“Who are you looking for? Do you want to meet the parents of the twins?” Rabbi, a five-year old Mohammadpur boy asked this Dhaka Tribune reporter as he was asking a shopkeeper for directions.
The parents of the twins, who consider themselves ordinary folk, have become overnight celebrities after one of the twin boys was kidnapped from hospital and then recovered 170 hours later.
For Babu and Runa, the parents, the harrowing episode has come with a silver lining. The trying tale, highlighting the combined powers of an active law enforcement effort and an outspoken press, could have gone the way of so many newspaper stories and ended in tragedy.
But for this family and their neighbours in Johuri Moholla, the media attention of the last few days has allowed them to bask in the after-glow of an ordeal that ended well.
Kawser Hossain Babu, the twins’ father, said while shopping Friday morning at Mohammadpur Krishibazar Market to buy a small fan and oil cloth for the infants, shopkeepers ran up to him to congratulate him and to say they had prayed for the recovery of the missing child.
On the Shyamoli Road, he said, a man stopped his car to inquire about the twins’ health.
“I have not been to work for 10 days. Journalists have been visiting the house non-stop. I thank them again and again. It is only because of the media that I got back my son. I want them to grow up to be journalists, God-willing,” Babu said.
The family home, on the 2nd floor of a Johuri Moholla house in Mohammad pur, is a small, one-room rental unit that costs them Tk4000 a month.
The room is simple; there is no bed in it. The family sleeps on the floor. Despite the cramped conditions and the family’s tight finances, Babu and Runa are a happy couple who say they are blessed to have their twin boys safely at home. Runa smiled and said she and her husband want the twins to become journalists.
The mother of the twins was breast feeding her sons. At least four neighbours were there to give her a hand.
Two packets of baby milk formula lay on the floor next to her. When asked why they had bought formula, Runa said the DMCH doctors had suggested buying one and RAB officials gave her the other. Her husband spent Tk565 on it.
This advice was given despite the government’s multi-million Taka effort, since the passing of a law in 2013, to promote breastfeeding.
DMCH doctors advised Runa to use powdered milk while in hospital although she was producing milk. “Without you journalists, we would never have gotten back our son. The DMCH authorities and RAB also did a lot,” she said.
Despite everything that had gone wrong, Babu and Runa were happy with how things turned out. Babu says he feels like a celebrity. “When we came home, hundreds of people came to see us. Before all this happened, our neighbours did not know us. But because of the media, people all across the country know who we are.”
