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UP AND UP, EVERYYEAR

Robin Gazi
Kamrunnahar had moved into a third floor flat in Goran with her husband and three daughters in 1998. It was and still is a dark and tiny two-bedroom flat.
The neighbourhood is not something special. Goran, near Bashabo, has a history of flooding and waterlogging and the local young hooligans tend to stalk young girls, especially the school-goers, on a regular basis.
A noisy three-wheeler stop, a kitchen market spilling over the bottom step, and shoulder-to-shoulder buildings did not make the flat a pleasant place for living. It was not the flat she had dreamed of raising her children in.
Kamrunnahar had been shifting homes ever since she got married.
Protective of her children's privacy and tired of the burglaries she was a victim of, Kamrunnahar figured the cheaper ground-floor flats would not do anymore. She needed to be higher up in the building. Hence, the Tk 3,400 rent a month had to be spent.
In 1998, Tk 3,400 was a burden and it became more so when her husband died two years later and she had to support the family with her boutique business.
By that time, however, the rent had gone up to Tk 4,000. It went up every year. It was Tk 200 or Tk 300 a year at first, then it became Tk 500 a year and then Tk 1,000 a year. She now pays a staggering Tk 11,000 with the promise that come next year there would be another hike. And the rent does not include the utilities.
Kamrunnahar is not complaining. Even though she now pays over three
times the rent she started out with, she says she is lucky as her landlord is a nice person. Landlords of neighbouring buildings increase rent Tk 1,000 to Tk 3,000 every year, she said.
Tashmin Jahan got married in 1999 and rented a two-bedroom flat in Rajabazar, which unlike Goran is almost at the centre of Dhaka. She needed to stay in a flat at the heart of
Dhaka because her journalist husband zips around the capital a lot for his work.
The newly-wed couple started to struggle within months as the Tk 5,000 rent was very high for a couple living on one pay check.
Within a year, she had no choice but to move north to Kazipara where she got a similar flat for Tk 4,500. But the landlord kept increasing the rent every year and whenever she protested the response was the usual: "If you can't, then vacate." New tenants always promise more rent than the old tenants do.
Tashmin had to move her family again, even further north at Mirpur-11'A, where she got a flat forTk 5,500 in 2006. It was just like the other flats she had been living in.
But her dream of living in peace did not materialise. The rent continued to climb every year. She finally
left the flat in 2012 when the landlord was asking for an astonishing Tk 13,000 a month, utilities excluded. She moved into a flat less than half the size of her previous flat.
Kamrunnahar and Tashmin's cases are not exceptional. They represent the middle class that go through this ordeal in Dhaka regularly. Some give in and pay the high rent while others move further and further away from the city centre and into smaller and smaller yet homes.
As for the landlords, the reasons for increasing rent are typical - price hike of essentials, increasing property value and better civic amenities - but most asked-to-leave tenants feel they are being evicted so that the landlord can give the house to better off people.
Rent increases every year, even though the law says rent can only be hiked every two years.