From chirps to silence

The acrid stench of charred wood and melted plastic still clung to the air as onlookers gathered around the Milestone School and College building in Uttara's Diabari.

The two-storey building, where laughter once echoed through classrooms and children ran along the long corridors, was now a scorched and silent shell.

The fighter jet that fell from the sky, crashed into a class 3 classroom, just next to the staircase. Flames devoured everything -- walls, grills, furniture -- leaving behind twisted metal and blackened concrete.

Several rooms east of the point of impact on the ground floor were gutted, but the third graders' classroom in the middle of the building was reduced to a gaping hole.

Just outside, a few coconut trees that once adorned the entrance now stood slanted and singed. Nearby, a metal swing set, eerily untouched, swayed gently in the breeze as if mourning in silence.

Yellow caution tape was wrapped around trees and poles just outside the entrance, while volunteers, mostly students from the institution, were on guard, determined to prevent anyone from entering.

People came in waves -- parents, students, teachers, local residents and onlookers -- to see and mourn. Some wiped away tears, others remained silent, their faces etched with shock. Most of them struggled to come to terms with how so many young lives were lost in the blink of an eye as the death toll from the deadliest jet crash reached 31 yesterday.

"It's hard to believe children were playing here just the day before," said Nasima Akhter.

She arrived with her husband and daughter from Pallabi, drawn by the weight of the tragedy. "I couldn't stop myself from coming here after seeing the devastating scenes on television," she said, her voice trembling. "It's impossible to imagine what the parents of those children are going through."

"Schools are regarded as safe havens for children. Once parents drop their child at the school gate, they breathe a sigh of relief, trusting their child will spend quality time in a secure and playful environment. That sense of security was shattered," she added.

As the day wore on, the crowd of onlookers swelled. Some came to express their outrage over military aircraft conducting training exercises above such a densely populated area. Others wandered silently, capturing the devastation on their phones, snapping photos, recording videos, and even livestreaming the haunting image of the ill-fated building to their relatives.

From time to time, planes descended toward the nearby airport -- an ordinary sight on any other day. But yesterday, each engine rumble overhead jarred the visitors, drawing their eyes skyward in instinctive alarm.

But inside the building, silence reigned. Students' green desks and chairs lay warped and melted, their cheerful colours blackened by fire. Textbooks, backpacks, and shoes -- some singed -- lie eerily in place, as if time froze.

On one of the iron window bars on the ground floor, a partially burnt, soot-covered children's book for class 5 clung. Just beneath, several exercise books for English and mathematics, also partly burnt, lie scattered on the ground. The exercise books had "Asmaul Husna Zaira, class-3" written on them.

"Only the Almighty knows whether this little girl [Asmaul] is alive or not. Her books may be burnt, but I hope and pray she survived," said a middle-aged man, gently examining the charred exercise books. He is a resident of Uttara, drawn to school by the heartbreak.

Once a student hostel, the two-storey building named "Haider Ali Bhaban" had been repurposed into an academic block. The ground floor held a dozen rooms, mostly serving as classrooms for various sections of classes 3, 4, and 5. At one end was a toilet, with another tucked just beyond the staircase.

The ground floor also housed two separate rooms for coordinators and teachers and a meeting room for the principal. Above, the second floor mirrored the layout, with another 12 rooms dedicated to classes 6, 7, and 8.

Each floor had a long corridor lined with iron window bars, meant to protect. It was there that many students had gathered after the end of their school day -- some chatting, others waiting for their coaching classes to begin -- when the plane struck the building. Now, that same corridor lies covered in soot and debris.

"Doesn't it look like a cage? How did the children manage to come out of the flames?" a young woman in her mid-30s asked her companion, pointing at the iron window bars.

No one, however, could exactly say how many students were in the building at the time of the crash.

Yards away, Khorshed Alam, a father, was narrating how his fifth-grader son survived narrowly.

"My son's classroom was the second room from the east end. His classes ended at 1:00pm and he left with a few friends just minutes before the plane slammed into the building. The classmates who stayed behind were injured."

"I don't understand why a training aircraft had to be flown over such a densely populated area. The authorities must take responsibility," he said, his voice trembling with anger.

Amid the grief and shock, the Milestone School and College campus erupted in protest. Several hundred students gathered on the campus grounds from the morning.

"We need to know exactly how many of our brothers died in the crash," one student said. "The authorities must be transparent -- no more hiding, no more silence."

Students called off their demonstration in the evening.

And as the last of the students left the compound, the silence returned, heavy and unrelenting, echoing with the memory of lives lost forever.