Death is not horrible when it happens in a faraway place to people whose existence has never bothered ours. It is not sad or horrifying, rather regrettable and untimely.
It is a small headline on top of a smaller story, which, during a particular season of news drought, might make its place in an uncomfortable corner of the front page.
The portion of the story that’s hidden inside is never going to be explored, unless for academic reasons or out of sheer boredom. The person who has been murdered will forever remain a name and maybe even a picture. And the murderer will always be just that too. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Unless if the murder takes place on top of a foot over-bridge you used to cross regularly in order to get to your school. Where you and your peeps smoked for the first time, where your dad embarrassed you by holding your hand in front of your friends, where your mother scolded you for getting poor marks on the last CT, and where the genjam boys used to hang out, smoking cigarettes and flirting with underaged girls (to be fair, the genjam boys, like the rest of us, were underaged themselves, at least in most cases) who liked the thrill of it (just to clarify, the majority of the students had better things to do than be genjam boys and thrill-seeking teenage girls).
My memory even goes as far back as when there was no over-bridge. A short, dark-skinned, middle-aged school-er-mama (I wish I could remember more politically correct details) with a traffic police-like baton and commando-like endurance used to lead parents holding their kids from one side of the road to another in a seemingly never-ending routine, through the sun and the rain (in which case, the baton got replaced by an umbrella, or maybe I’m over-imagining).
It took a nameless working-class citizen to be run down by a bus at the earliest hour to get the authority startled.
The result was a foot over-bridge. Not that it stopped people crossing across the traffic. The road claimed the life of Hamim Sheikh in early 2010.
A lot of things went wrong on top of the Kakrail over-bridge. In its hayday, the structure saw its fair share of genjam between various factions of the willing and able genjam boys. Some involved just the smallest pint of blood.
The bridge was also witness to fights between a particular variant of the thrill-seeking teenage girl and the genjam boy, both of whom had consensually proceeded beyond flirting. Now they were finally beginning to realise the depth of each other’s insecurities and peculiarities.
These fights remained verbal, but they were decidedly bloody (again, just to clarify, not all boys like genjam and not all girls are into bad boys. It’s just that this particular group of people were highly visible on the over-bridge).
As the monument that partly defined my childhood becomes tainted with blood, I can’t help but feel emptiness at the loss of a childhood safe house, where things going wrong meant my mom’s wrath or my dad’s irritation. Now, they mean mass protests and injustice
Sometimes moms, pushed to the brink of their critical point, would snap at the kids failing academically, or getting their shirts dusted and torn by childhood hooliganism. Stressed out dads would scream at the sight of their pubescent kids skipping out on school and hanging out at the over-bridges, planning the next genjam out in vivid (and rather obnoxious) details or discussing (in dehumanising terms) the physique of a female classmate. And somehow the dads always found out, so did the moms.
I almost forgot about the homeless. Like any other over-bridge in Dhaka, Kakrail had them too. And like the stereotypical homeless people, they were smelly, sweaty, sleepy, and in some cases, drug abusers. Society had failed them and they were returning the favour. Not that they ever could, fully.
But now, looking back through the eyes of a third year undergraduate student, the over-bridge was but a hauntingly beautiful monument that transcended through time and space and became a token of my school years. Every time I passed through Kakrail, the steel structure would catch my attention, and I’d wonder whether the same stories were playing out in them as they did only a few years ago.
It took her murder to change all that. The safe place of my childhood was now a crime scene. The long list of people whose security we couldn’t ensure was no longer.
What really went down in the seconds before the stabbing? What was the extent of the killer’s obsession with the victim? Will crimes like this ever going to see an end?
I don’t know. With further investigation, some answers will come out. Some never will. At the end of the day, I am not affected by the murder itself, because I didn’t get killed. My friends and family didn’t get killed. Instead of being sad for her, I am glad that I wasn’t her. That’s what has become of me. That’s what has become of this country.
Yet, as the monument that partly defined my childhood becomes tainted with blood, I can’t help but feel emptiness at the loss of a childhood safe house, where things going wrong meant my mom’s wrath or my dad’s irritation. Now, they mean mass protests and injustice.
Then again, maybe, there were no safe houses to begin with. They all got destroyed a while back, and the dead bodies are merely a reminder.
Fardin Hasin is a freelance contributor.
