A mother's cry for son

“If he did anything wrong, punish him. But please bring him back,” said Momtaz Begum who has been desperately knocking on the doors of law enforcement agencies for nearly a month in search of her only son.

The 43-year-old furniture trader, Sohel Hossain Montu, and his friend Hanif Mridha were picked up from Narayanganj's Siddhirganj on February 27 when they were returning from a religious programme of Charmonai Pir in Barisal, according to their families.

Since then Momtaz ran to whoever she thought could help find her son Sohel. But her fear of something ominous hovering over her son turns into a panic as she got the news of Hanif's death in custody of the Rapid Action Battalion on March 17, neighbours said.

According to Rab, Hanif died after he complained of chest pain and that he was detained from near its Ashkona barrack last Friday for his suspicious movement hours after a suicide attacker blew himself up inside the barrack.

Now all Momtaz wants is to see her son Sohel again, alive at any cost.

Sohel has been the driving force of her life since her husband abandoned her with her one-year-old child. 

She begged on the streets, worked as a maid to feed and educate her son with the hope that her miseries would end one day.  

Her hard work didn't go wasted as Sohel reciprocated with similar struggle to get himself settled as a trader of old furniture in the capital's Gulshan.

Sohel studied only up to class 10. He worked as an auto-rickshaw driver first, and then went to Dubai. Coming back, he bought a motorbike on which he used to carry passengers in his village of Barguna. 

Three to four years back, he started the business of old furniture at Gulshan.

Sohel lived with his business partner in Badda until this January when he shifted his family to Dhaka thinking of better education of his four-year-old son.

When all seemed to be in place, the family saw it upended overnight.  

Talking to The Daily Star correspondents at home in Jatrabari yesterday, Momtaz called for the prime minister's intervention in the rescue of her son, the only breadwinner of the family.

“The prime minister has a son like I do. She has a daughter too, but I don't have any other child.” The PM will understand the pain of a mother whose son went missing, she said sobbing.