Every afternoon, when schools begin to empty across Dhaka, Mahmuda Akhter finds herself looking toward the door.
For a fleeting moment, she still believes her 10-year-old son, Omair Noor Asfiq, will return home with his schoolbag on his shoulder, smiling as he always did after class.
Then reality returns.
Asfiq was among the 28 students killed when a Bangladesh Air Force FT-7 BGI training aircraft crashed into Milestone School and College on July 21 last year.
One year later, the routines of motherhood remain.
The child does not.
“I still feel it’s time to go and bring him home from school,” Mahmuda told Dhaka Tribune.
“Sometimes I unknowingly start getting ready. Then I remember he isn’t coming back.”
For Mahmuda, time has remained suspended on the morning she prepared breakfast, packed her son’s school bag and watched him leave for class.
It was an ordinary day.
Asfiq, a Class III student, was known for finishing his homework early and insisting on sitting in the front row.
That morning, instead of walking with his mother as he often had in the past, he rode to school on his uncle’s motorcycle.
His mother planned to take his afternoon tiffin later.
Instead, she sent it with another family member.
It is a decision she still struggles to forgive herself for.
“My sister-in-law told me she saw him while giving him his lunch because he was sitting in the front,” she said.
“I keep asking myself why I didn’t go that day. I never got to see my son one last time.”
Shortly after noon, panic spread through the neighbourhood.
Her brother-in-law, who worked at Milestone, called after failing to locate Asfiq following the crash.
Mahmuda rushed barefoot to the school.
Parents crowded the gates, desperate for information.
She searched classrooms, medical camps and every corner of the campus, convinced her son was alive.
“I never imagined I would lose him,” she said. “I believed I would find him.”
Relatives tried to shield her from the truth, telling her Asfiq had suffered only minor injuries and was being treated.
Hours later, his body came home.
“When they laid him on the bed, his face was red from the fire,” she recalled. “As a mother, there are no words to describe that pain.”
One memory torments her more than any other.
Asfiq had been born with a heart condition and was unusually sensitive to loud sounds.
“He would become frightened even if a balloon burst,” she said. “I never took him to birthday parties because doctors told me to keep him away from loud noise.”
“Yet my son died in the loudest moment of his life.”
Today, almost everything that belonged to Asfiq remains exactly where he left it.
His books, homework, clothes and belongings have been carefully preserved.
“I have everything my son used,” Mahmuda said quietly.
“Everything except my son.”
His younger sister still grows up surrounded by stories he never had the chance to fulfil.
He had promised that when he grew older and bought a motorcycle, he would take her to school every day so their mother would no longer have to walk.
That promise now exists only in memory.
Even after a year, Mahmuda says the family’s search for accountability remains incomplete.
“We still haven’t received justice,” she said.
“Governments have changed, but nothing has changed for us. Everyone has moved on. A mother cannot.”
For the rest of the city, July 21 has become an anniversary.
For Mahmuda Akhter, it returns every afternoon -- when the school bell rings, when children walk home with their parents, and when instinct still tells her that somewhere outside, her son is waiting to come home.