A low voice whispers from the Burn and Plastic Surgery Institute at Dhaka Medical College Hospital yesterday: “Please give me some cold water.”
It is nearly 1pm and just about everybody is thirsty for water, but 4-year-old Ashfaq cannot have a sip of a cool drink because his body and hands are in bandages.
His mother Parul Begum, 35, says she feels helpless.
Sitting by his bed, she sheds tears because she cannot satisfy her only son’s little request.
Parul also suffers from burns received when the bus she and her son were riding overturned, spewing hot water from the engine and searing their skin.
“Ashfaq often shouts out in pain and asks for little things like water, but I cannot give him what he asks for. When the nurse comes along with medicines, we are given something to drink,” she says.
On the day of the accident, Parul had brought Ashfaq, who had a fever, to Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU). On the way home, their bus flipped over in a blur of reckless driving.
Twenty-five percent of Parul’s body and fifteen percent of Ashfaq’s body were scalded by hot water from the bus engine.
The accident in the capital’s busy Karwan Bazar area on June 3 has been attributed to the drivers’ negligence. Parul and Ashfaq’s bus driver was attempting to outmanoeuvre and overtake another bus.
A bus helper was killed and fifteen were injured, six critically, in the accident but nobody has been punished for the reckless driving. Parul says she has no relatives to seek help from.
Abul Hossain, her former husband, left her to raise Ashfaq on her own three years ago.
The single mother works as a domestic help and lives with her son in a Tk2,000 per month rental unit in the capital’s Mirpur 1 neighbourhood.
Her mother, Aberma, who has gone blind, lives in their native village in Brahmanbaria district. Her father, Bazu Miah, is deceased.
Asked how their treatment was going, Parul said she was entirely dependent on the kindness of her ward fellows and her doctors.
“Both mother and son are stable, but burns require some time to heal,” their doctor Prof Abul Kalam, the head of the Burn Institute, said.
