Down in dumps

He wanted to spend the day off with his youngest son.

The two were whiling away the idle winter afternoon yesterday walking in front of their rented tin-shed room in the city's Moghbazar. Seeing some other children playing nearby, the kid darted towards them.

The father, Abdul Mannan, before he could understand anything, only saw a large chunk of a wall crushing on his son Saif around 12:45pm when two labourers were trying to knock down the front wall of a nearby room with big hammers.

“Saif might have screamed for help, but I didn't hear anything as he was under a pile of bricks,” Mannan, a day labourer, told The Daily Star at Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH).

After the chunk of the wall was removed by three men, Mannan saw his son lying in a pool of blood.

“I could sense that Saif was no more, yet I didn't waste a moment. I immediately took him to Moghbazar Community Hospital, but it could not treat him. Soon I rushed my son to Dhaka Medical College Hospital,” the grieving father said.

Doctors at the DMCH said the kid was brought dead around 2:00pm.

Saif used to follow his father almost everywhere and loved to dance to the beats of songs played from cellphone.

“My son would oversleep in winter mornings and take breakfast around noon. After breakfast, we would go to the front yard to hang out,” said Mannan.

The front yard of the house is a five-foot wide corridor between two rows of tin-shed rooms, in one of which lives the father of five with his wife and children. He pays a rent of Tk 3,500 a month for the room.

No case was filed in this regard till 8:00pm yesterday, said the OC of Ramna Police Station.