Ma

In our Rajshahi house, there was a very small pot. We used to brew tea in that pot, but always complained it was too small for even that. We would ask, “From where has this pot come? What was it for?” My mom said, “Actually, when I was a house tutor in the Mannujan hall (a women’s residential hostel), I used to cook rice in it. But there used to be extra every day.”

This was just after the time when they killed my dad for the Bangladesh Liberation War. I was four and a half and my little sister was one and a half years old. Ma did not want to be dependent on anybody – not her father, not her brothers, not on some other person. So, she joined Rajshahi University as a teacher just two months after my dad’s murder.

I could never comprehend how a woman feels when she becomes a widow at the age of twenty-seven. Because, I have never seen a drop of tear in my mom’s eyes.

When I became a teenager, I thought about that small tea pot where Ma used to make her rice. Thinking about the story of that extra rice, I tried to understand how Ma had to live. I couldn’t breathe.

Ma and my little sister Shyama. This one is one of the rare pictures where Ma had red vermillion on her hair parting and a red bindi (a red dot on the forehead). Hindu women put that color when their husbands are alive. She has white conch bangles which are also a sign of a Bengali Hindu married woman. When the husband dies, they wipe the red vermillion from the women’s hair parting with the dead husband’s big toe. They break the wife’s white conch bangles too. Ma had to wear white saris all her life, as she was a widow.