Shahriar’s hands shook as he stared at his bank statement.
The promotion had come through. Senior manager. Forty percent raise. The kind of money his father had never seen in his lifetime. But instead of joy, Shahriar felt something closer to nausea.
“What’s wrong?” his wife Meem asked, noticing his face. “Bad news?”
“No. Good news, actually.”
“Then why do you look like someone died?”
Good question. Why did financial success feel like grief?
Shahriar had grown up in a two-room flat in Mirpur. Seven people, one bathroom, walls so thin you could hear neighbors’ arguments word for word. His father drove a taxi sixteen hours daily. His mother took in sewing work. They weren’t destitute, but poverty’s shadow touched everything—the shoes worn until they fell apart, the birthdays without cakes, the constant calculations before buying anything.
He remembered being twelve, asking his father for money for a school trip. His father had looked at him with such tired eyes and said, “Beta, this month is difficult.”
Shahriar hadn’t asked again. Had sold his textbooks to a senior student instead, told teachers he’d lost them. The shame of that moment—standing in the principal’s office, lying about the books—still burned twenty years later.
That shame had fueled everything. Every late night studying, every job application, every promotion he’d clawed toward. He’d promised himself: never again. Never again would he have to tell his children “this month is difficult.”
And now? Now he earned more in a month than his father had in a year. Should have felt like victory. Instead felt like betrayal.
“I keep thinking about Abba,” he told Meem that evening. They were sitting on their balcony—a real balcony, in Gulshan, with a view of the lake. The kind of place people like his father only saw from outside.
“What about him?”
“He’s still driving that taxi. Seventy-two years old, still working. And I’m sitting here in this apartment that costs more per month than he earns in six months.”
“You send him money.”
“Money he won’t spend on himself. Uses it for his grandchildren, for the mosque, for neighbors who need help. Still eats dal-bhaat twice daily like he’s proud of the simplicity.”
Meem was quiet for a moment. Then: “You think wealth is making you a worse person.”
Not a question. A statement. She knew.
“I bought a shirt last week,” Shahriar said. “Fifteen thousand taka. For one shirt. Do you know what that money could have done for someone in my old neighborhood? Could have paid someone’s rent. Could have bought a month’s groceries for a family.”
“You’re allowed to buy shirts.”
“Am I? While people are struggling?”
“So what’s the alternative? Stay poor in solidarity?”
That was the trap. The impossible position he couldn’t escape.
His colleague Jahangir had figured it out differently. Jahangir came from money—generations of it. Wore wealth like comfortable old clothes, never seemed bothered by inequality or privilege. Last week, he’d bought a second car—”for fun,” he’d said—while his driver waited outside in the heat.
Shahriar had felt something ugly twist in his stomach watching that. Was this who he was becoming? Would he eventually stop noticing? Stop caring?
“I have nightmares sometimes,” he confessed to Meem. “That I’m turning into someone I wouldn’t have liked when I was younger. Someone who forgets where he came from.”
“And you have nightmares about the other thing too,” Meem said quietly. “About losing all this. Going back.”
She was right. The other fear, equally strong.
He checked their savings compulsively. Calculated emergency funds. Worried about market crashes, job security, unexpected expenses. The poverty he’d escaped still hunted him in dreams—eviction notices, declined cards, the particular humiliation of not being able to pay for something everyone else could afford.
Two weeks ago, his card had been declined at a restaurant. Turned out to be a bank error, fixed within hours. But those few minutes—standing at the counter, other customers watching, the waiter’s expression—had sent him back to every childhood moment of financial shame. His hands had shaken for an hour afterward.
“I’m afraid of being poor,” he told Meem. “And I’m afraid of being rich. What kind of person is afraid of both?”
“A person who understands both have costs,” she said.
His friend Rashid had chosen differently. Rashid worked in an NGO, earned a fraction of what Shahriar made, seemed genuinely content. They’d met for tea last month, and Rashid had talked about a village project with such enthusiasm, such purpose.
“Don’t you ever want more?” Shahriar had asked.
“More what? More stress? More stuff I don’t need? More distance from the work that actually matters?”
“More security. More comfort for your family.”
Rashid had smiled. “My family is comfortable enough. We have what we need. Anything beyond that is just fear talking.”
“Fear of what?”
“Fear of not having enough, which becomes fear of never having enough, which becomes a prison of its own.”
Walking home that day, Shahriar had felt something close to envy. Rashid had opted out of the whole game. But could Shahriar do that? Could he choose simplicity now, after tasting comfort? Would that be authentic, or just privilege cosplaying as virtue?
His mother had noticed the change in him. Last visit to their old flat, she’d said, “You seem tense, beta. Success should make you happy.”
“What if success changes me, Amma? What if I become someone you wouldn’t recognize?”
His mother had looked at him for a long moment. Then: “You think wealth automatically corrupts people? That’s lazy thinking. Poverty doesn’t make people virtuous either—it just makes them poor. Character is separate.”
“But money changes things.”
“Of course it does. Everything changes things. Having children changed you. Getting married changed you. Learning changed you. Change isn’t corruption.”
But was it that simple?
Shahriar thought about his father-in-law, a businessman who’d made significant wealth. The man was generous, kind, still remembered everyone’s names including the tea vendor outside his office. But he also made decisions Shahriar found uncomfortable—paid workers minimum wage, justified it as “market rate,” seemed unbothered by the inequality baked into his success.
“That’s just how business works,” he’d told Shahriar once. “You can’t save everyone.”
Maybe that was the final fear. Not just becoming wealthy, but accepting the compromises wealth required. The moral calculations that prosperity demanded. The peace with inequality that abundance enforced.
Meem found him that night sitting on the balcony again, staring at the lake.
“Still thinking?” she asked.
“Always thinking. Can’t seem to stop.”
She sat beside him. “You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t have a solution. You want to be wealthy without any of wealth’s complications, and poor without poverty’s suffering. That’s not an option.”
“So what do I do?”
“Stop treating money as a moral test you’re constantly failing. It’s just money. You earn it honestly, you use it responsibly, you help when you can. That’s enough.”
“Is it? While people are struggling and I’m buying fifteen-thousand-taka shirts?”
“You also donated fifty thousand to that flood relief last month. You paid for your cousin’s daughter’s surgery. You support your parents. You’re not a villain in this story.”
But he didn’t feel like a hero either. Felt like someone stuck between two fears, unable to fully embrace either poverty’s supposed virtue or wealth’s obvious comfort.
His therapist—yes, he could afford therapy now, another privilege that came with guilt—had said something interesting last session: “Perhaps the discomfort is the point. Perhaps the tension keeps you honest.”
“Honest about what?”
“About the fact that both poverty and wealth carry costs. People who are too comfortable with either extreme might be missing something. Your discomfort might be wisdom, not neurosis.”
Shahriar had thought about this for days. Maybe the fear of poverty kept him grateful, prevented complacency. Maybe the fear of wealth’s corruption kept him vigilant, prevented the moral numbness he’d seen in others.
Or maybe he was just overthinking everything, which Meem frequently accused him of.
“You know what your real problem is?” she’d said once, exasperated. “You think you have to figure everything out before you’re allowed to just live.”
Perhaps she was right. Perhaps both fears served a purpose—the fear of poverty driving effort, the fear of wealth maintaining conscience. Perhaps the goal wasn’t choosing one or eliminating both, but learning to walk the tightrope between them.
That night, Shahriar made a decision. He would accept the promotion. Would enjoy the comfort it brought without drowning in guilt. Would also set up systematic giving—not performative charity, but quiet, consistent support for people who needed it. Would visit his father more. Would remember where he came from while accepting where he’d arrived.
Would try to stop treating prosperity as automatic corruption and poverty as automatic virtue.
Would remember both were just circumstances, not moral verdicts. That character existed independent of bank balance. That he could be wealthy without losing his soul, and that poverty hadn’t made him virtuous—struggle had taught him resilience, but so could consciousness and choice.
Easy to decide. Harder to practice. But maybe that was life—not solving dilemmas but learning to live within them.
“I’m going to be okay,” he told Meem that night.
“I know,” she said. “You were always going to be okay. You just needed to believe it yourself.”
Outside, Dhaka hummed with its usual chaos. People chasing wealth, people escaping poverty, people stuck in between. All of them afraid of something. All of them trying to figure out this impossible equation of money and meaning.
Shahriar was one of millions, struggling with the same questions, finding the same unsatisfying answers that were somehow enough to keep going.
The fear would probably never fully disappear. But maybe it didn’t need to. Maybe it was part of staying human in a world where both poverty and wealth could strip away humanity in different ways.
He could live with that. He would live with that.
It was enough.
