Morning comes gradually to Babuganj Bazar.

Metal shutters rise. Shopkeepers arrange their goods. Customers begin moving through the narrow lanes. By the time business picks up, nearly 200 shops are operating along a market that stretches for roughly 300 metres, with the Banar canal running through its middle.

There should be rubbish everywhere. Instead, the roads and lanes are clean. The reason is often somewhere nearby, carrying a sack.

Hazrat Ali is 73. He is not employed by the local government. He does not work for the market association. Nobody hired him to collect its rubbish, and nobody pays him to do it.

He has simply been doing it for nearly 50 years.

Most mornings, Hazrat leaves his home in Pahar Anantapur village in Rangamatia Union, in Mymensingh's Fulbaria upazila, and heads for Babuganj Bazar.

He carries a sack. Then he walks. From one end of the market to the other, Hazrat picks up discarded paper, polythene and whatever other waste has accumulated. When the sack becomes full, he carries it to a designated dumping site near the market, empties it and returns.

Then he starts again.

His working day can stretch until shortly before the Isha prayer. When he becomes too tired to continue, Hazrat sometimes goes to the veranda of the Union Parishad office. He sits or lies down for a while.

Then he gets up and returns to the market. The routine has become harder with age. His body is stooped. His hearing has deteriorated. He has other physical ailments. The routine, however, has remained largely unchanged.

Talking with Daily Waadaa, Hazrat says he becomes uncomfortable when he sees rubbish lying on the ground.

“I started this habit when I was in my early 20s. I started by cleaning around my home and along nearby roads. I simply liked keeping the places around me clean,” he said.

Eventually, the habit expanded to Babuganj Bazar. And it stayed.

On days of rain and storms, he still goes out if his health allows. If he spots a discarded piece of paper or plastic, he picks it up. The volume of waste is considerable.

Babuganj Bazar contains around 200 shops as well as a large, government-owned two-storey market building. Hundreds of people pass through it each day. Shops, customers and traders continuously generate waste.

Much of what ends up on the ground eventually reaches Hazrat's sack. He collects as much as he can carry, walks to the dumping site and empties it. Then he returns for another round.

There is one interesting fact about this arrangement: Hazrat does not get paid. He has no monthly salary. No appointment letter. No formal job description. And he has never demanded one.

That choice is more unusual because Hazrat is not a man with money or time to spare. His only son works as a day labourer. His wife works in other people's homes. The three-person household has long lived with financial hardship.

For Hazrat, however, the hours spent cleaning Babuganj Bazar have remained separate from the question of earning a living. His family did not always understand that distinction.

They once tried to stop him. In a household where money was scarce, watching him spend entire days doing unpaid work was difficult to accept. Eventually, they stopped objecting.

By then, his routine had become part of family life…and part of the life of the market itself.

“Hazrat Ali is a very good man,” Obaidul Islam Chowdhury Panna, president of the Babuganj Bazar Merchants' Cooperative Association told Waadaa. “He has been cleaning the market's rubbish voluntarily for nearly 50 years.”

Hazrat, he said, arrives in the morning and leaves only briefly around midday.

“He goes home only to eat,” Obaidul said. “Then he returns to the market and works until night. He expects nothing in return for this work.”

For people who grew up around Babuganj, Hazrat has been doing this for so long that some cannot remember the market without him.

Rafiqul Islam Mukta Chowdhury, chairman of Rangamatia Union Parishad, is one of them. “I have seen Hazrat Ali cleaning the market since I was a child,” Rafiqul told Waadaa.

“Despite storms and rain, he does this work every day from morning until night,” he said. “He is an extremely poor man. Even then, instead of doing other work, he continues to keep the market clean.”

The Union Parishad sometimes buys him food and tries to provide him with assistance, Rafiqul said. It also provides something less formal: a place to rest.

“When he gets tired, he lies down or sits on the veranda of the Union Parishad office,” Rafiqul said.

For Hazrat, those breaks are becoming more necessary.

At 73, repeatedly bending down to collect rubbish and carrying loaded sacks through a market is no small physical task. His body now shows the accumulated effects of age.

Still, most mornings, the sack comes out again and he started his work without any fanfare.

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