Floating heroes

There comes money at Chittagong branch of Bangladesh Bank by trucks every day. Khokon maintains his livelihood by carrying the sacks of this money. He carries the sacks of the money to the bank from the trucks. But there is no place for him to take shelter. He passes night by sleeping either on a road divider or in a roundabout. Mir Hossain. He runs his family by selling tea in a rickshaw van in Chittagong city. It is not possible to rent a house with the money he earns by selling tea. Again, if the van is stolen he will be utterly ruined. So the van is his house. Here in the van, he sleeps by wrapping himself in a shawl or a blanket. Thus, he can guard the van. And in the same time, his house rent is also being saved. Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and Chittagong, another populous city of the country, are areas of my work. The rootless people, living in the city, remained unnoticed in most of the time of the day. But they become inseparable parts of the streets in night while there remains no hustle and bustle of the city dwellers. I get surprised after seeing the adaptation of these people, who come to the cities for survival from the villages in the face of any disaster. The adaptability and the struggle, they are doing to survive, have made them unique. Merely in capital Dhaka, there is no place for 50 thousand floating people to take shelter, according to the statistics of 2014 of Department of Social Services, Bangladesh. In Chittagong, many people pass days on footpaths as well. When it comes night, footpaths and road dividers turn into their beds. If the picture of the whole country is taken into account, then the number of such kinds of people would be increased several times. And through these photographs, I have tried to portray how the floating people passtheir night. For the last several months, I stood up with camera in various streets of Dhaka and Chittagong. I took the photographs of these floating people like Khokon and Mir Hossain at dead of night carefully. As slow shutter was used, their stories got new looks. Surrounding these lying down people, waves of light have passed off. Sometimes the flushes of light have made circles of different sizes. And sometimes the kinetic rays went off by touching them like the stream of fountain.