<i>An agonising visit to airport </i>

It was the first time in her life that she saw Shahjalal International Airport. She had always wanted to see it with her own eyes--the planes, the runways, the big intimidating building. She had hoped to come here one day to receive her husband as he would home from his trip.
But she never knew that when the day finally came, it would be only to collect the charred body of her dead husband.
Farida Khatun had spoken to her husband, Jaru Miya, only half an hour before the disastrous fire that killed him, along with 12 other Bangladeshis, in Bahrain on January 11.
As she waited for his body to arrive in the airport yesterday, she kept replaying the last conversation she had with her husband.
“I spoke to him only for a few minutes, to tell him that I was sick, that he needed to send me money,” said a grieving Farida, with tears in her eyes. “Now he is gone, and I am left with four children, and no one to support us anymore.”
Next to her, Shahadat and Teetu's father, Shah Alam, stared blankly at the passport size photos of his two sons. It took each of them Tk 3.5 lakh to migrate to Bahrain, and they still had not sent back much money home.
“Now I have lost both of them, and all hope of repaying the loans we owe to people,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion.
Halima Akhtar Tonni, a young bride, held her 10-year-old son, Shaon, tightly in her arms, still in shock about her husband's death, unable to process the clamour of journalists and cameramen crowding around her.
“He had only moved to a new apartment six days ago...” she muttered meekly. Now her son would grow up without even a single memory of his father, who left the country two months after his birth.
Sumon Islam, elder brother of Sapan and Sayful Islam, said his mother was inconsolable, unable to bear the news of the death of both her sons. “She has become physically weak, and I don't know how she will be able to react at the sight of their corpses,” he said, as he placed their coffins in the ambulance.