Bangladesh News

Rashida Akhter Ruma was struggling to hold back her tears, all the while cursing the fickleness of fate. Why she was not killed on this day four years ago when grenades rained down all around her, leaving her to bear the throes of injuries for life?

She has a point. Her death would have drawn public attention, enabling her two daughters to get some help.

The nightmare of the August 21 afternoon of 2004 haunts the former women affairs secretary for ward No. 69 of the Awami League day in, day out.

“The first grenade exploded as the netri (Sheikh Hasina) ended her speech and I stood up to walk up to her car,” Ruma recalled.

The 40-year-old felt a surge of pain as she tried to find a comfortable position on her bed. The grenades left six fractures in her legs, caused irreparable damage to her right ear and placed a few thousands splinters into her body. She lost three toes as well.

Ruma was relating her story at her uncle’s home on Nazimuddin Road, the latest in her search for shelter since the attacks disabled her to afford a home on her own.

She became the lone bread earner of the family after her husband died of cardiac arrest in 2002, earning about Tk 5,000 per month by teaching sewing skills.

As the attacks cost her work, a pall of uncertainty descended on the family. She left her rented house on Aga Sadek Road and started a life of living off relatives.

Tears now streaked her face as The Daily Star asked Ruma about her two daughters, Joya and Pia. “Failing to feed my daughters, I hopped them into a madrasa in the solace that they would not at least starve at hostels.”

“Doctors said I would soon go mad if I don’t treat my right ear immediately. Who’d look after my kids then?” Ruma asked.

Every August 21 adds to her nagging physical and psychological pains.

“When August 21 comes back every year, journalists like you come here to know how we are getting on. What does it bring other than fuelling the old injuries?” she said.

Not that Ruma did not get any help in treating her injuries. She underwent 13 operations home and abroad, with the Awami League bearing all the costs.

But everything came to a halt after the arrest of Sheikh Hasina on July 16 last year. Nobody enquired about her since then, she said.

A few hundred more in Dhaka City also bear the hallmark of the grenade attacks, splinters in the thousands.

“I have about 1,500 in my head, back, abdomen, waist, arms and legs,” Nasima Ferdousi said at Trauma Centre at Shyamoli, pointing to the ones protruding beneath her skin.

Doctors removed a few hundred from her body in 23 operations, eight in Bangladesh and the rest in India. After an operation at Apollo Hospital in Delhi, surgeons gave her son 250 splinters.

“I have those 250 in my house now”, the 47-year-old former senior president of the city unit Awami League said.

She says sometimes she feels like a tree as the splinters formed a layer under her skin. “The splinters feel differently in different seasons”.

With aging, she is developing new complications in her kidney, heart and backbone, she said.

Ruma and Nasima, who now rely on crutches for movement, yearn for better treatment abroad, but hold out little hope of it until “Hasina is freed.”

“Not only that the government did little in brining the culprits behind the attacks to book, they also did nothing to help the victims like us,” Nasima said.

She, like Majharul Islam Mamun, son of Ada Chacha a.k.a Rafiqul Islam who was killed in the attacks, demanded that the authorities smoke out and expose the masterminds of the attacks designed to eliminate the Awami League leadership.

“We’re happy that the caretaker government has brought the investigation back on track. But besides knowing who carried out the attacks, we want to know who plotted and financed them and who supplied the grenades,” Mamun told The Daily Star.

“The pain inflicted on us would recede a little if we see a transparent investigation and trial.”