Family, friends try in vain to get over the loss
Spending much of the last three days weeping by himself, Ahmed Munier Bhashan became numb yesterday.
The 60-year-old seasoned UN peacekeeper has lost a brother, a younger one, in a tragic road accident on Saturday.
“I couldn’t even bear to read the news…his face was everywhere,” Bhashan murmured, almost to himself, as he spoke to friends who joined him at Mishuk Munier’s burial at Banani graveyard yesterday.
Mourners and family members remained stoic as the acclaimed broadcast journalist was laid to rest around 2:00pm. Their faces etched with grief, all stood in silence.
Mishuk, chief executive officer of ATN News, was killed along with renowned filmmaker Tareque Masud and three others in a road crash in Manikganj.
Tareque will be buried today at his Nurpur village under Bhanga upazila in Faridpur.
Bhashan, who works at a UN peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone, came home yesterday morning to attend the burial. It was held up until his arrival.
The grave Mishuk was buried in near the northern boundary of the Banani graveyard was actually the grave of his grandmother Ashrafunnesa Begum. His mother Lily Chowdhury, a theatre activist, wished to be buried there after her death.
But her 52-year-old son took her place yesterday.
“Not like this…not like this…I can’t come to terms with this,” said Kazi Monjuly, Mishuk’s widow, as the burial took place. She then burst into tears and threw herself in someone’s arms.
Mishuk had migrated to Canada in 2002 after the closure of ETV where he worked. He moved back to Dhaka and joined ATN News in November last year.
“He came back for Ma,” said Bhashan. And then, overcome by emotion, he went silent.
“He used to complain that ma was getting thin. He decided to return so he could take care of her.”
But the mother will have to live with this.
“I will recover from this shock as I have my family and children. But Ma…,” he stopped short.
The father, Munier Chowdhury, never returned home after he was taken away by the collaborators of the Pakistani forces on December 14, 1971.
Forty years later, the family lost another member.
“Fake driving licence, untrained drivers, whatever it may be, these must stop,” demanded Bhashan. “I hope these stop or else his death will go in vain.”
“We are frustrated,” says Asif Munier Chowdhury, the youngest of the three siblings.
“I hear they [the government] have formed a committee to probe how it happened. But what is the point of looking into it now? What is the point of pointing fingers at someone now?
“If we had CCTV camera on that section of the street, like they have in western countries, then it could have been effective. But with some scattered interviews from witnesses and isolated evidence, this is pointless.
“What has happened has happened and we don’t want to play the blame game,” he said.
Asif hopes the authorities will wake up from their slumber and take steps so that nobody else is lost like this.
-With The Daily Star input
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