A few days ago, I eavesdropped on my five-year-old child and six-year-old nephew.
They had invented a new game—role-playing as a receptionist and a patient at a diagnostic center. One of them would sing out, "Token number so-and-so", and the other would come forward to get poked with an injection. I don't know if it was the sing-song tone or the imaginary shot that made them all giggly, but they seemed very proud of the game they had invented.
Both of them had faced genuine health scares earlier this year.
One survived dengue, the other chikungunya.
They went through repeated blood tests and visits to "real" doctors and "real" diagnostic centers; nightmares for us parents.
These moments were especially difficult when you consider the impact of the dengue outbreak this year.
In 2025 alone, Bangladesh witnessed 409 deaths so far, while the disease inflicted 110,765 people (Source: Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha). We were lucky that we were not part of that death toll.
Luck— you need a lot of it to stay alive in this city. And also a sense of dark humour.
If you live in Dhaka, it takes a reckless kind of courage, and a quiet delusion to dodge death, reach home, enjoy your morning tea and go about your life. So what do you call Dhaka? For me, no more a jadur shohor. Some call it a deathtrap, some call it Gotham with no Batman to save. Some compare it to living inside a video game and some: an unreleased installment of Final Destination.
I have noticed that many people in Bangladesh have found ways to cope with death and disasters through dark humour. It does not mean they lack sensitivity or empathy, in fact quite the opposite. Humour is just a survival mechanism, a way of acknowledging death while continuing to live without being consumed by it. When you hear people joke about what could have happened in the recent spates of earthquakes, for example, you realise that you're living in a city that has adopted humour as a way to cope with the many challenges thrown their way.
Humour is the superpower you unlock when the world around you conspires to kill you at any moment.
If you live in Dhaka, it takes a reckless kind of courage, and a quiet delusion to dodge death, reach home, enjoy your morning tea and go about your life.
So what do you call Dhaka? For me, no more a jadur shohor. Some call it a deathtrap, some call it Gotham with no Batman to save. Some compare it to living inside a video game and some: an unreleased installment of Final Destination.
And can you blame us? Abul Kalam died when a bearing pad fell on him. The body of Faria Tasnim Jyoti was recovered 36 hours after she fell into an uncovered drain in Tongi, Gazipur. If you think you are safe at home, remember the recent murder of the mother and daughter in their own residence.
If you are a minority, the chances are higher.
If you are a woman, the chances are higher.
If you are a child, the chances are higher.
If you are someone trying to raise your voice, making a difference, or politically active the chances are higher.
And as if all this is not enough, there is the earthquake scare and other natural disasters. There is also fear of mobs. This year we have seen death come in many forms. At times the number felt unreal, at others the reasons did. Some were violent and loudly discussed, some were silent, unreported. Many of these deaths rearranged something inside us until the city started to feel like a house of cards, even as we kept going.
Aerial view of Dhaka. File Photo: Nakib Shah Alam
Death next door: Milestone tragedy
Some incidents are so absurd, so Kafkaesque, that the mind refuses to accept them at first.
On July 20, 2025, Bangladesh lived through one of its most horrific chapters when a training aircraft of the Bangladesh Air Force crashed into a building of the Milestone School and College in Uttara Dhaka.
My office and home are both in Uttara. That morning, I took my sick cat to the vet and went to the office after dropping her home.
It was around 1:30 pm when a colleague called to say that a plane had crashed into Milestone School. Uttara has many branches of Milestone. I had just crossed one myself. It sounded like an extreme exaggeration, until it wasn't.
For the rest of the day, we helplessly watched school children— who were supposed to be returning home in a few minutes—screaming in agony as they burned to death.
It was a regular workday. Our office is very close to Diabari, where the accident took place. We carried on like zombies with the sound of ambulances, fire brigades and crowds in the background.
When I returned home that evening, my heart felt heavy with grief, anger, and compassion I didn't know how to process. I stayed up all night, scrolling for updates of those babies while holding my own school-going child to my heart. I felt lucky that my baby was still alive, and then almost immediately felt guilty for feeling any kind of luck.
Some people I know send their children to Milestone. You see Milestone students everywhere in Uttara— in elevators, on street corners, at local stationery shops. I don't know if it is the proximity of the school to our home, or the fact that I have a child of similar age to the victims, so many children had such a tragic death inside their second home; it felt as though the distance between death and me was nonexistent.
If you are Bangladeshi, death can feel routine. The Milestone school incident felt personal. I feel like I know Nazia, Nafee, Shayan, Mahreen Miss, Shobuja Khala.
Death is sitting right next to us.
The next day, life continued with cruel precision— morning tea, getting ready for work.
I had to take Monu, my eight-year-old cat, to the vet again for her treatment.
I myself had a doctor's appointment for an old pain. After dropping Monu home, I went to the hospital planning to go to work afterward. Then my phone rang.
Monu, my cat was not moving. She died.
When I returned home that evening, my heart felt heavy with grief, anger, and compassion I didn't know how to process. I stayed up all night, scrolling for updates of those babies while holding my own school-going child to my heart. I felt lucky that my baby was still alive, and then almost immediately felt guilty for feeling any kind of luck.
Somewhere between the Milestone fire and my cat's death, something inside me broke open. My knees gave way. I sat down and cried in the hospital— not quietly, but profusely, uncontrollably—for Monu, for the Milestone children I would never meet. Only then did I realise how much grief I had been carrying.
That day, I also learnt one more thing— hospitals are a great place to cry. No one questions you or judges you. You feel no obligation to explain.
While they (the shadharon jonota) are simply trying to navigate their life amid death and unknown, uncertain dangers, I feel that everyone in this city holds unreleased grief within them. And if we want to actually get going with life, somewhere along the way we need to hear the grief's demands to be released. We need to scream and cry it out.
It's been five months since that incident; I often wonder how the families are doing. So much has happened ever since, some more fire incidents, many more deaths.
In the days following the tragedy, on my way back home from dropping my daughter off to school, I would often spot "We mourn for Milestone" banners throughout different sectors of Uttara. Then one day, they were taken down. Just like that, we move on to the next big incident.
There was a press conference where the parents recounted the suffering and tragedy of the "fortunate" children who survived and those who couldn't. They spoke about how difficult it is for them to live the trauma, how hard it will be for the survivors to even hold a pen or to look at an airplane. They spoke about how that one seemingly regular day of their life altered their daily reality forever, how they struggled with purpose and to navigate a life. How ironic it is that they have to demand the best treatment for their little fighters; that it's not a given by the State.
A student of Milestone School and College holds her teacher as she cries while recounting the horrors of the previous day when a fighter jet crashed into one of the school buildings. File Photo: Prabir Das
We see them, empathise with them on some level, and understand them from a distance, but we will never be able to truly comprehend the pain that the families live with everyday. As we are saying goodbye to this year, I keep praying for these little victims and their families.
The Milestones incident did not alter my daily reality the way it did for the victims' families. But this sense of unreality made me more grounded, more compassionate, and more aware of the perpetual proximity of death's closeness.
That getting back home to our family is the whole point of the day.
The famous song 'dhonodhanne pushpebhora' is of course close to our heart but after every unusual, absurd accident- every avoidable death and failure of accountability the line 'emon deshti kothao khuje pabe nako tumi' resurfaces our newsfeed as status and memes reflecting our lived irony. See, humour is a survival skill for us.
It does not mean we lack patriotism, in fact quite the opposite.
You have to love this city to live in it, to wake up every morning and step into its chaos.
So what do you call this city? I call it home.
And you have to carry some luck and some love—stubborn, foolish love— in your heart to call such a difficult place your home.
Fayeka Zabeen Siddiqua is the co-founder and designer of Shishu Poribohon and mother of seven cats.
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