The car driving bride Rahima and bridegroom Mohammed Iqbal to Anwara upazila returned to her father's Dhanialapara residence, halfway from Charpatharghata where one of their two bridal party buses with around 80 wedding guests on board slammed into a speeding truck. The terrible incident left at least 26 dead and around 55 others wounded, 20 of them critically, early yesterday.

Rahima, the only child of rickshaw-garage mechanic Tazir Ahmed and housewife Sufia Khatun, got married to Iqbal on July 18, 2003 and was on the way to her father-in-law's house. Two other buses carrying some 160 guests and relatives who accompanied the bridegroom to the wedding party were ahead of the private car.

Both buses started off at around 12:00 midnight from the bride's residence and the first bus reached Anwara unscathed. But the other one collided head-on with a log-laden truck on Chittagong-Cox's Bazar road at Moizzyertek of Charpatharghata on the bank of the river Karnaphuli.

"You can't imagine what sort of pain we are going through now," said Sufia, Rahima's mother. "Financial hardship compelled us to arrange the function fourteen months after the formal marriage," she added.

Rahima, a class X dropout of Postarpar High School, was barely in the talking mood. "All my dreams are shattered following the accident," was all she could say.