<i>No fault of fate</i>

L-R: Siam, less than three months old, is seen in his grandmother's lap. He cries almost all the time. Siam's mother Merina, inset, perished in the Tazreen Fashions disaster Saturday night in Ashulia. Shahnaz Begum jumped from the fourth floor of burning Tazreen Fashions factory in Ashulia Saturday night. The jump might have saved her life but she broke her spine and both legs. Photo: Anisur Rahman

At home waits two-month-old Siam to be fed when Ruhul Amin searches among the debris and in hospitals in Savar and Dhaka for the dead body of his wife and the mother.
Five days into the deadly fire at Tazreen Fashions Ltd in Ashulia, Ruhul knows his beloved Merina will never come back to the family alive. But at least he could have it in his fate to lay her to rest.
He asked the survivors about Merina, who was working on the second floor of the building when the fire broke out on Saturday night. But who would have remembered whom on that terrifying night when everyone was frantic in search of an escape route from that hell?
After the fire fighters had put out the blaze, he ran around the charred building, turning over all the corpses. But most of those were beyond recognition.
"So I have decided to take my son Siam to Dhaka Medical College Hospital for a DNA test," said a distressed Ruhul yesterday, after he had heard that the government sought DNA samples from the relatives of the missing workers.
A match with the DNA of the 58 bodies buried at a Jurain graveyard in the capital on Tuesday could at least tell the families where the graves of their dear ones are.
Talking to The Daily Star, Ruhul reminisced on how years of friendship and then romance between him and Merina finally led to wedlock five years ago. And then Siam came to the world, giving Ruhul and Merina, of Thakurgaon, all the happiness they did not have in their lives before.
Merina Begum, 22, worked with Tazreen since its beginning in 2010 as a sewing operator. She never got the facilities she was supposed to get as an employee.
On Saturday, she left Siam in the care of her mother-in-law Aleya Begum and went to the factory in the hope that she could draw salaries of the three months when she was on maternity leave.
The authorities of Tazreen Fashions did not pay her the arrears but asked her to join work, Ruhul said, standing in front of their rented house in Nishchintapur.
"If I don't work according to their will, they [the authorities] will not give me the money," he quoted Merina as saying.
Merina wanted to leave the workplace at 5:00pm on Saturday. She requested the floor-in-charge to let her go as it was time to feed her newborn baby.
But the supervisor snapped at her and told her to get back to work, Ruhul sighed, citing Merina's co-workers.
"For the last two days, my mother has been feeding him [Siam] Lactogen powder milk," said Ruhul, a quality controller working with another garment factory in Ashulia.
"I do not know how to raise him without his mother,"
In Bangla, Nischintapur, where Ruhul lives, means a village with no worries but it now seems to be a place of grief. Many tin-shed houses have sprouted in Nishchintapur, Narshinghapur and other adjacent villages in recent years to meet the demand of garment workers. The majority of these houses saw one or more persons lost in the blaze and are now struggling to come to terms with their irreparable losses.
One of Merina's neighbours, Shahnaz Begum, also a sewing operator, was working on the fourth floor of the factory during the fire incident. She managed to save her life by jumping off a broken window.
Lying down with injured ankles, limbs and knees, Shahnaz yesterday said she could see nothing in the black smoke. All she remembers is that she followed some fellow workers to that window and jumped.
"Later, I woke up to find myself at a clinic in Savar."
Shahnaz's husband Ukil Mandal, a plumber, borrowed Tk 35,000 to pay the clinic's bill. The doctor told her that she needed to stay in the hospital for 15 more days but she left as it would be a matter of huge expenses.
"We do not have a single penny. Only two kilograms of rice are left. In these circumstances, the doctor tells me to change the dressing every alternate day."
Shahnaz's one month's salary is pending and her husband could not work for the last three days.
Khayrul Hasan, a quality controller of Tazreen Fashions, said he had managed to flee the blaze by climbing down a bamboo pole.
He wonders what to mourn for -- the colleagues he has lost or the job which was his only means of livelihood. Like him, more than two thousand others are left with the challenge of feeding themselves and their family members.