THERE is a particular kind of silence that descends on a village when a child disappears underground. It is not the silence of calm or resignation but the stillness of collective breath, the moment when time stretches and every sound feels intrusive. In Tanore, Rajshahi, that silence held for more than 32 hours as villagers stood around a narrow hole dug years ago for a deep tube well that never found water but instead claimed the life of two-year-old Sajid.
For more than a day, rescuers did what they could with what they had. Fire service workers lay flat on the ground, lowering cameras, pipes, oxygen cylinders and hope into the earth. Policemen held back crowds. Mothers in the village clutched their own children more tightly. Fathers whispered prayers. And somewhere beneath 60 feet of soil, a small body was losing its battle with time, darkness and the consequences of an abandoned hole that no one thought to fill.
There is nothing poetic about how a child dies inside a forgotten pit. And yet this tragedy, like so many before it, forces us to confront the uncomfortable poetry of national neglect.
Years ago, the country watched another such ordeal unfold live on television. Jihad, a four-year-old boy in Dhaka’s Shajahanpur, slipped into a water well. Millions stayed glued to their screens as fire service units struggled for 23 hours, insisting they had searched 280 feet and found nothing. Officials speculated, cameras probed, and at one surreal point the boy’s father was arrested so the police could extract a confession about where he had ‘hidden’ his child. The state minister confidently declared that ‘no one’ was inside that well.
Then local youths, armed not with expensive machinery but with bamboo, rope and ingenuity, retrieved Jihad’s body within minutes.
A High Court order later held government negligence responsible, even awarding compensation. The state resisted. Years passed. Officials were charged and then acquitted. The hole remained filled, but the accountability remained hollow.
Philosophers have long argued that societies reveal their deepest values not in their ceremonial speeches but in their smallest safeties. Aristotle believed that the purpose of a polity was to cultivate virtue and ensure the flourishing of its people. Kant insisted that human beings must be treated as ends in themselves, never as collateral inconveniences of bureaucratic oversight. And yet here we are, in a country where a child can fall into an irrigation borehole simply because no one cared enough to ensure it was sealed.
Sajid died not just because he slipped from his mother’s arms but because years earlier someone dug a deep tube well, failed to find water, abandoned the site and walked away. Like thousands of such borewells, it stood unmarked, unprotected, unregulated. It existed in the blind spot of an administrative structure that has mastered the art of looking without seeing.
Historically, tragedy often forces nations into introspection. Japan reformed its disaster management system after the Kobe earthquake. France restructured fire and rescue services after catastrophic tunnel fires. Even the United States rewrote emergency protocols after Hurricane Katrina exposed institutional paralysis.
But Bangladesh, in its uniquely stubborn resilience, possesses an extraordinary ability to mourn without reform. We perfect grief, not governance.
Every few years, a similar narrative returns: an open pit, a flawed rescue, a dead child, a media frenzy, a brief public outcry, a High Court order that gathers dust, and silence until the earth opens again.
If this were a work of fiction, one might mistake it for magical realism, the genre where absurdity becomes routine. Except there is no magic here — only realism of the bleakest kind.
In Tanore, the fire service worked long hours. Many risked their lives entering unstable soil. They tried to supply oxygen, dropped cameras into the pit, and excavated gradually to avoid a collapse. Their equipment was outdated, the terrain unforgiving. Their dedication was sincere yet overshadowed by structural inadequacy. The institution expected to respond to disasters is rarely given the tools needed to prevent them.
As one firefighter said, the hole was so narrow that even a camera could barely navigate it. Another explained that the ground was collapsing. They dug sideways, then deeper, then diagonally. A rescue that should have required specialised machinery and trained units instead became a battle fought with improvisation.
The most haunting detail is that rescuers heard the child cry until late Wednesday afternoon. For hours afterwards, the pipe pumping air remained open. Villagers whispered that if they had more advanced gear, if they had thermal imaging, if the team had been better trained or better equipped, perhaps the child could have been rescued alive.
Hope always revisits the scene of suffering, even when reason hesitates.
Mother Runa Khatun’s account is tragically ordinary. A brief distraction. A misstep. A hole where a hole should never have been. Sajid’s death is an injustice layered with human error, institutional carelessness and the quiet arrogance of a system accustomed to deferring responsibility.
This hole was not dug by the state but by a private landowner attempting to draw groundwater for irrigation. When no water was found, the site was left as it was — no warning, no barricade, no follow-up inspection. And in a region notorious for drought, where groundwater lies more than a hundred feet beneath the surface, such pits are commonplace. Invisible hazards are woven into the landscape like seeds of future tragedies.
Landowners dig. The government issues bans. Enforcement evaporates. Life goes on. Until it doesn’t.
Even the way these stories are narrated reflects a cultural resignation. We describe them as ‘accidents,’ as if the earth developed a mind of its own and decided to swallow a child. In truth, these are not accidents but the logical consequences of unattended responsibilities.
Camus once wrote about ‘the benign indifference of the universe.’ But the universe is not digging these holes. We are. And then we pretend astonishment when they claim lives.
The irony is subtle but sharp. We pride ourselves on grand national progress, exporting digital ambitions and mega-structures, while failing to ensure that holes in the ground are properly closed. It is a kind of developmental schizophrenia: a country reaching for satellites but tripping over its own soil.
The fire service, despite its limitations, continues to respond to every crisis with a determination that borders on heroic. But heroism should not be the compensation for systemic insufficiency. The real mark of civilisation is not in how valiantly we respond to disasters but how consistently we prevent them.
And so the question hangs: would Sajid have survived if our fire service had been better equipped? The honest answer may be uncomfortable, but it cannot be ignored.
Ignoring holes does not make them disappear. Ignoring negligence does not erase its consequences. Ignoring preventable deaths ensures only that they will return.
As the villagers of Tanore carried the lifeless body of Sajid to his grieving family, one could almost hear the echo of Jihad’s tragedy a decade earlier. The soil changes, the names change, but the script remains eerily familiar.
To mourn is human. To reform is moral. To neglect is unforgivable.
A society that cannot protect its children from falling into its own mistakes is a society digging holes far deeper than it realises.
HM Nazmul Alam is an academic, journalist, and political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently he teaches at IUBAT.
