Shayed & Aijer

How do the aged earn a living when their children are themselves too poor to sustain them and pension and support funds of any kind don’t apply? The tactic developed by Shayed and Aijer, who settled in Savar, Dhaka’s industrial hinterland, after leaving the north of Bangladesh, relies on what could be called a lowest-input and highest self-exploitation movement pattern. Every second day, in the middle of the night, they commute to Dhaka with loads of lush green bunches of taro leaves as well as stems, collected from the fields around their village; they sell them off to the city’s cooks in a little while and generally reach home before 10am. While the loose regulations of Mirpur 1 street market represent an important precondition for their mini-business, an under-regulated and over-expensive road communication system gives them hard times commuting.