Homeless man in capital arrested for violating stay-at-home measures

Kazi Tahsin Agaz Apurbo

Zakir Hossain, 32, and his daughter Sheuly, 5, were arrested last night for defying the very strictly imposed stay-at-home regulations.

During the arrest, Zakir was perplexed and spent a good 10 minutes explaining to the law enforcers how he was at home. "This is my home. I stay on this very pavement," he said, pointing to a few sacks rumpled together, possibly to make a bed for him and his daughter.

The law enforcers, however, did not agree with what Zakir had to say. "Even if he is at home, if this can even be legally defined as such, this entire area is also a beggar-free zone and there is a Tk 20,000 fine if you are caught begging here," a police official told this correspondent.

The latest stay-at-home rules have come as a big blow to some five million city dwellers who are homeless. With government measures yet to benefit many of these people, possible because they are not very urban-centric, homeless people are now on the run.

In the latest sting operation, where law enforcers pretended to be doling out relief, they had managed to keep out of the grabs of influential locals, some 5,000 homeless people were rounded up. They had come to get the relief, but once they failed to produce any documentation of their residential address, they were instantly detained.

"We are trying to get these people off the streets of the capital and send them back to where they came from," a law enforcer said on condition of anonymity.

A quandary does arise with this plan as many of the homeless people tell similar stories of how their homes were devoured by rising sea levels. Every year, Bangladesh loses thousands of hectares of land which are swallowed by water bodies which snake throughout the delta.

"We are looking into this. We are hoping by fining some of the rivers, the problem can be solved," an absolute idiot of a water body official said in this regard.

For now though, the homeless are hiding, often in plain sight. In many railway stations around the capital, people with no permanent homes can be seen, biding time till luck fortunes them once more.

"It isn't all bad. I got my daughter a job in a nearby house. I would get to see her before the breakout of this virus," a mask-less Shamima Begum says.  

And so the fate of five million is now up in the air.

Someone should start a readymade garment factory which hires them, a minister had quipped earlier this week.

Lubnan Khaleesi munches on snacks non-stop and is constantly worried about one day reaching into her snack shelf only to find nothing in there.

(The article above is a work of pure fiction and satire. Any resemblance with any person, organisation or entity living or dead is purely coincidental.)