26/10/2025
The Dhaka Metro Rail tragedy has left me hollow, numb with grief, anger, and disbelief. How does one even begin to process something so senseless?
A man, an ordinary soul with dreams, with love, with a family, told his sister-in-law at 11 AM, “অতি শীঘ্রই বাড়ি ফিরবো।” Just an hour and a half later, at 12:30, he did return home, but not alive.
His wife has been fainting again and again since the news broke. This morning, she had asked him to step out. She had no idea she was sending him toward his death. The very structure built with our money, meant to serve us, to connect us, became the thing that ended him.
They say his family will receive 5 lakh taka and a job in the Metro Rail. That’s it. As if a life, a husband, a father, a son, can be measured in currency and compensation. In Bangladesh, the value of life has become cheaper than concrete.
He had no warning, no time to say goodbye. In this country, you never know which farewell will be your last. The man who said, “I’ll be back soon,” never came back. He didn’t know walking on a footpath would be his final act.
In other nations, people fall onto the tracks by accident. In ours, the tracks or their parts fall on us from the sky. This isn’t God’s will. This is the deadly price of negligence, of carelessness, of lives treated like statistics.
And soon, they’ll say it again, “We followed the rules.” “It wasn’t our fault.”
But someone’s husband is gone. Someone’s home is silent. Someone’s life has collapsed.
We don’t need condolences. We need justice. We need accountability.
Because the day we stop demanding it, that’s the day we, too, fall silent forever.
