Late last Tuesday night, Zumratun Nesa Barsha, 24, video-called her father from a house in Manipuripara, Dhaka. She told her parents her husband was torturing her over dowry. She pleaded for help.
Then the call went dead. When her family went to check on her, they learned she had died.
Her father later files a murder case. Later police shared that Barsha was repeatedly beaten over dowry demands by her husband Nabid Hossain.
Her family had given money several times, he said, yet the demands kept ending in quarrels and beatings.
Nabid has not been convicted of anything; a court will decide. But the part of this story that does not depend on a verdict is the call.
A grown woman, inside her marital home, reached for the one door she still trusted, her parents’.
Help arrived after she had stopped breathing.
We like to treat a story like this as an aberration, one monster in one house. It is not.
It is the sharpest edge of a system that leaves women no safe place to stand. Look at the choices we offer them, one by one.
If you stay home, you are not safe
Marry, stay home, raise the children, and you disappear. A BIDS study presented last year found that women in Bangladesh spend nearly four times as many hours on unpaid domestic work as men.
The cooking, the cleaning, and the nursing of in-laws. None of it carries a salary, a title, or, very often, a thank-you.
A woman who does all of this is still introduced as someone who “does nothing.”
Why? Because she earns nothing.
And the violence, when it comes, is not rare. The government’s 2024 Violence Against Women Survey found that 76% of women had faced violence from a husband or partner at least once in their lives, and 49% in the past year.
Sometimes the violence arrives with a price tag. Dowry has been illegal in this country since 1980, and the law was remade in 2018. Yet in Barsha’s case, police say, her family paid more than once, and the demands did not stop.
If you work, you still do not win
So she works. Now she learns the next rule.
Most women in the garment sector stand on the factory floor while the supervisory and managerial chairs are filled by men.
Women are half as likely as men to reach university. Jobs we label “feminine” pay less. The gap often does not appear on a payslip as two different numbers for the same job. It is built earlier, in who is steered where and who is allowed to rise.
Even a woman who earns a living still comes home to a second job. Women spend 7.1 hours a day on unpaid care and domestic work, while men spend 0.9 hours. She leaves the office and walks straight into the kitchen. She carries the family’s health, its guests, its elders, and kids' homework.
And still, she is judged for the balance. Leave on time, and she is a careless employee. Stay late, and she is a neglectful mother. Skip a family dawat, and she is selfish. Attend it exhausted, and she is sulking.
She is never the one doing it right.
The danger does not wait inside the home. The bus, the lane, the workplace, the comment section. Women learn to plan the route home the way others plan a trip abroad.
Sold as a ‘good match’
We send our daughters to school, and many of them top their classes. Then we measure the success of that education by the quality of the proposals it attracts.
The degree becomes a decoration for the marriage market. Families chase the “good groom” as if he were insurance.
Is there a way out?
The honest answer starts with a number we avoid. The 2024 survey found that divorced, separated, or widowed women were 92% less likely to face violence than women living with their husbands.
For many women, the safest place is outside marriage. And we have made leaving the greatest shame of all.
Even if your husband beats you, disrespects you, and asks for a dowry, as a woman, you have to stay in that marriage.
You have to make it work for your kids, your parents, their respect, and the society.
In the eyes of society, it is better for a woman to come back home as a dead body than as a divorcee.
Barsha did what we tell women to do. She married, she stayed, and she endured. On the last night of her life, she did the one thing we rarely let women do. She asked to be saved.
Think of what it took to dial that number. Her family had paid and paid again. Everything society says about staying, about the children, and about respect was telling her to hold on. Still, the only door she believed would open for her was the one she grew up behind.
The next daughter who reaches for that door should not have to wait. A father who hears “help me” should not first ask what people will say.
Barsha could not come home. The least we owe her is to make sure the next woman finds the door already open.
Shuchi Binte Shahjalal is a member of the Editorial and Op-Ed team at the Dhaka Tribune and looks after the Trib Z and Arts & Letters pages.