Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [63]
Even though the British-based Sylhetis often live in public-housing apartments and sometimes earn little more than the British minimum wage, those earnings are enough to have made them something akin to feudal lords in Sylhet. The villagers treat them as wealthy benefactors, and on their visits they often behave with the hauteur of nobles. Their wealth has created employment and construction booms, turning the region’s villages into hubs, with their own migration waves and even small arrival cities of their own. A typical Londoni household will have a dozen or more hectares of cultivated fields, several large-scale construction projects, a few shops in the village and perhaps a share in a road-building or mosque-building project; it will provide direct incomes for between 12 and 100 Sylhetis at any time and will attract dozens of people from poorer regions of Bangladesh to the village, usually to live in “colonies,” slum rental-housing developments built and owned by the Londonis.
In one large rice field in Biswanath, I met a gang of harvesters bent over the paddies, using their scythes to cut the rice, then bundling and tying it in an exhausting 10-hour day. Tariq Mia, 23, had come with most of the other team’s members from Jamalpur, an extremely poor northern district more than 200 kilometers away, to spend half the year working the paddies in order to support his wife and children. Jamalpur is subject to the monga, a seasonal famine; death from malnutrition remains a tangible possibility there. During the harvest months, Tariq is able to make 3,000 taka ($60), a third of which pays for rent and food in the colony of slum shacks. The remaining 2,000 taka, multiplied by the four harvesting months, is more than double the annual earnings of a Jamalpur farm, enough to stave off starvation. Tariq and his team work under the watch of Cherag Ali, 30, a poor Biswanath resident from a non-Londoni family; he lives in a better-appointed shack in the village and earns about twice as much from the harvest.
These men work for Mominul Islam, a young man they consider the malik (landowner), who lives in the “blue house,” a tidy, modern bungalow at the foot of the big Londoni house, surrounded by a fence and a well-kept decorative garden. Four decades ago, these fields were only three-quarters of a hectare and were harvested by the family who lived here; the land was subdivided from one generation to the next and approaching the sort of crisis we witnessed in central India. Then, in the 1960s, the family patriarch went to London, worked for a few years in a factory, then opened a north London takeout restaurant that did well off the booming economy; he used the proceeds to build the blue bungalow and to consolidate and expand the family’s land holdings into more than 25 hectares. His London-born son, known to the family as Sufe Miah, went into small-scale property development during the British housing boom of the 1990s and used that money to build the Londoni house, to launch several housing developments in the area, and to open a string of shops and rental storefronts in Biswanath village, all during his twice-yearly visits from London.
Overseeing this small empire from the blue house, and employing and housing the rice harvesters, is Sufe Miah’s nephew, the 21-year-old malik Mominul Islam, a laconic, soft-spoken man whose family, owing to the death of his father, has been unable to join the rest in migrating. Mominul has struggled with English classes and not yet managed to find any marriage opportunities in London, despite his attachment to Western-style motorcycle jackets, shoes, and football teams. Instead, he has become something of an overseer and a putative entrepreneur: He used some of his uncle’s remittance money and one of the rental