A couple of years ago, my wife and I were at a police station in Dhaka to file a GD.
I wasn’t thrilled at being there, answering questions that sounded too much like an interrogation, but it was something that needed to be done. I’ll spare you the details, but it involved lodging a complaint against a certain unsavoury individual. The police officer jotted down the details -- name, phone number, address -- and for a second I caught myself thinking, hey this is easy! But as soon as I made the mistake of thinking the needful was done, and that I could leave, the question was asked: “And his permanent address?”
“Uh … I don’t know what his permanent address is, but I literally just told you where he lives.”
“Well, you see. We need a permanent address,” serious Mr Policeman replied with his serious face. “Where is his ancestral home? (desher bari)”
“Er … I don’t know. We don’t exactly chit-chat.”
“Hmm, we need a permanent address,” came the reply once again, as though we had hit an impasse.
Eventually the GD was done, but not without a whole lot of grumbling on part of the officer, who was acting like we had come forward with incomplete information, or were being shifty by not having every answer ready at the tips of our tongues.
In the first place, I had gone on the advice of a friend and relative from CID who had already put in a word at the station, but even then, I walked out of the place feeling like I was the criminal, maybe for wasting the valuable time of this policeman who had been swatting mosquitoes when I walked in, with Zen-like focus.
The bureaucratic machinery of Bangladesh is completely obsessed with permanent addresses, and I shudder to hear those words every single time. I have filled out so many forms over the years, and I should be used to it by now, but I am not. When asked what my permanent address is, I feel like saying: I have an address, I don’t have a permanent address, because I’m not a tree!
Plenty of people don’t even have addresses. It is not too difficult to find people camped out for the night on the streets of our capital city. They have makeshift homes set up illegally on footpaths, and they can be turned out any second.
They set up little mosquito nets where they can, or find bits of refuge in bridges or underpasses, or sometimes just under the wide open sky, and there they are. That’s the reality of Bangladesh -- people without homes or addresses of any sort, without any earthly possessions, without a clue where their next meal will come from, without any hope.
I do realize, as I sit here in my apartment, sheltered from the elements, typing away on my laptop in English, for an English-language newspaper read by a mostly upmarket crowd, that I am immensely privileged. I have the luxury of whining about bureaucracy and infrastructure and quirky-but-annoying cultural practices in these little op-ed pieces instead of begging on the streets, or working myself to death just to survive.
So maybe I shouldn’t complain.
But that’s exactly my point: If a person of my level of education and privilege is at a loss when answering these so-called mandatory questions, what can be expected by someone who has been dealt a worse hand by life?
When I’m asked for my permanent address, I never know what to say. Knowing that questions like this will come up keeps me away from government offices, even when I genuinely need (and am entitled to) some sort of service. What hope is there for someone who doesn’t even have a bed for the night, let alone ownership of -- or access to -- a home somewhere they can call their permanent address?
I do not mean for this to be a high-and-mighty rant about the plight of the poor, or to pretend that I lose sleep over the existence of poverty. This is Bangladesh, and poverty is our bread and butter.
Most of us are numbed to the brutality, and have developed ninja-like skills of dodging questions of inequality, or questions of how -- if we are really the development miracle we are claiming to be -- we can explain the colossal pool of “newly poor” that has been created in this country since the pandemic started. We say the country is going up, but in reality it is sinking, in more ways than one.
What I would like to point out, however, is this absurd disconnect between the reality of where people are, and how the tone-deaf bureaucracy operates. Permanent address is just one of those ludicrous fixtures.
People are sometimes required to digitally register for things, but then, most of the population is not computer literate, but even when they are, the websites don’t work. These days, digital birth registration has become a thing (what?!), and yet, to this day, we do not scrupulously record births in the first place.
The government and the bureaucracy need to take responsibility at their end, be realistic, and proceed in a way that works for the people. You can’t pull a requirement out of thin air when your system in all these years has not codified it into a working scheme, and gently introduced the people to it.
In other words, if you want my birth certificate, make sure you issue me a birth certificate when I’m born. If you want my permanent address, make sure you give me an option to put “N/A” if I am someone who rents a place but does not own a home or property. And please spare me the nonsense about “ancestral homes” or desher bari, because many of us have no tangible connection -- material, legal, or emotional -- to those lands either. Yes, landless or uprooted people do exist, because we are not trees.
Anyone who has ever tried to get some sort of service in Bangladesh from the public sector knows just how abysmally out-of-touch the protocols are, how blind to reality the whole process is. The system is designed to deter, rather than serve. The only creatures at home in this nightmarish eco-system are the professional crooks, with bribery being second nature for them. The rest of us are screwed.
Lewis Carroll could not have possibly imagined a crazier wonderland.
Abak Hussain is a journalist.