Even a life needs watering
After decades of queuing at illegal lines, Surja Banu finally gained a safe, legal water connection — and renewed hope.
Surja Banu never had the language for it, words like access or rights or equity. But she has lived her entire life in the absence of it.
We are not so different from the earth, you know. Even a life needs watering. Leave it dry long enough, and it cracks… just like soil.
Her father named her Surja, the sun. She is past seventy now, and time has pressed its folds into her skin. Yet, there is a brightness in her smile that the years have not managed to get to. Wide, bright, and defiant, it still carries something of the girl her father saw when he chose her name.
Marriage brought Surja Banu to Jhilpar, an informal settlement in Mirpur on the edge of the capital. The community depended on one or two unsafe, illegal water lines; fragile lifelines at best. From then on, before first light, Surja would step out with a bucket in one hand and a metal pot resting against her hip. She would join the long queue and wait as the hours stretched, and the sun climbed higher and burned overhead. The queue held everyone hostage. If they stepped away, they could miss the water. If they stayed, there was still no guarantee it would come. There were days, sometimes several in a row, when it simply did not. As her household grew, so did the weight of that struggle.
A change finally arrived in 2024. After years of persistent effort by WaterAid Bangladesh, working alongside Dustha Shasthya Kendra (DSK), Dhaka WASA extended legal water connections to the residents of the slum. It meant that families who had long lived on the margins of the system were finally being seen as legitimate customers, with a claim to safe and reliable water.
The residents have paid their bills every month since. People who had been given little reason to believe that institutions would keep their promises kept their own. In a city where informal settlements are often spoken of only as problems to be managed, this is the part of the story that often remains untold.
For Surja Banu, standing now in the evening of her life, it is not simply a tap on a wall. It is a presence as radiant as the name she has carried all her years.
