Early memories of injustice and confusion
I was in ninth grade when we moved into a newly renovated government quarter in Hathazari—a former seed storage facility turned into housing for public agricultural staff. My father, a development officer, was one of the first to be placed there. The house stood in an open field, with no boundary walls and no separation from the outside world. Just across the narrow path, people from the nearby area would come to urinate—right in front of my window.
At first, we asked gently. This was our home now. We were raising our voices not out of pride, but out of desperation. The stench would fill our rooms. The ground was soaked, the air heavy. My family tried to maintain dignity—we weren’t asking for a palace, just decency. But nothing changed.
One day, I had enough. I stepped out and confronted a young man as he was peeing. I wasn’t violent. I asked him to stop, with more firmness than before. I was a teenage boy asking to live in dignity. A few hours later, he came back—not alone, but with backup. They shouted outside our home, unprovoked, full of rage. I went out to speak, to explain—thinking words could make them understand our pain. But they beat me. No conversation. No justice. Just fists and fury. I was left with a bloodstained shirt and a lesson I couldn’t unlearn.
My father, shaken but proud, took my torn shirt to the local chairman’s office—seeking justice in the system he had served his whole life. There was no justice. They refused to apologize. There was no enforcement of fairness. There was no system that cared. We stopped complaining after that. The peeing continued. The smell returned. And eventually, we left. But something stayed with me.
This was not just a bad person doing a bad thing. This was a society with no rules for dignity. No structure for protection. No consequence for harm. No system to stand with the powerless.
And even as a boy—bleeding from injustice—I knew: This wasn’t just wrong. It was designed to be this way.