Nearly a year after the fighter jet crash at Milestone School and College claimed the life of eight-year-old Bappi, his mother Bithi says the loudest reminder of her son is not a photograph, a school bag or an empty bedroom -- it is the rhythmic beep of the life-support machine that echoed through the intensive care unit during his final hours.
She still hears it.
The sound has followed her every day since July 21, 2025, when the Bangladesh Air Force’s FT-7 BGI training aircraft crashed into the Uttara school campus, killing 36 people, including 28 students.
“When Bappi was on life support, I kept hearing that ‘beep... beep...’,” she told Dhaka Tribune, struggling to hold back tears.
“A year has passed, but that sound still rings in my ears. Sometimes I feel like I am standing in front of the ICU again.”
For Bappi’s parents, time has barely moved since that afternoon.
Every detail of their final morning together remains painfully clear.
Like every school day, Bappi’s mother woke before sunrise to prepare breakfast for her two sons.
Bappi, a Class III student, wanted chapati instead of the bread she had initially planned.
“I was going to make Horlicks,” she recalled. “Then he said, ‘Mom, why don’t you make chapati?’ So I made chicken chapati. He ate happily.”
Later that morning she packed his tiffin and headed to the school after dropping off his younger brother, Vijay, a nursery student.
Normally she would wait until Bappi’s class ended and feed him herself.
That day, the class was still in session.
She handed the lunchbox to a school nanny.
“I still don’t know whether my son ever ate the food I packed for him.”
Minutes later, a phone call shattered the ordinary morning.
“The plane has crashed at Milestone. Come immediately.”
She rushed back to the school, where panic had already consumed the campus.
Burned children were being carried out one after another.
She searched classrooms, corridors and open spaces but could not find Bappi.
“I kept telling myself I would find him alive.”
Her husband searched hospitals across the city until the family finally received a call from the National Institute of Burn and Plastic Surgery.
Inside the ICU, she recognised her son immediately.
“Others could not recognise him because of the burns,” she said. “But I am his mother. I knew it was Bappi.”
She remembers his face, hands and head covered with severe burns.
One memory has haunted her ever since.
“A few days earlier I had cut his hair short. Now I keep thinking if I had left it longer, maybe his head would not have burned so badly.”
The following morning, doctors called the family.
Before breaking the news, they asked Bappi’s father how many children he had.
“When they told me to stay strong, I understood my son was gone,” he recalled.
A year later, the family’s grief has evolved into unanswered questions.
They say they have never been shown CCTV footage from the school, never received the investigation report and still have no sense that anyone has been held accountable.
“We have only one demand,” Bappi’s mother said.
“We want justice.”
The tragedy also changed the life of Bappi’s younger brother.
After losing their eldest son, the family withdrew Vijay from Milestone and enrolled him elsewhere.
His mother says she still cannot bring herself to walk past the school where Bappi spent his final day.
“My legs stop moving whenever I go there,” she said.
“No amount of money can replace a child.”
Nearly a year after the disaster that shook the nation, official investigations have been completed, committees have submitted reports and recommendations have been issued.
But inside one family’s home, July 21 has never truly ended.
The last tiffin remains uneaten in memory.
The ICU monitor still echoes.
And a mother continues to wait -- not for her son to return, because she knows he never will -- but for the justice she believes never arrived.