Inspired by: Women shirt factory workers on strike

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It reminded me of my morning commute in Dhaka. I used to start very early from my home to avoid traffic, and almost every day I would see this stream of women walking together, almost hand in hand, holding each other and carrying their lunchboxes. We all knew who they were, we called them Garment women (that is the local lingo for Ready Made Garment Factory Workers in Bangladesh).

I could see how poor and hardworking they were from their clothes and their faces, but I could also see how they laughed and talked continuously with one another as they forged their path through a very patriarchal and almost unlivable city for women. For some unknown reason, that image came back to me when I saw Women Shirt Factory Worker on Strike.

I suppose this is something that happens when one has lived most of their adult life somewhere else, somewhere far away, somewhere different. Probably this is why we always end up trying to build bridges between the present realities of living ‘here’ and the past (is it?) reality of living ‘there’. And in this whole messy process, we sometimes end up living ‘elsewhere and nowhere’ at the same time. This piece comes from my own ‘elsewhere and nowhere’.