Drone Buddies of Barishal -Jarif Hasin

The night the cyclone tore through Barisal, the sky sounded like it was cracking open.

Fourteen-year-old Rafi stood barefoot on the verandah, holding the railing as wind howled past him like a living thing. Palm trees bent until their crowns scraped the earth. Tin roofs flew like paper boats. Somewhere in the darkness, the river groaned, swollen and angry.

By morning, the storm was gone but Barisal was changed.

Houses leaned at strange angles. Fishing boats lay tangled in paddy fields. Mobile networks were dead. Electricity lines drooped like broken spider webs. And worse than the destruction was the silence. The kind that felt heavy, like something bad was waiting to happen.

Rafi knew that silence.

By the second night after the cyclone, the smugglers came.

They arrived quietly, their engines muted, gliding through the flooded canals that cut through the outskirts of the city. With the coast guard busy and police stations half-drowned, the river routes were suddenly wide open. Boxes moved in the dark—medicine stolen from relief trucks, fuel, illegal electronics, even weapons.

Rafi watched them from the roof of his uncle’s half-broken house, anger boiling in his chest. People were sleeping hungry under torn tarpaulins, and these men were stealing help meant for them.

“This can’t go on,” he muttered.

Behind him, Maya adjusted her glasses and said softly, “Then we don’t let it.”

Rafi turned. Maya was fifteen, the smartest person he knew, with a brain that worked like a calculator and a heart that never accepted injustice. Beside her stood Tanim, thin, quiet, always carrying a screwdriver in his pocket. And at the edge of the roof, chewing nervously on a piece of dried coconut, was Jamil, the fastest runner in their neighborhood and the bravest liar when needed.

Together, they were just four teenagers from Barisal.

But they had something no one else did.

Drones.

The drones weren’t fancy. No military tech. No shiny imports.

They were made from broken toys, discarded phone cameras, plastic frames printed at a local workshop, and motors salvaged from old fans. Rafi had started building them months ago, inspired by science videos and his late father, who used to say, “If you understand how something flies, you understand freedom.”

The cyclone had knocked out GPS signals, but Maya had rewritten the code to use visual mapping instead. Tanim had waterproofed the circuits with candle wax and plastic wrap. Jamil had named each drone like they were pets.

That night, they launched Pakhi-One into the sky.

The drone rose silently, its tiny camera feeding shaky images to Maya’s tablet. From above, Barisal looked wounded—dark patches of floodwater, broken roads, blinking lanterns like lonely stars.

Then they saw them.

Three boats. No lights. Moving against the current.

“Smugglers,” Jamil whispered.

Rafi’s fingers tightened on the controller. “Let’s follow.”

For three nights, the Drone Kids watched.

They tracked routes, recorded unloading points, marked times. The smugglers were organized, using abandoned warehouses, bribing desperate men, threatening others into silence. One boat carried stolen relief medicine. Another carried something worse: sealed metal cases, heavy and guarded.

On the fourth night, Pakhi-One didn’t come back.

The screen went black mid-flight.

“No… no, no,” Maya said, frantically typing commands.

A second later, a message appeared on the tablet—typed, not automated.

STOP FLYING OR THE NEXT ONE FALLS WITH YOU.

Jamil’s face drained of color. “They know.”

Tanim swallowed. “We should stop.”

Rafi stared at the dark sky. Fear pressed against his chest, but beneath it burned something stronger.

“If we stop,” he said slowly, “they win.”

Silence hung between them.

Then Maya closed the tablet.

“Then we don’t stop,” she said. “We evolve.”

They built Pakhi-Two in one day.

Smaller. Faster. No camera light. Signal hopping every three seconds. Maya added an audio sensor. Tanim rigged a release mechanism from a pen spring.

“What does it release?” Jamil asked.

Rafi smiled grimly. “Noise.”

That night, Pakhi-Two flew low over the river. When it hovered above the smugglers’ main boat, Rafi pressed the button.

The drone screamed.

A piercing alarm echoed across the water—loud, sharp, impossible to ignore. At the same time, Maya sent the recorded coordinates and video clips through a weak but working emergency network that was straight to journalists, NGOs, and the coast guard command in Dhaka.

Chaos erupted.

Men shouted. Engines revved. One boat slammed into another. Pakhi-Two vanished into the darkness, but its job was done.

By dawn, coast guard vessels arrived.

The smugglers scattered—but not all escaped.

They thought it was over.

They were wrong.

Two days later, Jamil didn’t come to their meeting.

Rafi found him near the old ferry terminal, sitting on the steps, a bruise darkening his cheek.
“They warned me,” Jamil said quietly. “Said next time, they won’t talk.”

Fear crept into Maya’s eyes. “We should hand everything over and step back.”

Rafi looked at the river. Calm now. Almost innocent.

“No,” he said. “We finish this.”

That night, they launched Pakhi-Three.

It didn’t spy.

It guided.

Using LED flashes and coded sounds, the drone led coast guard boats through narrow canals smugglers thought were secret. It hovered above hidden warehouses. It circled boats pretending to be fishing vessels.

By sunrise, arrests were happening across Barisal.

The metal cases were seized.

Inside them were guns.

Weeks later, electricity returned. Schools reopened. Relief trucks moved freely again.

No one knew who had helped stop the smugglers.

Newspapers spoke of “anonymous local intelligence.” Officials praised “community cooperation.” The Drone Kids watched from a tea stall, pretending not to listen.

On the riverbank that evening, Rafi packed away the controller.

“Do you think we’ll ever fly again?” Tanim asked.

Rafi looked at the sky, glowing orange over the water.

“Maybe,” he said. “But not to fight.”

Maya smiled. “Maybe to rebuild.”

Jamil grinned. “Or race.”

They laughed, the sound light and free.

Above them, unseen, Pakhi-Three rested in its box that was silent, waiting.

Because in Barisal, after the storm, a new kind of watchful hope had learned to fly.