Diarist 21

Diarist 21 in the year to July 2025:
Status: husband, father, not fully the household manager (see text below) Household size: 3 (he. wife, adult son)
Occupation: ATM Guard (former shoe seller). Education: he & wife completed primary school
Major assets: small house & homestead land
Net income year to Jul 2025: 164,100 taka (USD 1,368 PPP$ 5,107, or PPP$ 4.66 per day per person, but see text below): Income in kind: none
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 0, Loans 0
main worry about his family, May 2025: my job has moved to Dhaka which is expensive and inconvenient

Diarist 21 has had a more adventurous life - maybe a less responsible one - than most of the Diarists we have presented here up to now. When we started tracking him, he was selling cheap shoes from a small rented tin hut near the market. He told us he'd been to India to try for better work there (he is Hindu). We learned later that he had run away from debt, and that while in India he contracted a second marriage and then deserted that woman when he returned to his first wife here, with whom he already had a son and a daughter. His wife told us that when she had twins Diarist 21 sold one of them to the clinic staff without telling her.

Chart 01 shows some of the changes in his life and work. In early 2017 he gave up the shoe shop, dissatisfied with the earnings. He tried a garments job and disliked it. He had a spell unemployed and talked of going to India again, but that idea failed because he has no legal ID papers. Finally he got a job at a Bank as an ATM Guard, and when they wanted to repost him elsewhere he left and joined a second bank in the same role: that Bank has recently transferred him to Dhaka, which he doesn't like.

D21 in the shoe shop

and at the ATM

Diarist 21, chart 01, balance

The data is chart 01 is not complete in the sense that holds for most of our Diarists. His wife mistrusts him, and they keep more-or-less separate accounts. He contributes to the household costs through monthly payments to their son, who is a barber: the chart shows that since he got the Bank work he has been regular at this. His wife keeps some of her garments factory wage secret. We take data from Diarist 21 and we have incomplete data on transactions made by the rest of the family. For example, we see in chart 01 that Diarist 21 advanced 57,000 taka to buy a homestead plot, but we see no sign of any follow-up payment nor do we see any data on the construction costs of the small home they built there. It turns out that that is because his wife and son managed the completion of the land purchase and the building of the house: the son took howlats (interest-free local loans) and MFI loans to do so.

Loans

In respect of loans, too, we have limited data. In the early days when he was running his shoe shop, his wife was willing to take loans from the Co-operative to help him finance it. These loans were fully repaid. But later, as the relationships in the family deteriorated, we were not able to get data on any other borrowing. We do know, however, that his wife and his son were active borrowers, both from MFIs and from local informal lenders, and that these loans were used, among other ways, in buying the homestead land and building the home on it.

Diarist 21 has not himself borrowed: he says he fears the difficulties he might face with repayments, while others comment that his unreliability makes people unwilling to lend to him.

Diarist 21, chart 02, loans

Savings

Again we have limited data. He told us early on that he didn't think he should keep money in Bank because if his family found out 'it would be bad for me'. For that reason, he said, he kept a bit of money with a close friend, his 'moneyguard'. However he later admitted that he had had a savings account at Mutual Trust Bank all along - we learnt this when he started making quite large deposits into it during the time he had his garments job. He subsequently withdrew this money for the land purchase. He has also been a member of a religious-based savings club for a few months.

Diarist 21, chart 03, savings

Gifts

Diarist 21 made the occasional small gifts common in the culture - for family and neighbourhood religious and ceremonial purposes. But they have been small, and he has received virtually no gifts himself. We do not. therefore, show a chart.

on to Diarist 22

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