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Lifeless in sudden madness

Staff correspondent
The motionless body of three-year old Maruf bore testimony to the searing pain of the fire that consumed him. Even in death, his mouth was wide open in a silent scream.
He was the youngest member of the Bihari household that lost nine members in an arson attack amid clashes with local Bengalis and law enforcers in Mirpur yesterday.
Three other children also perished in the attack -eight-year-old Roksana, lovingly nicknamed Buchi by her family, and 12-year-old twins Lalu and Bholu. Their elder sister Farzana, 15, is currently writhing in the burn unit of Dhaka Medical College Hospital with 17 percent burns that cover her whole face and a part of her breathing tract.
"I was the only one who could get out alive. We were trapped inside - my mother, me, my elder sisters Afsana and Shahana and my other siblings. Shahana's husband made a whole through the thatched wall, and only I managed to crawl out. The rest were too injured to move by then," said FarzanatoThe Daily Star.
Back at Kurmitola Bihari Camp, her father Mohammad Yasin was found sitting under a coconut tree, with a blank look on his stony face. His tears had dried up with the intensity of the grief of losing all his children and his wife. Questions and kind words alike were met with a dumbfounded silence.
At one point he emerged from his trance-like state and lamented to The Daily Star that he had asked his family to stay in the security of their home, but never in his wildest imagination, expected it to turn into a deathtrap.
"When the chaos started, I told them to hide inside. Then I went to check out the situation outside. Suddenly, I heard from locals that my house had been set on fire. By the time I arrived, everyone had been burnt to ashes," said Yasin.
H is next-door neighbor Kamrunnessa Bibi was found scavenging broken bits of china and glassware in the ruins of her one-roomed house.
"I work as domestic help in houses. I am the only breadwinner as my husband is mentally unstable. I am nearly 60 years old now. Everything you see in this room was collected painstakingly over the years. This small television set they burnt down was bought very recently," she told The Daily Star, pointing to the remains of her household stuff.
Kamrunnessa was inside the house with her husband when the miscreants set fire to it. "For a second I thought I
was going to die. Then I mustered courage and broke the door open."
Bundling up in a cloth whatever had been left, Kamrunnessa headed out through the charred skeleton of what once was her home.
When asked where she was going, she said, "I do not know. On the sidewalk, I guess."
Abdul Shahjahan stood in the black sooty water that pooled into his house after the firefighters doused the fire, looking at the remains of his house.
He had been sifting through his belongings trying to salvage anything that might have been left.
"As soon as the clash started, I took
my wife, three sons and a daughter and escaped," he said.
Pointing to an open drawer, he stated, "There were around Tk 1 lakh 20 thousand in that drawer. I am only a milkman and those were all my savings. Before they set my house on fire, they looted it. I don't see my television set anywhere in the mess either."
However, he also lamented the loss of his children's textbooks.
"This year will be tough for them, with no books, no home, no money. I wonder whether they can continue going to school," said Shahjahan. All of his dreams seem to have been reduced to ashes along with his properties.