“I have become an orphan. Who will I stay with now? Everyone else has parents. I didn’t have a mother before, but I had a father. Now I have neither.”
Nine-year-old Arfa struggled through tears as she tried to make sense of a loss far bigger than the numbers Bangladesh records every day in its worsening dengue outbreak.
Her father, Tajul Islam Taju, died on September 18 after contracting dengue. He was the only parent Arfa had ever known.
Her mother died just five days after giving birth to her.
For Arfa, therefore, her father’s death was not simply another addition to the country’s dengue toll.
It took away the person who had been both mother and father to her -- the man who took her to school, brought her home, took her out on holidays and built his life around raising his only daughter.
“When friends were picked up by their mothers at school, I used to feel sad and miss having a mother,” Arfa told Dhaka Tribune.
“But my father used to come to pick me up. Even without a mother, I felt comforted knowing I had my father. Now, even he is gone. Father will never take me to school or out for an outing again.”
Her loss comes as dengue is exacting an increasingly heavy toll across Bangladesh.
At least 214 people have died and 70,104 have been hospitalised with dengue this year through September 25, according to the Directorate General of Health Services.
Another 955 patients were admitted to hospitals and three died in the latest 24-hour reporting period.
September alone has accounted for 115 deaths in its first 25 days, making it the deadliest month of 2026 so far.
Behind one of those deaths is a child in Rampura now asking where she belongs.
Father and mother in one
Arfa was born by Caesarean section at Narail Sadar Hospital on February 13, 2018.
Five days later, her mother Marufa suddenly collapsed while still recovering after childbirth. According to the family, she suffered severe bleeding and died.
Arfa grew up without any memory of her mother.
Tajul never remarried. Instead, according to his family, he devoted himself to raising his daughter at their home in the Wapda Road area of Rampura, where they lived with her grandparents.
Every school day, he would take Arfa to school and bring her home. On holidays, he took her out.
His mother, Sakhina Begum, said Tajul’s illness began after he returned home from his shop late at night with a fever and feeling unwell.
The following morning, despite still being sick, one of his first concerns was his daughter.
“Mom, will you take Arfa to school, or should I?” Sakhina recalled him asking after Fajr prayers.
She told him to rest and took Arfa herself.
By around 7am, Tajul’s condition had worsened. He began vomiting repeatedly after eating a banana and some bread.
The family initially tried to persuade him to go to hospital, but he believed he would recover. He later consulted a doctor and returned home with prescribed medication and intravenous saline.
By evening, however, the vomiting had intensified and he developed chest pain.
He was rushed to Khidmah Hospital, but doctors there recommended transferring him to a facility with intensive-care capacity.
Dengue diagnosis came as condition worsened
Tajul was subsequently admitted to Better Life Hospital, where tests confirmed dengue at around 8pm, according to his family.
By then, his condition was critical. His blood pressure had fallen, he was having difficulty breathing and the vomiting continued.
When his mother saw him the following morning, she realised how seriously ill he had become.
“I could tell just by looking at him that my son’s time was running out,” Sakhina said, breaking down in tears.
As his condition deteriorated further, Tajul was transferred to Evercare Hospital and placed on life support.
He died at 7:55pm on September 18.
He was buried the following day in the family graveyard at his ancestral home in Debidwar, Cumilla.
‘We kept telling her father would get better’
Throughout her father’s illness, Arfa had waited for him to return.
Farhana Akter, an aunt of Arfa’s late mother, said the family tried to reassure the child.
“Arfa had been crying ever since Taju bhai fell ill. We kept telling her that her father would get better,” she said.
When the news finally came that he had died, there was no longer anything they could tell her.
“The child became inconsolable,” Farhana said. “There wasn’t a single person who could hold back tears upon seeing her.”
Arfa’s grandfather has now taken responsibility for raising her.
“My granddaughter wasn’t an orphan until now; losing her father has made her one,” he told Dhaka Tribune.
“I will look after her now. I am getting on in years, though, so I don’t know how much I’ll be able to do.”
For Arfa, the statistics of Bangladesh’s dengue outbreak have been reduced to something much simpler.
She once watched other children leave school with their mothers and wished she had one too. But her father would arrive, and that was enough.
Now, as Bangladesh counts 214 dengue deaths, Arfa is learning what one of those deaths means when the person behind the number was the only parent she had left.