Sohel Rana, a 25-year-old rickshaw puller, was lying on the bed in a dark room when the electricity went out in Dhaka’s Shialbari slum on Sunday noon.
He didn’t require much light since he sees everything blurry nowadays.
“The surroundings around me seem foggy now. My sight is handicapped to the point that I can’t see objects only two or three feet away from me,” he said, recounting his present state after his eyes were damaged by splinters of a cylinder which detonated near his home on Wednesday afternoon.
After his eye surgery Sohel was released from the National Institute of Ophthalmology and Hospital in Dhaka on Saturday, and is now idle in his one room housing that has no windows.
With troubled eyesight and several bruises on different parts of his body, he can barely move without his wife Taslima Khatun’s help.
He tried to contain his grief, but failed.
Lamenting his sufferings, Sohel said: “Everyone, apart from my wife, knows that I can see. But I can’t.”
“I didn’t tell my father and mother about my critical condition. (But) my father (living in Sirajganj) was ready to sell our house for my treatment. I told him that he will not see me again if he does that and comes to visit me.”
Even though doctors have prescribed rest and some tests a few days later to assess his condition, Sohel is tense about whether he will ever be able to see again.
Bishwajit Chandra Das standing inside the slum | Rajib Dhar/Dhaka TribuneSeven people were killed, and at least 20 were injured, when a balloon-seller’s gas cylinder exploded in Mirpur, Dhaka on Wednesday.
On the other side of the same slum, lives Bishwajit Chandra Das, a 14 year old who left his studies two years ago after completing the sixth grade.
On the day of the cylinder explosion, he was injured by splinters that hit his eyes. He rushed to a nearby tube well and applied water to his eyes.
He returned home from the National Institute of Ophthalmology and Hospital on Saturday, with problems in his left eye still persisting. He can’t shower, eat, or even move without the help of his mother.
The teenager used to earn Tk4,500 to Tk5,000 and gave all his earnings to his mother, to be spent as household income.
“I have been absent at my workplace for a few days, like my mother. I feel very bad about it,” said Bishwajit, who seemed to be more tense about securing his livelihood than his eyes.
He came to the city to seek a better life with his mother and a two and a half year old sister, after their father left them three years ago.
The doctors have assured him that he will regain his eyesight within a few months.
“Once I get well I wish to provide well for my mother. I will build a house for her,” he said, sharing his plans for the future, hoping that the doctors are right about him regaining his eyesight.
