When I stepped into Farmgate Metro Station a few days ago, the whole place was buzzing with people. Middle aged men and women, our mothers and fathers, were scattered here and there, sitting wherever they could find space.
Worry was written plainly on their faces, lips moving silently, murmuring the names of the Creator. It took me a moment to understand, the Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSC) exam was going on, and this is a common scenario.
This is a road we have all walked once, and our parents have walked many times over. Whenever there is an exam in our lives, literal or otherwise, they worry, they pray.
They may not fully understand everything that comes with changing times, but they know this much: That their child needs the Creator's help, and that they themselves are the only reliable bridge between the Creator and their child.
But it is genuinely disheartening to see these people standing or sitting around like this, with no proper seating, no fans, nothing. And on top of that, as if things weren't hard enough already, the rain came down.
Their child's exam, how the household will run this month, what the child will eat once the exam is over -- all of it already sits heavy on their shoulders, and now on top of that, there is no roof over their heads either.
Anyone who has been through this kind of situation knows exactly how much mental pressure builds up during these hours. Even the body starts to feel it, a kind of burning restlessness that creeps in with the cold air during moments of this much stress.
A proper waiting space for these people at a time like this is something that simply cannot be denied.
And this is exactly why a thought keeps nagging at me. We give so much importance to the exam candidate, yet somehow forget the people who come along with them.
The child sits inside the exam hall for two or three hours writing on paper, while outside, the parents sit through an even longer stretch of time, taking their own invisible exam -- one called anxiety.
Standing there that day in a busy place like Farmgate, I saw a middle-aged man drenched in rain, huddled under a shop's shade because he had no umbrella, his eyes fixed on the school gate. Beside him, a woman sat by the footpath with the end of her sari pulled over her head, a bag in her lap, probably holding a water bottle and some snacks for her son. There was exhaustion on her face, but her eyes would not leave that gate.
We see scenes like these every single day, and yet we have grown so used to them that we no longer stop to think about them.
That is when it struck me how one-sided we are as a system, and how deliberately so. We build exam centres, plan seating arrangements, send out question papers wrapped in layers of security, but we do not even bother to put up a simple shelter for the people waiting outside.
We authorize institutions, allocate exam halls, appoint teachers as invigilators, but the people outside -- the ones waiting with what is arguably the biggest investment of their lives -- never even make it into the planning.
The scale of this makes the gap harder to ignore. This year, the Dhaka Education Board alone is running the HSC exams out of more than three hundred centres, most of them inside the country, and a handful abroad.
Nationally, the picture is larger still. All nine general education boards used identical question papers for the first time this year, sitting well over a million candidates across nearly 2,700 centres under eleven boards.
Multiply that by even one guardian per child, and what stood outside Farmgate that morning was not a handful of anxious parents. It was a nationwide crowd, quietly standing in the rain, in front of nearly three thousand gates.
This is not a demand for luxury; it is a demand rooted in basic humanity. A tin shed, a few benches, and perhaps a couple of fans are neither difficult nor expensive to arrange.
While a handful of institutions have taken such initiatives, their efforts remain the exception rather than the norm, leaving the vast majority of waiting areas without even these basic facilities. The education board could make this a formal directive, requiring every center to set aside even a temporary waiting space.
Local administrations, community volunteer groups, even alumni associations of these institutions could step forward for this small initiative. In some places, perhaps a nearby mosque or community center could be opened up temporarily for these people too.
What makes this harder to accept is that the exclusion of guardians is not an accident, it is policy. In Dhaka, the Metropolitan Police has banned unauthorized public entry within 200 yards of HSC examination centres, with exemptions only for examinees and officials.
It is a reasonable rule for security. But nowhere in the official seat plans, board notices, or ministry circulars is there a single line about where the people pushed beyond that perimeter are meant to go.
This isn't just about comfort. It is about dignity. A parent who takes a day off work, who braves the sun and the rain, all for their child's future, deserves at least a small, dignified place to wait.
In our society, this silent sacrifice parents make behind their children's success often goes completely unseen, and yet it is exactly this sacrifice that an entire generation is built upon.
If we truly want to make our education system humane, that humanity needs to extend beyond the four walls of the exam hall too: Where, quietly, a group of people spend every passing moment in prayer for their child, even if it means standing there soaked in rain.
Because an exam is never just for one student -- it belongs to the whole family. Showing this bare minimum of care toward that family is our collective responsibility.
Nafew Sajed Joy is a Bangladeshi researcher, writer, and environmentalist with a keen interest in sustainability, development, and South Asian affairs.