Diarist 03

Diarist 03, unlike Diarists 01 and 02, is a Muslim, with a home  a few hundred metres away from them in the local market area. Now in her early 50's, she has been a widow since 2006, and has brought up five daughters, three of whom have married, one of whom trained as a nurse and has a job in Malaysia. Diarist 03's husband was a shopkeeper and after his death she continued to run the shop, a small-scale grocery store (seen in the picture).  By the time we started tracking her transactions the shop was running poorly, as the first chart suggests. She told us, back then, that she thought the shop was making a profit, though she didn’t keep accounts. She got stock delivered each morning by rickshaw van and usually paid for it out of the day's takings at the day's end. She gave 'baki' (shop credit) to several customers many of whom were salaried employees of the hospital opposite. She said "you can’t run a shop without giving baki". In early 2018 she closed the shop. Her home is still the rooms she rebuilt behind the shop. That is her one big asset, though she now spends more and more time with one of her daughters in Dhaka.