Diarist 40 lives in a three-generation household with her disabled husband, her daughter and son-in-law and grandchild. The old couple are uneducated. The son-in-law, who works at an engineering firm, contributes some but not all of his income to Diarist 40 while keeping some back for his own family's use. The educated daughter, a high school teacher, has at times quarreled with her mother and kept an entirely separate household (for example between April 2021 and July 2022), so some of our data on income may not be as accurate as in the case of most of our diarists. The daughter's baby was born in late 2023, just after the son-in-law went to a job that he secured in Australia but quickly came back having felt very homesick there.
The son has been working in Singapore since about 2009 and used to remit money to his parents and to his parents-in-law. Because his wife disliked her sister-in-law (Diarist 40's daughter) she lived with her own parents. In 2023 this couple divorced, whereupon the son married again, by phone. The family had to pay 300,000 taka kabin (compensation) to the ex-wife. The son went quickly back to Singapore.
Diarist 40 and her husband have their own homestead plot and have had several rounds of building to improve the home. In 2018 her husband's illness worsened and he had expensive hospital treatment. Before his illness (a dislocated spine) he used to grow bananas. In early 2017 the chair of a saving club where the husband was a member entrusted her to look after the club's savings, but she went out one day without locking her cupboard and 100,000 taka was stolen. She employed a faith-healer to get the money back, without success, and then repaid the money to the club from her own resources.
But as chart 01 shows, despite a humble background and some big expenses, the household has used remittances, and income from the son-in-law, to create a surplus most months.
