"Jannatunessa, Sir, a second year student. She was a very good girl."

Then I remember that in the morning my wife called me from Chittagong and told me that there had been heavy water-logging in the basement garage of our apartment complex and the security wanted the car key to take our car to the first floor parking lot. Then I also recall the few other calls I had had from Chittagong since the morning from friends and colleagues complaining of never- seen-before rainfall in the city. One colleague actually prayed for God's immediate intervention as she thought never ever before had the rain caused the water to rise up to their ground floor level, and this time there was more than a foot high flood inside their house. She thought the whole of Chittagong must have sunken.

But I am too busy with my own concerns in having to start living in the capital city, and have remained sort of indifferent to the Chittagong plight. But Jannat's being buried alive under a loosened mass of earth from the hilltop lands me suddenly on ground zero reality.

What's happening in the country! Why should people live so precariously by a sliced off hillside? Poverty! The number one reason. People who cut up the hills for sand trading and grabbing lands are the money-makers. They don't end up only spoiling the pristine hills, they build brick structures and tin shacks to lure poor and lower-income group people to rent them.

Poor people live without a choice. In a single day landslide caused by heavy rain put the end to the lives of 122 people. Chittagong landscape is beautiful, medium-height hills sprout all over the city, but land robbers have de-shaped them by cutting and slicing, and shanties, where very poor people live and breed, clinging to the cliffs have decorated the hill walls.

The same situation prevails at CU, and Saidur, the CU employee of the press, who started his career in 1976, and his wife and their five children had rented this house at the Shahid Minar site where the highest peak of the campus looms ominously over the shanty houses that have mushroomed at several cut-out tiers of the hill.

The Prothom Alo of 12 June reports the mother of the house had just prepared the breakfast on the fateful morning of June 11, and Nazmumnessa was reading a book in her bed. Saidur was watching TV along with his younger brother in the living room, while the young boys clustered around their mother over the breakfast. Saidur first heard the noise or saw the avalanche, but, oh, rue to his fate, before he could so much as utter a warning, a big soggy chunk of brown earth from a height of twenty metres or so bore down on the house, taking out the life of Jannat in a moment. Oh!

I try to remember her face, but I can't place it, though I dimly remember her name. Or maybe because her name is very common that I think I know her by name.

Her tragic death, I find it very difficult to digest. I am not ready to ascribe it to a pure and simple case of accident. Some unanswered or unanswerable socio-economic circumstances have contributed to her death.

Poverty I have already mentioned. In our society poverty forces people to abandon their high hopes and compromise with the basest form of living. Living dangerously by a hillside is such base living. Saidur, or many like him, has gambled with life. Live cheaply, somehow, he told himself, or his family. Accidents won't happen. Yes, during the high monsoon, in incessant rain, the occurrence of a landslide is as common as it has been on CU campus since long (in 1992 there were seven people killed in a similar incident), but Saidur thought, or people like him think, death will brush him aside. It did him personally, though, but not his children and wife. They were finished!

Saidur thought when his children will grow big and qualify in life their days of desperation will be over, and they will have nice regular houses to live in. Everything is just put to naught now.