Tanvir Mohammad Taqi, a young poet, avid reader and brilliant student from Narayanganj, was brutally murdered in March 2013. During the fallen Awami League regime, Taqi’s family and friends repeatedly alleged that influential quarters within the ruling establishment had been interfering with the legal process. Yet even after the regime’s collapse, the investigation has shown little meaningful progress. Following the assumption of power by the newly elected Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led government, Taqi’s mother, Rawnak Tahmina, wrote an open letter to members of parliament in March, renewing her long-standing plea for justice.
TIME moves like dust. It lifts, drifts. It settles. Everything — memories of glee and sorrow, memories that had lodged themselves in the chest and the skull, layer upon patient layer — enveloped under a blanket of dust. The proud moments of a life, our endless, soaring days, or those of pain, like a wounded bird’s final, desperate wing-beat — all, at last, buried. Grief, too, is swept away with the dust. The dust takes everything.
But one. The thing that changed the course of our lives stays. It shifts, it moves. Despite the layers of a thousand memories buried before it, it tears its way out. It tears asunder. Big, dark boulder. Cold, carved in the shape of what was taken from us. It throbs with memory.
Our son was born on the afternoon of October 5, 1995, in the city of Narayanganj. Tanvir Muhammad Taqi. He came into the world at dusk on Bijoya Dashami while dhak drums beat across the city. The air was thick with joy and mourning. From the mosque, a muezzin came to whisper the call to prayer into his ear. Perhaps, in the mingling of those sounds, the child had thought, in some wordless way, that all the beauty of the world had assembled only to welcome him.
When Taqi was born, like the poet Sukanta, I, too, made a vow to do what I could to make this world worthy of all children born into it. With Taqi, our days were luminous, like kites spinning red and blue against boundless open skies. He learned to walk. He went to school. He learned to sing, to draw, to write poetry and stories in both Bangla and English. Books became a kind of hunger in him. In his O-Level examinations, he achieved the highest marks in the country in Physics. In his A-Levels, he scored 297 out of 300 in Physics — the highest recorded anywhere in the world that year — and 294 out of 300 in Chemistry, the highest in Bangladesh. A seventeen-year-old boy, standing at the threshold of everything.
But on the day the results came out, Taqi was already dead, floating down the Shitalakshya River.
On March 6, 2013, a powerful family of known criminal standing in Narayanganj abducted and murdered Taqi. His body was thrown into the Shitalakshya. According to confessional statements later recorded under Section 164, he was beaten unconscious with a cleaver’s handle. They then climbed onto his chest, and strangled him until he stopped breathing. One of his eyes were wrenched out. Several parts of the body pulverised. The forensic doctor confirmed that Taqi had been struck from three separate directions on his head.
Eleven individuals under the command of the Osman family carried this out in their private torture cell. In March 2014, the assigned investigative agency Rapid Action Battalion held a press conference and announced that the investigation was nearly complete. A charge sheet detailing how, why, when and by whom Taqi was murdered would soon be submitted to the court, they said.
But three months later, on June 3, 2014, the then prime minister Sheikh Hasina stood on the floor of the national parliament and declared that she stands with the Osman family of Narayanganj, and that she would continue to look after them.
The case went silent. The men named in confessional statements as Taqi’s killers moved freely through the city, visibly, unafraid and protected.
Thirteen years have now passed since Taqi’s murder. Eleven and a half of those years were under the Awami League regime. The remaining one and a half years under the interim government following the upheaval of August 5, 2024. When the interim government was formed, several of the killers were re-arrested. But they, too, are now out on bail. The investigation, said to have been finished twelve years ago, has still not produced a report submitted to any court.
Taqi wrote, in one of his poems:
All of humanity will stand today in a single rank — / rising above malice and war, / forgoing machinations, / to spread these songs of love — / to say, people, one and the same. I taught Taqi to love this country and its people. I taught him to believe that it was worth the effort of making liveable. He believed it. He dreamed, with the particular conviction of the young, of a society built on care, justice and equality. Instead, a society built on violent hierarchies sent eleven men to make him take his brutal leave.
Governments come and go. I have watched them come and go. I believe that the sacred responsibility of governing a people is also a moral one. I believe that it is placed by something larger than any party or dynasty. When that trust is corrupted, it opens a wound. The wound festers.
You are now the lawmakers of this country. You have been placed with the sacred responsibility of governing. I am a mother who has outlived her child by thirteen years. I hope you will help me to ensure that the murder of my child is brought before a court of law, and that those responsible are held to account.
Translated from Bangla by Sayrat Salekin.
