ABSTRACT
Jabruddin was in his late twenties when we first knew him. He lived in the same Sheikh compound as his second cousin [FFBSSJ Nisar and Najma. Khalil and his brother, Khurshid Ahmed, were his first cousins [FyBS]. Jabruddin’s parents had both died just a few years before our arrival and so too had Jabruddin’s younger brother. Thus, he was the only adult man in his household. In the early 1980s, he was farming the land jointly with his father’s three younger brothers and their sons. As an only surviving son, he would come to control more land than any of his first and second cousins once the farming enterprise was divided. Already, his share of the produce was enabling him to live more comfortably than several of the other families in the compound. He and his wife, Jamila, had built a kiln-brick house with two rooms. By the mid- 1980s, they had upgraded it by plastering its exterior and adding a tiled facade decorated with Islamic inscriptions praising Allah and the Prophet Mohammed.
