‘I cannot sleep at night,’ said Abul Khayer sitting in his rented room at Mohammadpur on August 29, ‘when I think about my child. It seems that he hasn’t died. He’ll return.’
Rakib Hasan, a 12-year-old boy, a student of Class VII of ITZ School and College at Mohammadpur in Dhaka, the man said, loved to play football.
‘He went out about 5:00pm on July 19 to play football. I warned him,’ he said. ‘But didn’t heed it. He ignored the warning of his elder brother, too.’
A bullet pierced through his head just before the evening prayers that day when clashes broke out between student protesters, on one side, and the police and Awami people, on the other.
The interim government on August 28 said that more than 1,000 people died in student protests seeking reforms in civil service job reservations that peaked in the student-mass uprising causing the downfall of the Awami League government on August 5.
Khayer, a linesman working with Dhaka’s north city authorities, brought Rakib,
the younger of the brothers, to Dhaka from his village in 2021 looking for a better future. His mother lives in their village home at Ramganj in Lakshmipur.
‘I cooked for him because he didn’t like anyone else cooking his food. I used to sleep on the floor, leaving the bed for my sons. Now that he is gone, I feel tired of living this life,’ Khayer said weepingly, holding a photograph of Rakib’s.
Rakib, who was lying dead beside the Mohammadpur Club on Kazi Nazrul Islam Road, was taken to a local hospital and then to the National Institute of Neurosciences and Hospital.
Khayer came to know of Rakib’s death about 9:30pm. He found the body a few minutes past midnight that day at the National Institute of Neurosciences and Hospital.
The hospital authorities refused to hand over the body, saying that it was a police case. Khayer had to wait for the whole night and run between Mohammadpur and Sher-e-Bangla Nagar police authorities four times until afternoon that day because of confusion over the jurisdiction of the area where the incident took place.
The body was later sent to Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital, but there was none to carry out the post-mortem examination.
Khayer hired an ambulance, which was hard to arrange, to take a coroner from Farmgate to the hospital. It was risky outside as law enforcers and Awami League people were firing into protesters and ordinary people.
After all the procedures, Khayer could bury his son in the family graveyard in Lakshmipur about 11:30pm on July 20.
Awami League people and law enforcers stopped him many times on the road all along, which only compounded his suffering. ‘It left like I was a foreigner caught in a war zone.’