The Migrant Count Climbs Through the Hot Months, and Is Tallied as the Heat Eases

DHAKA — The registered-migrant count climbed all summer, the way it climbs every summer, and now — as the worst heat finally eases across the corridors — the agencies have paused to tally it, soberly, the way they always do. The total is past a hundred and twelve million and still rising toward the next grim marker the Passage Trust would rather not round up to, and behind the number, as always, is a family. In a transit shelter on the edge of Dhaka, Amina Rahman is registrant somewhere past the hundred-and-tenth million, a figure she finds absurd. "I am not a statistic. I am a woman who left a house," she said, holding a paper folder that is now her whole legal existence. She left a district that the aquifer abandoned, walked a corridor the Trust manages, and will be counted, this autumn, as one more registered climber in a total the world reports in the flat voice of accounting. The Trust's people do not pretend the flatness is kindness. "We count them because counting is the first thing we can honestly promise," a coordinator said. "A number is not dignity. But an uncounted person is even less." The heat is easing. The count is not. It only pauses, each autumn, to be added up.