Ajit Chandra Das still cannot forget the day he saw his father's lifeless body lying on the floor in the house four years ago.
He is a survivor of the 2011 Mirsharai tragedy which marks the death of 45 people, including 42 young students, in a fatal road crash on July 11 that year. The other three victims included his father Haranath Das and two spectators.
The accident took place when a truck carrying the students on their way back home from Mirsharai stadium after a football match plunged into a roadside ditch in Saidali area on Abutorab Road.
Haranath, who joined locals to recover the bodies from the ditch, was frantically searching for Ajit because the boy was on the truck. But he could not find his son alive or dead at the scene of the accident.
“It was too difficult a shock for my father to bear as he could not even find my body after assuming that I had also died in the accident,” Ajit, who lives at Paschim Maghadia village in Maghadia union under Mirsharai upazila, recalled.
“He left the scene with a broken heart, returned home and suffered a cardiac arrest in a while. Today, I am alive but he is not. I think I can never forget my father,” said Ajit, who was a student of Abutorab High School at the time of the accident.
Of the 42 students who died, 34 studied at Abutorab High School, four at Abutorab SM Government Primary School, two at Kamal Uddin Chowdhury College and the remaining two at Abutorab Fazil Madrasa.
Abutorab High School authorities said a range of programmes had been outlined to observe the day, including offering prayers at the graves of the victims, laying wreaths at a memorial, a discussion and a parade which would be joined by students of different schools in the area.
A second memorial was decided to be built in the ditch where the accident took place but the work has not started yet.
