I arrived at Rajuk Uttara Model College with long hair, a torn shirt, no belt, and sandals on my feet. It was the small portrayal of a self I had built over years of high school, proof that I could stand out from a crowd without anyone needing to tell me how.

The college had other plans for me.

During my first week there, a barber gave me what everyone in Uttara calls the Rajuk cut, the same haircut every boy in the building eventually wore, and for a while I assumed that was the whole story of what had happened to me, an institution erasing a teenager's individuality in one chair, with one pair of scissors.

I found my way back to something like myself by working around the uniform's edges rather than fighting it outright, inventing my own epaulette for the debate club, a small unauthorized badge worn on a shoulder that was not supposed to look identical to every other shoulder in the room. For that, for the trouble of engineering my own difference inside a system built to erase it, I earned a reputation.

I was, by the account of several teachers, a bad boy.

Growing into masculinity rarely happens as a smooth handover from father to son. It is closer to a negotiation, one that stretches out over years, and a boy has very few tools available to conduct it. Mostly he has his own body: his hair, his clothes, his posture, the small refusals he can manage before someone notices.

Becoming a bad boy, in this sense, is not a moral failing. It is a boy testing the edges of a self that adults drew for him long before he had any say in the matter, deciding for the first time what to keep of that drawing and what to discard. Long hair, an earring, an unbuttoned collar, a phone he begged for, a bike he saved up for, are not symptoms of a child going wrong.

They are the friction of a child going somewhere that belongs to him and him alone.

Ishayat Shahriar Oprotim never got the chance to find out what his own version of that friction would have looked like. He was thirteen, the only son of Nahida Begum, an associate professor in Comilla University's Bangla department, when he left home on a Friday afternoon with his mother's iPhone to take photos with friends. He never came home. His body was found the next day in a wooded area near the campus, with severe injuries to his head.

Within hours of the news breaking, before his family had even finished arranging his first janaza, the conversation online had shifted. It moved away from whoever had killed him and settled instead on him. Why did a thirteen-year-old have an iPhone.

Why was he out with friends taking pictures instead of at home. What kind of parents let their son wander around like that. He was gone one day, and by the next, he was standing trial for his own death.

There is an ordinary explanation for why a boy wants a phone, or long hair, or a bike, and it has little to do with being spoiled. The sociologist Charles Cooley described something he called the looking glass self, the observation that a child does not build an identity alone in a room.

He builds it by imagining how he appears to the people around him and folding their judgment back into his own sense of who he is. A boy rarely wants a phone out of simple greed. He wants it because his friends already have one, and in their eyes, holding one, he becomes someone rather than remaining no one in particular.

Wanting the object is only half the story, though. When a boy is denied the conventional routes to status, respect from his elders, praise at school, a report card his family can be proud of, and told in the same breath that he must not go chasing status through his hair or his clothes either, he is left with almost nowhere to go.

The criminologist Albert Cohen called this status frustration, and it explains something important about why boys who cannot win under the rules of the bhadro chele so often give up trying to win under those rules at all, building instead an entirely different currency for themselves, one in which visible difference, a little bit of trouble, becomes the point. Even then, once the phone is finally in his hand, the boy was probably never chasing the object itself.

The French theorist Jean Baudrillard argued that desire is never a desire for a specific thing. It is a desire for difference, for a foothold in the social meaning circulating around a person. Blame the iPhone for what happened to Oprotim, and the wrong noun has been blamed.

Oprotim was killed by another person, over a phone, in an act that deserves condemnation and grief. Something else unfolded alongside the police investigation, though, with no relationship to who actually held the weapon. Before officers had finished piecing together what happened, public commentary had drifted toward a different question, no longer who did this, but what kind of boy and family invites it.

That question never came from the killer. It came from timelines, comment sections, group chats, the chorus of people who consider themselves guardians of a certain approved version of boyhood. Howard Becker, the sociologist behind labeling theory, argued that deviance is not a quality embedded in an act itself.

It is a label, manufactured and applied by whoever happens to hold the power to apply it. That labeling machine did not wait for grief to finish its work before it began stamping Oprotim with a verdict he never lived long enough to contest.

This reflex already has a name circulating in Bangladesh, the Kishore Gang panic, and it is not invented out of thin air. There are documented cases of teenage gangs causing harm. Panic, though, tends to outgrow its evidence. A boy on a bike, a boy with a styled haircut, a boy out late with friends and a phone in his pocket, all of it now reads, to an anxious segment of the public, as the opening chapters of a story destined to end in a police report.

Oprotim was never in a gang. He was a boy who had borrowed his mother's phone to take some pictures. He died into a country already fluent in reading boys who look like him as warning signs before it reads them as children. That same fluency shows up, almost word for word, in a much older and uglier line of questioning, the one that asks what a woman was wearing, why she was out so late, why she did not stay home.

Underneath both questions sits the same suspicion, a search for evidence that the victim somehow deserved what happened to them, which conveniently spares the people asking from sitting with a harder truth. It is easier to comb through a dead child's phone than to reckon with the person who killed him.

There is a deeper machinery running beneath all of this, and the philosopher Michel Foucault spent much of his career describing its shape. Modern discipline, in his account, rarely works mainly through punishment handed down after the fact. It works through what he called a normalizing gaze, a form of surveillance so thoroughly absorbed into daily life that people learn to sort and classify one another automatically, deciding who counts as fit, safe, and unremarkable and who does not, often long before anyone involved has done anything wrong.

Oprotim did not need to commit a crime to end up filed under suspicion. He only needed a phone, a bike, and a group of friends, three unremarkable facts about being thirteen years old, for that gaze to sort him under potential threat rather than child. This sits alongside the state's failure to keep him safe as a second, quieter failure, a culture that has trained itself to look first at its own children as risks in need of management, and only second, if ever, as children.

I turned out fine, or fine enough. The suspicion never fully lifted, though. I did eventually become a prefect at Rajuk, though my form master refused to authorize the second star on my epaulette, let alone the third, the kind a more trusted, more obedient boy might have worn without anyone blinking.

One star was the ceiling my deviance had already priced in, and I have spent years since wondering how much of what quietly never came my way, without explanation, was still being charged against that same old suspicion, somewhere, in a ledger nobody ever showed me. I lived long enough to wonder about it. Oprotim did not.

That is the stake in all of this, and it was never only about one dead boy. It is about every living one still being watched through the same lens. The policing of boys by their murubbis, over hair, over phones, over bikes, over an earring, is not some quaint cultural habit worth a shrug. It is a live system of judgment that follows a boy from the barber's chair to the school gate and, in Oprotim's case, all the way into the corner of the internet where people found the time to try him for his own murder.

What needs to die here was never the child. It is the hegemony of the murubbis, their reflexive claim to sit in judgment over a boyhood they no longer remember living, and their quiet, ongoing refusal to let a boy simply be thirteen.

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Anupam Debashis Roy is the editor-in-chief of Muktipotro. He can be reached at writeranupam1101@gmail.com