I read that Reshma Ratna died yesterday. I did not know her, but the news report said that the photo they posted was taken from her Facebook page.
So I searched for her on that social media platform. You can learn a lot about a person from the way they present themselves on social media if they choose to let you.
I did not know Reshma Ratna, but I learned quite a few things about her yesterday. I learned that she was 33 years old and a schoolteacher. That she was once a resident of Old Dhaka, but of late had moved to Mirpur since the school where she taught was in Dhanmondi, which was easier to get to from that part of town. That she liked to sing, recite poetry, read books, ride her bicycle, and run. That she had apparently run marathons.
I did not know Reshma, but I learned that she also had a passion for mountaineering. That after finishing her studies at Eden Mohila College, she had obtained training on mountain climbing at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering at Uttarakhand, India, and climbed the Keokradong at Bandarban in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
She went on to climb the Point Lenana in Kenya and the Stok Kangri and the Kang Yatse 2 in Ladakh, India. And that like most mountaineers, her dream was to climb Mount Everest.
I did not know her, but I think I got a bit of a glimpse into her soul from her social media page. It was filled with videos of poetry recitations, some commemorating the recent death anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore.
She seems to have been associated with a YouTube channel and Facebook page called Taire Naire Na, which was a poetry forum. Taire Naire Na uploads poetry sessions by renowned reciters for 15 consecutive days during this Eid ul Azha season.
She had kept uploading these videos on her page. Her final post was a video of Bhaswar Bondopadhyay reciting the Rabindranath Tagore poem “Ami” uploaded just a day ago.
I did not know the young woman, but she certainly seemed to have packed a lot of living into her 33 years. Her social media page tells us she had studied the Spanish Guitar, that she was a frequent visitor to the Bishwo Shahityo Kendro -- the Centre of World Literature.
There are photos there of her playing the electric guitar; happily posing at the 80th birth anniversary of Abdullah Abu Sayeed, the founder of Bishwo Shahityo Kendro, a couple of years ago; proudly displaying the flag of Bangladesh at the peaks in Kenya and Ladakh she had conquered; receiving medals after scaling those peaks.
She certainly seemed to have had an adventurous streak. It’s this spirit of intrepidity that drove her to attempt those climbs, although she knew, as she wrote in her Facebook bio, that mountaineering was the “art of suffering.”
It’s that same spirit that led her to ride her bicycle at 9am on a Friday morning at the Crescent Lake Road adjacent to the Chandrima Udyan of the National Parliament Building. It’s there that a speeding microbus drove her and her bike over, in the street that surely must have been completely empty at that time of the morning on a public holiday.
For all of her courage, her toughness, her worldliness, her embrace of the art of suffering, she must have been a naïve woman, this Reshma.
She was callow enough not to realize that a ride alone early in the morning on her bicycle in her native city was an adventure too many, one she might not survive.
It is the same lesson boys and girls even younger than her had learned on the streets of the same city two years ago almost to the day. They had tried to ensure that reckless, untrained, unlicensed drivers would not be allowed to operate vehicles in this city, only to have the very ones they would have counted on to maintain law and order turn on them.
In their case, it is their dreams, their romantic notion that they could put the world to rights, that was killed. In Ranta’s case, this city’s indifferent heedlessness made a corpse out of her; snuffed out her brave, guileless spirit.
I did not know Reshma Ratna. But I know we needed her to live.
I know we cannot allow this appalling waste of lives to go on.
Tanvir Haider Chaudhury has spent most of his career as a banker and is now running a food and beverage company.