One was a delivery man who had a tough time ensuring financial security for his family. The other worked in a clothing store at New Market, barely eking out a living for his spouse and children.
Nahid Mia and Mohammad Morsalin do not live any more. Trapped in the violence which engulfed the entire area around New Market, they did not have the means to ward off the blows being rained down on them. No one will tell you who those criminals were who cheerfully went into beating the life out of them. But everyone involved in that insanity which overtook this city a few days ago will point the finger at one another for the crime that was committed.
Meanwhile, Nahid’s elderly father does not know how he will cope with these new, heartbreaking circumstances. His other children are too young to shoulder the responsibility of stepping in where their sibling used to be. The elderly father now has a load on his shoulders — his remaining children and the family of his murdered child.
Morsalin’s wife does not know why her young husband had to die. Her children, shocked into a state where their father will not come home anymore, face not just an uncertain future but one that is dark, one where the little lamp that Morsalin kept lit has swiftly been snuffed out.
It is easy to inform ourselves that we are shocked at these two killings of two poor, hardworking young men. It is fashionable for us to demand that those responsible for their violent end be brought to book. And once we have done that, we will go back to life as usual, we will grow oblivious to the idea that Morsalin and Nahid are dead and gone, for good.
With the passage of days and weeks, their families, with all their pains and tears, will fade from our consciousness. The police will of course reassure us that inquiries will be gone into to determine the circumstances leading to the end of the lives of these two young men.
But the bigger issue today is that in the deaths of Nahid and Morsalin, two families have died. Apparition-like, they will struggle to survive. Perhaps they will seek compensation from the authorities. Perhaps they will move from door to door soliciting alms. Perhaps a few kind souls will pitch in with help.
But these two families, like the families of so many other poor breadwinners that have gone through similar agony in earlier times, are today condemned to a living death. Their breadwinners are in their graves. For their parents and spouses and children, the world is today a cemetery where they walk in the shadow of death.
It is a shame, our shame, that we have not yet been able to identify the criminals who bludgeoned Nahid and Morsalin to death. That ours is a society which does not care, which has little time for the huddled masses, makes us go red in the face with embarrassment. It is a society we have over the years built on the sinister foundations of insensitivity.
We do not catch and prosecute the educated criminals who steal from the country and stash away their loot abroad. We watch the agents of and dealers in manifest corruption go around the land lecturing us on the values of patriotism, on the need for hard work.
The hard work is done, if you must know, by the skinny women who every day walk miles to reach the garment factories where they spend days passing into the cruel night. The hard work is done by the likes of Nahid, biking and walking to homes delivering items to those of us who are a class above them, or so we think. The hard work comes from Morsalin, from all the Morsalins who for a pittance go out on a limb to persuade customers to buy the goods at stores owned by others.
In a society where social justice is an alien thought, where morality long ago was banished to the woods, where politics does not build a safety net for those whose lives are a long tale of suffering, we know that expectations of sunlight breaking through the clouds are misplaced.
In a land where social democracy, if not exactly socialism, should have underpinned the basis of the state long, long ago, we have been silent, bewildered observers of the bizarre punctuating our collective life as a nation.
Rickshawpullers are whipped over minor infractions on the streets; the impoverished are turned rudely away from the gates of restaurants out of which emerge the well-fed and well-clothed; bus drivers and conductors are blamed for every accident, but not many care to imagine how they provide food on the table for their families; low-paid employees are given short shrift and summarily dismissed by their affluent bosses with nary a thought to the skies breaking over the heads of these employees.
Perhaps Nahid and Morsalin would have gone on struggling, had they lived, for years in order to give their children a reasonably happy future. Perhaps they would both be alive had those students of Dhaka College and those traders of New Market moved to save them from their skirmishes. Perhaps.
But what’s the point? The futures of these two struggling citizens ended on that rubble-strewn street where they were felled by the marauding mobs.
The students of Dhaka College and the traders of New Market have reached a deal to put their conflict behind them. One wonders if they reflected, at their midnight meeting, on the tragedy that has befallen, owing to their violence, on the families of Nahid and Morsalin.
One wonders if the police are on a focused search for the assailants of the two men. One wonders if the local Member of Parliament has been to the homes of these shattered families, to reassure them that the state will henceforth be responsible for their well-being.
One wonders …at the unstoppable decline in our values, at our refusal to empathise with the poor, at our tolerance of all the wrongdoing eating away at the vitals of our once caring, vibrant, future-oriented society.
The tears of the lonely keep falling all the time.
Syed Badrul Ahsanis a politics and history analyst
Source: bdnews24.com
