SUKANTA HALDER and SHAHEEN MOLLAH

On a Friday midday in West Agargaon, Shahnaz Akhter stood at a vegetable stall in the summer heat, bargaining over the price of eggplants. Sweat traced lines down her forehead. The colours of her sari had faded.

Four hundred taka used to be enough for daily groceries she needed for her family of six. That was weeks ago. Now she comes home without cooking oil.

When she spoke, her voice was low, barely rising above the noise of the market. “Without oil, it’s simply not possible to cook,” said Shahnaz, 35.

Her husband drives an auto-rickshaw. Weeks ago, the family could cover groceries without going into debt. Now they buy on credit at the local store, or deliberately buy less than they need.

Shahnaz is searching for work as a domestic worker but hasn’t found anything yet. If she can’t, she says she’ll have no choice but to take her children and her mother-in-law back to the village.

Her situation is not unusual. Across Bangladesh, low-income families have spent most of the past three years absorbing wave after wave of price increases, each one arriving before the last had fully settled. Wages, for the most part, have not kept up, and the distance between what people earn and what it costs to live has been widening.

The numbers tell the story plainly. Inflation stayed close to 9 percent

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