My eyes snapped open at 4:30 pm on Friday, April 30, 2010. Everything looked the same, but nothing felt right. I checked the time on my cell phone. 4:30 pm? It was unusual, if not downright unlikely, that my parents hadn’t woken me up for lunch…that too on a weekend. Since I’ve been back from Bonn, my routine had been to sleep all morning and to wake up for lunch grudgingly because my parents insist that I eat in order to not die of ulcer. Therefore, I found it odd that no one had called me for lunch.
I got up to go look for my parents. I went to my parents’ room where I found my mother sleeping. I shook her, but she did not stir. This scared me because my mother is a really light sleeper. She wakes up in the middle of the night if I flick on a light switch in another room. I shook her vehemently another four or five times until she groggily opened her eyes. I kept asking her, “What’s wrong?” and more forcefully each time. When she eventually opened her eyes, and said, “What?” I realized that she had been drugged. She kept saying, “What?”, “What?”, “What?” and it was clear that she was incoherent and disoriented. She had no idea what she was saying. I knew immediately that something was very, very wrong. I had a sneaking suspicion that somehow the new maid we had hired two days ago was involved, but I had to find my dad first.
I ran downstairs, wondering if he was even home. I checked his study, and he wasn’t there. I noticed that the living room door was open (which usually isn’t), and I went to check there. There, I found my dad, crumpled on the floor. I turned him over, and I saw that he was bleeding from the head. He was breathing, but unconscious. I had no idea how long he had been lying there. My first instinct was to assume that this maid (and whoever had been involved with her) had hit my dad on the head when perhaps he had tried to dissuade them from whatever ill-intentions they had had. For a second, I wondered if they were still in the house, since I had no idea how long ago all this had taken place. I ran back upstairs to call for help. I called my cousin Mowlee apu because a) hers is the only landline number I know by heart, b) she, my other cousin Neetun apu and my aunt live very close to where we live, and c) both she and my aunt are doctors. Luckily, my cousin was home and in a hysterical frenzy, I tried to explain that my dad had head injuries and we needed to get both my parents to the hospital. I’m certain I wasn’t being very coherent myself, but my cousin understood the urgency immediately. She called my Aunt and my other cousin who had been out at the time, and eventually my other Aunt and Uncle (both doctors as well) were informed and within 10-15 minutes, they all arrived at our place.
While I was making the frantic phone call, my mother staggered up from where she had been lying on the bed, practically stumbling over her feet in her drug-induced semi-consciousness and kept asking what had happened. To avoid having her trip over her own feet and hurting herself more, I walked her downstairs where my dad was lying. She sat next to him, but she couldn’t comprehend that he had been hurt. She kept talking gibberish. By this time, my dad had blinked his eyes open and was staring up at us vacantly. I had never felt so helpless in my life, not being able to tell how serious his injuries were, and unsure as to what I could do to help without making it worse.
Soon enough, my aunt, uncle and cousin arrived. My uncle immediately said that the head injuries were not serious. It appeared that my dad had stumbled into the living room and had collapsed there, hitting his head on the glass-topped coffee table on his way down. In another 5-7 minutes, my cousin Mowlee apu, who I had called first, arrived on scene. It was decided that both my parents would be taken to Dhaka Medical College Hospital where both she and my Aunt work. No one thought it was safe for me to stay back, not knowing if whoever was involved was going to come back. I was told to stay put at my cousin’s place while the others took my parents to the hospital. By the time my parents had made it to the hospital, it was almost 6pm. Despite being groggy and semi-conscious, my mother managed to tell us that she had eaten breakfast that morning, had felt faint and unwell immediately afterwards, and the maid had helped her upto her bedroom and had lain her down on the bed. She does not remember anything after this point. It was obvious that if this had happened right after breakfast, my parents had been knocked unconscious for a good 8 to 9 hours.
Strangely enough, the last thing I remember from that morning was the new maid knocking on my door, asking to be let in so she could clean my room. I had opened my door, had fallen back in bed, and the next thing I know, it was 4:30 pm. Even though I’m in the habit of sleeping all morning, the slumber is usually fitful and I wake up every half an hour or hour. There’s a lot of noise around during the day, and my room gets really hot when the sun is up. I stay in bed out of sheer laziness, not because the sleep is so deeply satisfying. However, on that particular morning, I don’t remember anything after letting the maid into the room. I don’t recall her being inside my room at all, and it is nearly impossible that I had simply been sleeping for a good 9 hours without waking up even once. This leads me to believe that I had been knocked out too in some way.
I had made a quick check of the apartment before we all headed out to make sure everything was locked and that nobody was hiding inside. I stayed put while my relatives got my parents settled into the hospital. Since it had been so long since the ingestion of the drugs, a stomach-wash would prove futile. Since my dad is 66 years old, we were afraid what effects the drug would have on his major organs. Coupled with the head injury, I was ready to fear the worst. I made it to the hospital by 9 pm to see them both. My mother kept floating in and out of consciousness, speaking about that morning, but not entirely lucidly. She slept a lot, but my dad couldn’t, and wouldn’t sleep. He was restless, couldn’t speak at all and would occasionally mumble a word or two. Things didn’t look well for him, and it didn’t appear that he was recovering at the same speed my mother was. By early hours of Saturday morning, he started to talk, but was not making much sense. He could tell he was in a hospital, and that he had been hurt, but he kept thinking that he had been in a car accident. I hadn’t spent the first night in the hospital. Mowlee apu was with him that night, and he kept asking about me and my mother and where we were. He kept asking about our chauffeur and asking if he was alive. My dad had gone to Bogura on Tuesday and had returned on Wednesday night. His memory for the next 36 hours seemed to stall there. He couldn’t remember anything after Wednesday night, believing that he had been in a car accident on his way back from Bogura that night. He had no memory of Thursday or Friday. All of Friday evening and all of Saturday, he was alert, but not at all lucid. We’d tell him what happened, and he’d forget within 10 minutes, and ask again what had happened. I was terrified because it appeared that my dad was still disoriented and could not retain any short-term memory. He could recognize everyone, ask questions, make conversation, but he couldn’t remember anything that was said to him in the previous 10-15 minutes. I worried that his head injury might’ve caused this, even though I had been assured that the injury was minor. The ECG results of his heart, X-rays and CT scan of his head all came back clean. He was stable in most obvious ways possible, but something appeared amiss. My mother was recovering nicely on the other hand. She was absolutely lucid (even though we eventually found out on Sunday evening that she couldn’t remember what she had done or said to us the previous day). The drugs that they were pumped with were so strong that both my parents seem to have no recollection even now of anything from Friday, Saturday or even Sunday morning. By midday Sunday, dad was doing better visibly and was finally able to understand what had happened. His head had cleared up and he was no longer having the retention problem that he was having on Friday and Saturday. Luckily, the head injury had not been serious, and both my parents are on their way to recovering.
Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, what we can guess had happened (since neither parent remembers anything from Friday) is that this new maid, who had also been responsible for making breakfast, had put something in the food to knock my parents out. Since I don’t eat breakfast, I had not ingested this toxic breakfast, but was still knocked out for the next 8/9 hours. It seemed that the plan was to knock my parents unconscious, go out and presumably bring back more people to rob the house. Nothing of significance appeared to be missing at first glance. When my relatives arrived on scene on Friday, they had found a key stuffed into the keyhole from the outside. It was the wrong key that had presumably been stolen, and whoever was involved had clearly intended to break in using that key. Since it couldn’t open the door, and perhaps they heard footsteps in the hallway, the key had been left dangling from the keyhole and they had made their escape.
We live in a relatively secure apartment complex, so for this to happen in our own home is shocking. We still don’t know clearly what had happened. What we can surmise is that the drugs took awhile to kick into action for my dad. My mother had fallen unconscious first. The maid then stole two sets of keys (one of them is a set of keys for all the bedrooms, and the other being a key that only opens a door that leads to my bedroom, which she had mistaken for being the key to the main door…this is also the key that was found in the keyhole outside), cash from my dad’s wallet, more cash from some drawers and had presumably left to go get more people. Strangely, she had not been able to find any of my mom’s gold jewelry. She had tried to break open my mom’s closet, where most of her gold jewelry was anyway, but had been unable to. She clearly left in a hurry to come back later. I can only assume that my dad got wind of this, or saw the maid walk out the door, and in his drug-induced state of consciousness thought that she was done with her work and leaving. What is shocking is that even in that state, my dad managed to lock the main door from the inside, and eventually collapsed 4 feet away inside the living room.
Later, I found all our kitchen knives, boti, etc. hidden in my parents’ bathroom. Whether she had stashed them there to perhaps hurt us later, or to keep them out of our way in case we tried to defend ourselves (unlikely, given how strong the poison was), I cannot say. But seeing them hidden out of sight like that, and that too in my parents’ bathroom, sent a chill down my spine. What if they intended to finish us off after the deed was done?
We have a lot of things to be thankful for. We’re thankful that my dad had the sense to lock the door after her. It appeared that he even tried to lock the door close with his key from the inside too. This is really unusual because we almost never do that. I can only imagine that he’d realized something odd going on, and decided to be careful. We’re thankful that he was in such good health. He could’ve been in far worse shape after the ordeal. We’re also thankful that the intoxication had not been to the level that it had turned lethal and killed both my parents.
I only wonder what might’ve happened, had I not been in Dhaka at the time? How long could it have taken for anyone to discover my parents? Could it have been too late by then? If this woman had not carried out her devious plan on her second day, and had decided to do it after a few weeks, she would’ve realized eventually that I would leave Dhaka soon enough, and perhaps would’ve struck at a time when I wasn’t around. What if my dad hadn’t locked the door after her? Would these people have ransacked the house and then hurt us more? What if I had eaten breakfast that morning? How long could the three of us stayed unconscious, or worse, deteriorated to the point of no return, had I also been induced with the same drug?
There’s nothing any of us can do at this point except be thankful that it could’ve been so much worse. I’m just so grateful to have my family by my side at a time like this…and more so, grateful to have so many doctors in my family. I could not have survived this ordeal without them. I’m thankful for all the concerns and prayers I’ve received from my friends from both home and afar. It has kept me on the verge of sanity for the past few days.
My parents are recovering well, but the shock of what has happened, and what could’ve happened, has finally started to settle in. They are visibly shaken and are having a hard time coming to terms with how unsafe one can potentially be in one’s own home. Moving back to Germany at this point seems crazy, because I’ll be wondering every moment of everyday whether my parents are safe or not. I have to come to terms with a few things myself too. I am outraged and mortified. You read about things like this in the newspaper and assume that it can never happen to you. When it does, it’s hard to decide whether to be afraid or livid.
Thank you for keeping my family in your thoughts and prayers. It has meant the world to me to know I had my friends and family by my side throughout this ordeal.
I got up to go look for my parents. I went to my parents’ room where I found my mother sleeping. I shook her, but she did not stir. This scared me because my mother is a really light sleeper. She wakes up in the middle of the night if I flick on a light switch in another room. I shook her vehemently another four or five times until she groggily opened her eyes. I kept asking her, “What’s wrong?” and more forcefully each time. When she eventually opened her eyes, and said, “What?” I realized that she had been drugged. She kept saying, “What?”, “What?”, “What?” and it was clear that she was incoherent and disoriented. She had no idea what she was saying. I knew immediately that something was very, very wrong. I had a sneaking suspicion that somehow the new maid we had hired two days ago was involved, but I had to find my dad first.
I ran downstairs, wondering if he was even home. I checked his study, and he wasn’t there. I noticed that the living room door was open (which usually isn’t), and I went to check there. There, I found my dad, crumpled on the floor. I turned him over, and I saw that he was bleeding from the head. He was breathing, but unconscious. I had no idea how long he had been lying there. My first instinct was to assume that this maid (and whoever had been involved with her) had hit my dad on the head when perhaps he had tried to dissuade them from whatever ill-intentions they had had. For a second, I wondered if they were still in the house, since I had no idea how long ago all this had taken place. I ran back upstairs to call for help. I called my cousin Mowlee apu because a) hers is the only landline number I know by heart, b) she, my other cousin Neetun apu and my aunt live very close to where we live, and c) both she and my aunt are doctors. Luckily, my cousin was home and in a hysterical frenzy, I tried to explain that my dad had head injuries and we needed to get both my parents to the hospital. I’m certain I wasn’t being very coherent myself, but my cousin understood the urgency immediately. She called my Aunt and my other cousin who had been out at the time, and eventually my other Aunt and Uncle (both doctors as well) were informed and within 10-15 minutes, they all arrived at our place.
While I was making the frantic phone call, my mother staggered up from where she had been lying on the bed, practically stumbling over her feet in her drug-induced semi-consciousness and kept asking what had happened. To avoid having her trip over her own feet and hurting herself more, I walked her downstairs where my dad was lying. She sat next to him, but she couldn’t comprehend that he had been hurt. She kept talking gibberish. By this time, my dad had blinked his eyes open and was staring up at us vacantly. I had never felt so helpless in my life, not being able to tell how serious his injuries were, and unsure as to what I could do to help without making it worse.
Soon enough, my aunt, uncle and cousin arrived. My uncle immediately said that the head injuries were not serious. It appeared that my dad had stumbled into the living room and had collapsed there, hitting his head on the glass-topped coffee table on his way down. In another 5-7 minutes, my cousin Mowlee apu, who I had called first, arrived on scene. It was decided that both my parents would be taken to Dhaka Medical College Hospital where both she and my Aunt work. No one thought it was safe for me to stay back, not knowing if whoever was involved was going to come back. I was told to stay put at my cousin’s place while the others took my parents to the hospital. By the time my parents had made it to the hospital, it was almost 6pm. Despite being groggy and semi-conscious, my mother managed to tell us that she had eaten breakfast that morning, had felt faint and unwell immediately afterwards, and the maid had helped her upto her bedroom and had lain her down on the bed. She does not remember anything after this point. It was obvious that if this had happened right after breakfast, my parents had been knocked unconscious for a good 8 to 9 hours.
Strangely enough, the last thing I remember from that morning was the new maid knocking on my door, asking to be let in so she could clean my room. I had opened my door, had fallen back in bed, and the next thing I know, it was 4:30 pm. Even though I’m in the habit of sleeping all morning, the slumber is usually fitful and I wake up every half an hour or hour. There’s a lot of noise around during the day, and my room gets really hot when the sun is up. I stay in bed out of sheer laziness, not because the sleep is so deeply satisfying. However, on that particular morning, I don’t remember anything after letting the maid into the room. I don’t recall her being inside my room at all, and it is nearly impossible that I had simply been sleeping for a good 9 hours without waking up even once. This leads me to believe that I had been knocked out too in some way.
I had made a quick check of the apartment before we all headed out to make sure everything was locked and that nobody was hiding inside. I stayed put while my relatives got my parents settled into the hospital. Since it had been so long since the ingestion of the drugs, a stomach-wash would prove futile. Since my dad is 66 years old, we were afraid what effects the drug would have on his major organs. Coupled with the head injury, I was ready to fear the worst. I made it to the hospital by 9 pm to see them both. My mother kept floating in and out of consciousness, speaking about that morning, but not entirely lucidly. She slept a lot, but my dad couldn’t, and wouldn’t sleep. He was restless, couldn’t speak at all and would occasionally mumble a word or two. Things didn’t look well for him, and it didn’t appear that he was recovering at the same speed my mother was. By early hours of Saturday morning, he started to talk, but was not making much sense. He could tell he was in a hospital, and that he had been hurt, but he kept thinking that he had been in a car accident. I hadn’t spent the first night in the hospital. Mowlee apu was with him that night, and he kept asking about me and my mother and where we were. He kept asking about our chauffeur and asking if he was alive. My dad had gone to Bogura on Tuesday and had returned on Wednesday night. His memory for the next 36 hours seemed to stall there. He couldn’t remember anything after Wednesday night, believing that he had been in a car accident on his way back from Bogura that night. He had no memory of Thursday or Friday. All of Friday evening and all of Saturday, he was alert, but not at all lucid. We’d tell him what happened, and he’d forget within 10 minutes, and ask again what had happened. I was terrified because it appeared that my dad was still disoriented and could not retain any short-term memory. He could recognize everyone, ask questions, make conversation, but he couldn’t remember anything that was said to him in the previous 10-15 minutes. I worried that his head injury might’ve caused this, even though I had been assured that the injury was minor. The ECG results of his heart, X-rays and CT scan of his head all came back clean. He was stable in most obvious ways possible, but something appeared amiss. My mother was recovering nicely on the other hand. She was absolutely lucid (even though we eventually found out on Sunday evening that she couldn’t remember what she had done or said to us the previous day). The drugs that they were pumped with were so strong that both my parents seem to have no recollection even now of anything from Friday, Saturday or even Sunday morning. By midday Sunday, dad was doing better visibly and was finally able to understand what had happened. His head had cleared up and he was no longer having the retention problem that he was having on Friday and Saturday. Luckily, the head injury had not been serious, and both my parents are on their way to recovering.
Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, what we can guess had happened (since neither parent remembers anything from Friday) is that this new maid, who had also been responsible for making breakfast, had put something in the food to knock my parents out. Since I don’t eat breakfast, I had not ingested this toxic breakfast, but was still knocked out for the next 8/9 hours. It seemed that the plan was to knock my parents unconscious, go out and presumably bring back more people to rob the house. Nothing of significance appeared to be missing at first glance. When my relatives arrived on scene on Friday, they had found a key stuffed into the keyhole from the outside. It was the wrong key that had presumably been stolen, and whoever was involved had clearly intended to break in using that key. Since it couldn’t open the door, and perhaps they heard footsteps in the hallway, the key had been left dangling from the keyhole and they had made their escape.
We live in a relatively secure apartment complex, so for this to happen in our own home is shocking. We still don’t know clearly what had happened. What we can surmise is that the drugs took awhile to kick into action for my dad. My mother had fallen unconscious first. The maid then stole two sets of keys (one of them is a set of keys for all the bedrooms, and the other being a key that only opens a door that leads to my bedroom, which she had mistaken for being the key to the main door…this is also the key that was found in the keyhole outside), cash from my dad’s wallet, more cash from some drawers and had presumably left to go get more people. Strangely, she had not been able to find any of my mom’s gold jewelry. She had tried to break open my mom’s closet, where most of her gold jewelry was anyway, but had been unable to. She clearly left in a hurry to come back later. I can only assume that my dad got wind of this, or saw the maid walk out the door, and in his drug-induced state of consciousness thought that she was done with her work and leaving. What is shocking is that even in that state, my dad managed to lock the main door from the inside, and eventually collapsed 4 feet away inside the living room.
Later, I found all our kitchen knives, boti, etc. hidden in my parents’ bathroom. Whether she had stashed them there to perhaps hurt us later, or to keep them out of our way in case we tried to defend ourselves (unlikely, given how strong the poison was), I cannot say. But seeing them hidden out of sight like that, and that too in my parents’ bathroom, sent a chill down my spine. What if they intended to finish us off after the deed was done?
We have a lot of things to be thankful for. We’re thankful that my dad had the sense to lock the door after her. It appeared that he even tried to lock the door close with his key from the inside too. This is really unusual because we almost never do that. I can only imagine that he’d realized something odd going on, and decided to be careful. We’re thankful that he was in such good health. He could’ve been in far worse shape after the ordeal. We’re also thankful that the intoxication had not been to the level that it had turned lethal and killed both my parents.
I only wonder what might’ve happened, had I not been in Dhaka at the time? How long could it have taken for anyone to discover my parents? Could it have been too late by then? If this woman had not carried out her devious plan on her second day, and had decided to do it after a few weeks, she would’ve realized eventually that I would leave Dhaka soon enough, and perhaps would’ve struck at a time when I wasn’t around. What if my dad hadn’t locked the door after her? Would these people have ransacked the house and then hurt us more? What if I had eaten breakfast that morning? How long could the three of us stayed unconscious, or worse, deteriorated to the point of no return, had I also been induced with the same drug?
There’s nothing any of us can do at this point except be thankful that it could’ve been so much worse. I’m just so grateful to have my family by my side at a time like this…and more so, grateful to have so many doctors in my family. I could not have survived this ordeal without them. I’m thankful for all the concerns and prayers I’ve received from my friends from both home and afar. It has kept me on the verge of sanity for the past few days.
My parents are recovering well, but the shock of what has happened, and what could’ve happened, has finally started to settle in. They are visibly shaken and are having a hard time coming to terms with how unsafe one can potentially be in one’s own home. Moving back to Germany at this point seems crazy, because I’ll be wondering every moment of everyday whether my parents are safe or not. I have to come to terms with a few things myself too. I am outraged and mortified. You read about things like this in the newspaper and assume that it can never happen to you. When it does, it’s hard to decide whether to be afraid or livid.
Thank you for keeping my family in your thoughts and prayers. It has meant the world to me to know I had my friends and family by my side throughout this ordeal.
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