Diarist 63, the original Diarist, was from a poorer northern District but moved here when she married a local man. Both were illiterate. They had two sons and a daughter, and one of the sons lived with the couple, along with his wife and young daughter, when we started. The household lived in their own home on homestead land but they had no farmland. Diarist 63 suffered from diabetes and a chronically painful hip. Her husband had been a fisherman all his life, on the local river, the Shitalokya. The very active son had started and still runs a clothing shop in the main market. He gave a little of his income to his mother to run the household, but we were not able to track what he did with the remainder. The other (younger) son is a fisherman like his father.
Diarist 63 herself traded saris, rather as Diarist 20 (a friend of hers) does, but on a smaller scale. But also, in about 2003 a German NGO selected her to be trained to make 'fuel-efficient' cement cooking stoves, which she could sell to the NGO so she didn't have to do any marketing herself. That came to an end but was replaced around 2013 with a new system by which she made and sold the stoves herself but got a subsidy of 250 taka for each verified sale.
In the 2020-21 Covid crisis they saw a dip in income but survived, partly because the elder son closed his shop temporarily and joined his father fishing.
But Diarist 63's health was declining. She was told she needed treatment in India, and got a passport. In 2023 the elder son paid all the costs (224,000 taka) of taking her to India. But the diagnosis was advanced cancer, and they ran out of money before any treatment was concluded. They came back in January 2024 and in September she died.
We then took on the elder son as our substitute Diarist 63: this has given us more data on his clothing shop business but, as chart 01 shows, it has little relationship to the situation that held when the original Diarist was alive. But it looks as if the son provided enough to the combined household from his profitable business to give them a surplus most months.
