Meherun Nesa went to Ganabhaban, the residence of the prime minister, in the afternoon of August 5 as countless others did to celebrate Sheikh Hasina鈥檚 fall.
The celebrations were overwhelming for her as she lost her cousin Rabbi, who was shot at Mirpur 10 on July 19, during the 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, finally overthrowing the Awami League government.
Meherun, a third-year bachelor鈥檚 student of Hazrat Shah Ali Mahila College, returned home at Mirpur 13,聽 in the evening with a bunch of flowers.
But gunfire had shaken the area by the time she reached there. A crowd laid siege to the Kafrul police station, her father Mosharaf Hossain said, and the police entered Block C of the neighbourhood.
鈥楽he was happy to come back home with flowers to share her joy with the family but was shot minutes after she had entered the house on the second floor,鈥� Mosharaf said on September 30.
She was hit with two bullets when she was standing with her mother Asma Aktar by a window at about 7:30pm.
Meherun, aged 22, was pronounced dead at 8:00pm in Aalok Hospital Limited at Mirpur 10. She was buried in a neighbourhood graveyard without a post-mortem examination that night.
Mosharaf 鈥� who returned from Qatar, where he had worked for 32 years, two years ago without any savings 鈥� said that he had been closer to her daughter than any others in the family.
The 63-year-old man said that he could only buy a two-katha plot at Aminbazar at Savar. But the piece of land has since then fallen on the wrong hands. He lives with the family in a two-room house that his wife inherited from her parents.
Mosharaf, a car driver who earns Tk 16,000 a month from work and Tk 5,000 by renting one of the rooms, has had a hard time supporting his family.
Meherun, who used to work at a clothes shop for Tk 7,000 a month, shouldered part of the family鈥檚 expenses.
鈥業鈥檝e kept my daughter鈥檚 blood-stained clothes. Sometimes, I take them out, hold them out and look at them,鈥� Mosharaf said. Meherun鈥檚 brother is a student of Class XII.
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 at a briefing on September 28 said that it had enlisted 1,581 people as having died in the movement.