Nafisa Hossen Marwa, 17 years old, could call her father on August 5 to say: ‘Baba, I am dying. Please, take my body home.’
A bullet pierced her left chest sometime around 2:00pm in the Baktarpur area of Savar, on the outskirts of Dhaka, during student protests that demanded reforms in civil service job reservations.
The protests, since July 1, flared into a mass uprising towards the end of the month, overthrowing the Awami League government on August 5.
Nafisa joined the protests in August 4–5 keeping without letting anyone know after she had visited her grandmother’s house in the area. Her father earlier asked her not to join the protests.
She sent her father Abul Hossen, the owner of a tea stall who lives at Ershadnagar of Tongi, two photographs of the protests that day.
‘I saw the photographs and I called her around 1:45pm. I asked her to immediately get back to her grandmother’s place. She refused and hung up,’ said Abul Hossen, 50 years old, on October 3.
When I called her again around 2:15pm, someone else answered the call, telling him that Nafisa had been shot.
About half an hour later, Nafisa called her father, telling him that she was dying and asked him to collect her body.
‘I hurried out of my tea stall, walking and running as the roads were deserted. I reached Savar around 5:30pm,’ he said.
Nafisa, a student of Shahajuddin Sarker Model School and College at Tongi who was taking the HSC Examinations, was taken to Enam Medical College Hospital at 3:32pm. She had died by then. She was buried at Ershadnagar later that night.
Nafisa and her younger sister Safa Hossen are children from Abul Hossen’s first wife. Abul has another daughter from his second wife. Neither of his marriages worked out and he lived alone in a one-room house that he rented at Ershadnagar.
Nafisa, who along with her sister lived at her grandmother’s, moved to her father’s house a year ago for her studies.
Her mother Kulsum Begum, who went to Kuwait in 2022 to work in a hospital as a cleaner, was abroad when she died.
‘Nafisa wanted to be a physician,’ said Abul Hossen.
The Directorate General of Health Services on September 24 came up with a preliminary list of 708 having died in the protests and subsequent uprising.
The health affairs sub-committee of the Students against Discrimination on September 28 said that it had enlisted 1,581 people as having died in the movement.
