Boro Amma- The Great Mother & Story of Motherhood

Morning of October 1942, Chittagong, British Colonial India

 Chittagong was a sleepy, largely agrarian town, still languishing in the backwaters of the British East Indian Colony. As the early winter fog was still hesitantly floating in the air, sudden howling of aerial attack sirens rang out from the nearby British and Allied military barracks. Soon, waves of Japanese Bombers started dropping the payloads over the town. The Japanese air-attack was instantly followed by thuds of anti-aircraft batteries fired from the British bases as they engaged the attackers from this Air-Naval base. 

On this same day of October 27, 1942, shrill cries of children and relatives rang out in the unison in the household of Antoo Miyan Chowdhury and Pori Roksar Begum.

The gathered elders and men of the family started chanting “La ilaha il-lal-la-No God but Allah”, their collective voice took on the gravitas of gnostic melody, as Pori’s body laid motionlessly on her bed. Someone pulled the white shroud over her body soon covering her pale bloodless face. As the cacophony of mourning voices of men, women and children merged together like an operatic performance, one was the most distinct with mournful timbre in that bamboo thicket house with a corrugated tin roof.“Pori? Why did you leave before me? How could you go before me?” The mourning and melancholy of the voice gave her identity away: only a mother could be so sad, she was none other than of Sabeda Khatun, Pori’s mother.

Chittagong, being in a far-flung corner of the British Indian Colony bordering Burma (Myanmar in the present days), was still almost unknown to the world and was still hidden away from the limelight of the constant World War II news reports which were only busy with the reports of European frontlines. Almost nothing was reported from this area in what was the mainstream media of that time, although the ferocity and atrocities of the war were no less than the European frontlines.

But lying in the hinterland of Indian subcontinent provided no respite to my ancestral hometown of Chittagong from the devastation of World War II. It quickly became a hub of frantic military staging operations for the British Army. By this time the Japanese Imperial Army had occupied large part of Burma with the cooperation of local Burmese and had posed a direct threat to what was the territory of Indian Colony itself.  At this time, British Major General Wilfrid Lewis Lloyd was commanding the battle to recover from what was until then a humiliating defeat of the Allied armies at the hands of the Japanese Imperial Army in the Burma Front.

Chittagong

Nestled by the shores of the Bay of Bengal, with continuous and contiguous Burmese shorelines, Chittagong still defines the transition of India-South East Asia with Indochina or with Far East Asia. It was the perfect geographic and strategic fit for the advance military supply base that could be reinforced from the sea and the air routes in Burma Campaign. The Americans also provided significant logistical support via Chittagong as British Allied fighters assembled for the fight in Arakan, the westernmost Burmese province adjacent to Chittagong. The assembled troops were diverse and included conscripts, soldiers, and other personnel from all parts of India, and as far as West Africa. The first reported Japanese bombing of Chittagong was on August 9, 1942, which, intensified during the subsequent months and by October it was so intense that my grandmother Pori’s burial had to be delayed on October 27, 1942.

Pori & Antoo Miyan Chowdhury

Pori Roksar Begum was my maternal grandmother whom we call “Nani” in local Chittagong dialect. She was the oldest of four children of Sabeda, and Ahmed Kabir (Sabeda’s husband). Pori had died when my mother was barely ten, we never had a chance to meet her in person. 

Her parents had named her Pori, meaning Angel, for the angelic beauty and mild manner she showed from her childhood onward, according to family’s history. But little did they know then while naming her that she would turn out to be physically fragile all her life as well.

As was customary in the society of the then, Pori, in her mid-teenage years, married my maternal grandfather, Antoo Miyan Chowdhury, my “Nana“. He was one of the first Muslim graduates in Chittagong with a BA degree at a time when the Muslims from the Indian subcontinent had just begun their struggle to regain their rights to get an education and enter the job markets after a long period of marginalization and discrimination, both at the hands of the British colonialists who wrestled the power away from the Muslim dynasties and later at the hands of the Hindu majority who more closely allied themselves with the British before the Muslims could accept and reconcile with the new reality of being the losers and the underdogs in the wake of a new power structure.

Nana was a government servant of the British Raj, a position commanding considerable social respect and financial security. His homelife flourished as well, as during their married life of ten years, Nana and Nani Pori had seven children. Each pregnancy happened before she could fully recuperate form the previous childbirth and left her weaker and sicker than ever. Her seventh child, a boy, was born in 1942 through a difficult delivery at home. And so, it seemed that by this time, Pori’s young body had produced enough children and could not give birth anymore.

Although the newborn was healthy after the long birthing process, Pori never regained her place in her world. All her seven deliveries were at home under the care of her mother and local elderly women (midwives) who lacked any formal medical training. Hospitalization for childbirth was not ever heard of in those days in this society. The midwives and elder women who supervised the childbirths of Pori at her home were at a loss to explain her deteriorating condition. They told she had chutabai, a basket term in the local Chittagong dialect for this illness. In folk terms, chutabai is blamed for all illnesses in the postpartum period in this part of the world.

Finally, a real doctor, Purno Chowdhury, one of the rare finds in Chittagong in those days, was called in for a home visit. He dispensed the medicinal concoctions at his disposal at that time, but it did not change the downhill course of this young mother’s condition.

According to the family history, she developed a low-grade fever after her last child was born, she had unending vaginal discharge that was tinged with blood. Few weeks later she turned “yellow” and died amid shaking chills and fever. In the present context, after putting the story together, Pori had a typical case of “puerperal sepsis” or postpartum infection due to partially retained placenta that was not spontaneously expelled completely after the last childbirth. This is not an uncommon condition especially in females with many pregnancies when uterus has lost its tone or elasticity.

In Today’s World

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 295,000 women died of childbirth-related complications in 2017 alone, and infection was one of the leading causes. In the U.S. 12% of post-childbirth deaths of mothers are related to postpartum infection.  It is common for postpartum women in such a situation to die of overwhelming infection or sepsis and to turn yellow from their liver’s failure at the late stage.

One universal truth since the beginning of motherhood in our world is that the mother is the anchor for her daughter irrespective of culture and geography, and even more so in the patriarchal societies on our Indian subcontinent. My grandmother Pori’s main helper and constant companion was naturally her own mother, Sabeda Khatun, who was my great-grandmother. We called her Boro Amma, which translates literally as “The Great Mother” in English.

Sabeda and Kabir

After my maternal grandmother “Nani”died, leaving behind six children (her one female child died in early infancy, thus she had total of seven live births), the sole responsibility for raising, feeding, bathing, and nurturing these children fell on Sabeda, my “Boro Amma”. She took them in as her own children and stayed at their home to raise these motherless children. Having endured tragedy and deprivation in her own life, this is what she took on as her mission. 

Boro Amma was a widow herself, after her husband, Ahmed Kabir, died young under mysterious circumstances and had left behind four young children. The family story is rather sketchy on this situation, but what is known is that he was another British Colonial Government servant with an important position. Unfortunately, he apparently got involved in a conflict with his British boss who was later found intoxicated with alcohol and died in a motor vehicle accident. In the ensuing trial, Kabir was found to be guilty and was given a jail sentence.

This is where the facts get murky. Some say Kabir brought great shame to his family and then committed suicide. But the story could be more complicated than what appears on the surface. Elders in the family used to respond by silence when asked questions about him. 

His family was exceptionally wealthy and, at least part of their wealth was accumulated with the direct patronization of the British Raj. In those days no one could afford to alienate the Raj or could get rich without help of Raj either. 

Upon Kabir’s death, and the death of the patriarch of the family, the rest of his family and cousins used a bastardized interpretation of local religious inheritance law by claiming they were based on Islamic laws drawn with the help of corrupt clergies to deprive the family of the deceased of any inheritance. Kabir’s family was not the first one to use such an inhumane law because it had been in use among Indian Subcontinent Sunni Muslims for a long time, creating destitute orphans within the same lineage of the richer families. Such a system rewarded the surviving heirs at the cost of making the orphan heirs penniless and leave them with zero inheritance.

Was it a punishment rendered to Kabir for getting into a conflict with his British boss whose favor made the family rich but exacted a toll upon his helpless family by its very design? Or was it an understanding on the part of Kabir’s father that after his death, his son’s widow and their children would be taken care of by the rest of the family in a humane way which really never happened? And in spite of such laws, some families do treat the orphan family members in an equitable manner and take care of them especially if there is enough wealth to go around. So the last scenario could also been a plausible one.

I have heard both sorts of answers during my interviews with different family members. But whatsoever might be the answer in this case and in others, the end result was like Sabeda’s family: orphans were deprived totally and thus creating an inhuman situation for them. The scourge of such an atrocious inheritance law was so grave to the society that in 1959, Ayub Khan, president of Pakistan declared this law designed to deprive the orphans to be unjust and illegal. Alas, he did not make it retro-active as a result deprived families like Sabeda’s family remained deprived and marginalized in the society for ever.

Sabeda and Nana

Sabeda grew up in a well-to-do family whose parents had generational wealth accumulated over decades of business in the elephant trade. Over several generations, they had trapped wild elephants from the Chittagong forests and trained them to be sold as beasts of burden for the Moghul Empire and later for the British Raj and the loggers, who used the elephants to transport large teak trees and to extract other forest resources. Elephants in Mughal period, and in many parts of India even during the British colonial times were like today’s military transport vehicles. They were needed to mobilize large cannons and other supplies for war efforts as well as transport of personnel in difficult terrains without roads where mechanized vehicles could not be used.

After becoming a young widow with four minor children, Sabeda was reassured by her father-in-law, the patriarch of Kabir’s family and his brothers, that she and her family would be taken care of and that they had nothing to worry about. Implicit to this promise was the reputation and wealth of the family that the patriarch had generated and was leaving behind for the extended family. Sabeda had no reason not to believe in this reassurance and, living in a patriarchal society, she had no choice either. 

Pori was her oldest child and, after losing her dear first child, Sabeda was raising her dead daughter’s six surviving young children with much love, care, and dedication. This not only became a primary mission in her life after premature death of her daughter, but it also kept her mid away from the constant reminders of her won family’s misfortune and the injustices she and her young children had suffered at the hands of her in-laws.

After my “Nani” (maternal grandmother) died, my maternal grandfather “Nana” was a young father and a widower with a much-coveted government job of the British Raj. As is natural for his own needs and societal expectations, in 1944 he married another teenage bride who was perhaps only a few years older than his own older children, my mother and her older brother.

Although in the local culture, this kind of marriage was nothing out of ordinary since girls were expected to get married early and men’s qualifications were their education and a stable job or family wealth to support their family. Yet what was completely out of the ordinary was that a young beautiful girl from a good family background was married off to a widower with six living children from his previous marriage.

War Comes to Chittagong

A great interplay of time, place, and societal needs came to the fore in 1944. In addition to being the major staging ground for the Burma War front during the World War II, Chittagong was in full grip of the Bengal Famine that started in 1939 and continued through the duration of World War II, eventually killing over 3.0 million people. Although this famine was more widely reported from big cities like Calcutta, smaller frontier towns like Chittagong located on the remote shores near the Far East, at the farthest corner of India, were far more affected, but the devastation was almost never reported from areas like this.

Kenneth Hulbert, who served in Chittagong for the British Royal Army Medical Corps, was assigned to establish a field hospital for the war casualties in Chittagong in 1943. For the purpose of building this hospital he and his entourage were living in temporary quarters in Chittagong at that time and this is what he wrote in his diary, “After sunset, a dull low moaning sound started up and seemed to go on all night. I asked one of the Indians what this was, and he said that it was coming from the Indian village around us. He said it was the sound of people dying of hunger. What a dreadful place this is. The distressing thing is that there is nothing we can do to help them.”

Dead bodies of humans and their skeletal remains were strewn around the city, gnawed on by the street dogs or feasted upon by the urban crows and vultures. On top of this, rumors were circulating all around that the locally stationed Allied forces who came from all over the world, including other parts of Indian and African colonies, and even as far as Australia, were raping young local girls. An inevitable result of the World War II and the Bengal Famine was the breakdown of social norms, law, and order. Reports of young girls sold to prostitution were rampant so as other crimes arising out of war, poverty and famine.

At this time, Major General Wilfrid Lewis Lloyd was commanding the 14th Indian Division mainly derived from Western Indian people and the 81st West African Division in the frantic military staging operations along the supply route of Arakan for the Burma Campaign.

The devastating war, famine, and the fear of sexual violence by the young soldiers and its consequences made even the most established families in Chittagong feel terribly vulnerable, fearful, and uncertain about their future. The society was especially on edge at the thought of protecting their young girls from the sexual predations of the soldiers, and other criminals. Such line of thinking in an ancient conservative society during the desperation of war and famine was nothing out of the ordinary either. Families knew that rape, or even the very allegation of rape, and loss of chastity that is highly valued in the society, would doom the marriage prospects of any young unmarried girl and therefore totally ruin her life in a society that stigmatizes the victims as much as the criminals for such crimes.

Given such a reality, any proposal from any respectable educated local man was not only great news but was also very welcome relief for the parents of such “marriage-age” girls. As the saying goes, “Anything can happen”, but amid war and famine, more things can happen in more strange way.

In the aftermath of tragic realities and inevitable changes that come with it, Boro Amma, at the invitation of my grandfather, was happy to stay at the home of her deceased daughter and volunteer her services for the raising and protection of the children, knowing as well that it would take the burden of raising so many children off of the newlywed couple. This in a society where, even today, a man is not expected to raise children and do household work, let alone given the time of the 1940s, the time when these protagonists were acting in their real-life drama.

As for his newly married teenage wife, it would have been impossible for her to raise her husband’s six children from his previous marriage, with two of them being just few years younger than his new wife. Thus, the new role of the living grandmother of the children not only seemed natural and integral, but also very much in real need.

For few months, the large family of Antoo Miyan Chowdhury, his teenage wife and his six children from his deceased wife seemed to be surprisingly calm and quiet, belying the inner turmoil of the human mind that was brewing beyond sight.

Boro Amma was happy to add another “daughter” in her life, which is how she used to refer to my newly married step-grandmother, while at the same time taking care of her own daughter’s six children. This arrangement seemed to have worked out well for my grandfather who was carrying on his own life in his own way and was happy to have a very much needed new companion in his life.

In his life, nothing had changed, other than having a new young wife that filled the void left by the premature death of his first wife- or so it seemed.

War in the Household

As the war against the Japanese Imperial Army advanced across the battle front lines in the deep jungle of Asia, and the dead bodies of the Bengal Famine victims in Chittagong piled up on its alleyways and byways, things seemed to be exceptionally calm in the large household of my Nana. As the elder caretaker, Boro Amma continued to do her household work and supervised all the children’s needs, and so her role as the director of the household affairs remained unchanged, at least outwardly.

In reality, I cannot even imagine my newlywed Nani’s mental state and her astonishment when she arrived as a married wife first time in Antoo Miyan Chowdhury household and had to face the six children of my Nana from deceased wife, the two older children being just a year or two younger than her!  

As the mother of the deceased first wife, Boro Amma had no legitimate position other than her legacy as a volunteer elder, who was caretaker of six motherless children for a long time, and well-wisher of the family. And, of course, her need in this family in such a predicament was grounded on practicality and actual need if not anything else. 

After her daughter’s death, Boro Amma’s motherly instincts shifted into full gear to protect the motherless children of her beloved daughter. At the same time, the instincts of the new wife shifted into overdrive to be the head of her own household and her thirst for having her own children grew every day and redoubled each time, she saw the other children. In an ancient patriarchal society, the success of the marriage is measured by the number of children produced in the marriage. This is another way to show a successful marriage and a way to exert uncontested control over the household for anyone in this position living in the shadows of a first wife who was so prolific while living with so many children. 

But in an old traditional society, there was a barrier to this new bride immediately dethroning the elder Boro Amma also, who had been so intimately associated with, and had been part of my grandfather’s family and the surviving six young children for such a long time. 

Having been there throughout the illness of Nana’s first wife, and having been there after her daughter’s death and even several more years before my Nana got married, Boro Amma’s new role was not easily replaceable, and doing so abruptly would not go down gracefully within their society either, especially given that there were six children who needed the genuine household care and love from their grandmother, which was something the teenage stepmother was unable to provide, even if she wanted to.  No one knew the children better and cared for them more till now than their own grandmother. On the other hand, she was the obstacle on the path of the young wife to be the unquestioned queen of her own domain, which was also her legitimate right. Thus, the stage was set for the great real-life family drama.

The mental skirmishes began within few months of the new bride coming home and, at first, they were just testing each other’s will. Each side tested the other side’s position and was happy to resolve it or leave it where it was. They engaged in a little cross talk here and there, but nothing more than that, and both sides seemed to be eager to return to the status quo knowing each other’s value in such a positioning.

Keys to the Household

After a year, things came to a head when the new wife took away the keys of the household from Sabeda, who had carried them tied to the corner of her sari. She had done this since the days when her daughter was married to Antoo. During those times, Pori had been happy to let her mother have them, due to her own frequent illnesses and Sabeda was taking care of all the household work in anyway and so she was the only one who really needed the keys more than anyone else.

This ring of keys came to symbolize more than just something to carry around. The ring symbolized the overall guardianship of the family, its hierarchy and recognition that the bearer was the caretaker of the family. Each side had their own explanation of how one lost and the other had found the ring of keys. The result was clear and followed the law of nature as the new bride got to keep the keys and the ex-mother-in-law lost them. This was a seminal moment of the family and it set in motion the real changes in this family that were yet to come.

As the time went by, the newlywed found it more uncomfortable that the mother of the deceased wife was staying within the household, whereas this was her and her husband’s house now after all. With each day, she found it to be impossible to live in this condition, although the six young children needed their grandmother on the other hand. As much as Sabeda realized this, she bit her tongue and put her soul’s desire in her self-made mental prison and resolved to herself to the fact that her first commitment was to protect and nurture her own grandchildren- no matter how she was treated or how despised she had felt.

The ring of keys was the symbol and once she lost her control of the keys, she knew her presence in the family was tenuous and her days with the family were numbered. But she still wanted to care for the motherless children as before until they grew up. She wanted to protect them, and this was her mission despite all personal costs.

As the law of nature dictated in due time, the newlywed who was eager to start her own family got pregnant. But her first few pregnancies resulted in early fetal demise. Each time the newlywed got pregnant, Sabeda took special care of her in the customary way as any mother or elder of the family would do. But as repeated miscarriages happened, in a society where even the educated are superstitious and believe in bad eyes, evil eyes and sorcery, the young wife started suspecting the grandmother of her stepchildren was the designer of such mishaps.

Utilizing the knowledge of medical science, miscarriages are not at all uncommon before successful pregnancies especially in young women and can happen up to 15-20% percent of all pregnancies. Out of this, many women, about 65% of them would end up having successful pregnancies ultimately. Although there are many reasons for such “habitual miscarriages” in up to 75% of cases no obvious causes are found even today.

On the Front Lines

It was a day in early 1945, as the battle between the Japanese and the British Allied forces heated up at the Burmese front. At this time, my grandfather Antoo was posted as a land registration officer in an isolated island habitation which locals called Moishkhali (literal where only water buffalos live) located off the coast of Chittagong not very far away from Burmese shorelines. There was no land route to travel here which is nonexistent even today.  The only means of travel was by water. This place was lush green with sparse human habitation and a large part of it was occupied by mangrove forest at that time.

Moishkhali, normally, windswept, muggy, and scraggy piece of land with few low elevation hills sitting in the middle of brackish water. But one summer day in May of 1945, few months before the Allied Burma Campaign ended, the wind seemed to have died down suddenly from the island. The surrounding waterbody which always undulates with the agitation of blowing wind, came to a standstill.  Small hand-crafted wooden fishing boats which normally navigate by catching the wind on the sail made up of patched up clothes and gunnysack, suddenly lost momentum and seemed to be stationary in the mid water hoisted by an unseen string from the sky.  When this happened, the stagnant air on the island became heavy with the moisture from the surrounding water bodies. The air so heavy and so full of moisture, soon, everyone in the island seemed to be suspended in a state of half sleep and half awake. 

Sabeda was hanging the family’s hand washed clothes in the backyard clotheslines. Khaleda, her favorite granddaughter helping her as usual. Khaleda, my mother was her only granddaughter, the two although belonged in two different generations by age, were inseparable in affection and friendship.

 Sudden cry from inside the house drew their attention. Sabeda dropped her clothes that were in her hands ran inside the house, the new wife was on the floor soaked in blood.  This was yet another miscarriage, but a pregnancy that was more advanced than any other so far among the multiple spontaneous abortions. 

The miscarriages before this were earlier in the course of pregnancy for my step grandmother, she has always been praying to God, meticulously following all the advice she has been given by the elders to bring her pregnancies to a success from the very beginning of her marriage. This was a time when success of marriage was defined in bearing child, when womanhood was defined in terms of giving birth to children.  Pressure on her was double since her husband and his deceased wife already had six children, there was no question to his virility and fecundity. All parties knew that the validity of this couple’s conjugal life and success of marriage was under societal judgment which will be judged by the number of children this couple produces.  Pressure on her was unbearable at this time.

Sad, depressed, anxious, and angry, this time around, she, the new wife, my step grandmother decided who did this. Although she had long suspected, and people whispered in her ears, she never confronted this herself, but this time was different; she could not stand the very sight of her husband’s ex-mother-in-law- not even for a moment.  Already primed and prejudiced by the previous miscarriages, this time around, Antoo, was doubly upset. He used the full force of his anger, and openly called his ex-mother-in-law Sabeda a sorcerer and accused her of feeding his new wife abortifacient that was laced with sorcery. 

Although centuries of research in the field of medicine have yet to find any reliable natural abortifacient and or any evidence that sorcery can do anything to any pregnancy, nevertheless, in the primitive society of far-flung India during British Raj, this was a believable and reasonable explanation. Even if it was not, they were convinced in their own mind that this is the reason. And the reason was simple: Sabeda did not want the new wife to have any children so Sabeda’s six orphan grandchildren, could be taken care of well.

Who could be the secret grand-villain creating such mysterious family tragedies than an ex-mother-in-law living among them who was protecting and advocating for the six young children of the deceased first wife? Who could evoke more paranoia than the one who was a constant reminder to the new wife that she was living in the shadows of the first wife, even after she had been deceased for long time?

Antoo Miyan Chowdhury, my maternal grandfather, known for his volatile anger, took care of this accumulated suspicion, disappointment, and inner anger this time around in the most aggressive way he could using both verbal and threat of physical abuse.

As the tropical sun was scorching down on this steamy summer day of 1945, Sabeda was immediately led on the dirt path by a servant of Chowdhury household with hurriedly gathered one leather suitcase and a clothe sac. The path ended on the river ghat where she was made to board on a wooden sampan waiting for her. This boat or sampan rowed solely by a human muscle power completed the arduous journey in eight days crisscrossing through the waterways from Moishkhali island to the city of Chittagong.  Sabeda, by now totally exhausted and heart-broken reached her hometown finally, empty handed. She could not even say a proper goodbye to the children she cared for all these times. Later she confided to my mother that the only thing that prevented her from jumping in the water in that fateful journey was the thought that these children would need her one day and that she needed to keep herself alive for their sake.

As she was expelled, the crying children were not allowed to hug or go near her let alone speak to her. Children were watching her from behind the wooden grills of windows as she repeatedly stopped watching them and sobbing, wiping off her tears in the corners of her white sari, a color of sari she had started wearing since the day her husband died, which is meant for windows as symbol of eternal mourning and chastity in the local culture. 

On this very day the Pori’s six children became orphans for the second time even before the trauma of losing their own mother had erased out of their minds. The only constancy in their lives were gone, again!

Sabeda’s Saga

After the forcible and tragic separation from her grandchildren for whom she was the true mother after their own mother’s death, began another chapter in the life of Sabeda, adding to her personal tragedy one more time, and yet- this won’t be her last. As for the six children of Pori, within four years of losing their mother, they lost the only other person they knew was constant in their lives, the one most intimate to them from their very birth and the one who cared for them selflessly.  She was their only mother figure, only advocate and only source of stability so far.

Some of the surviving six children were still very small, unable to comprehend the complexities of life and with the sudden loss of their loved one left them with a lifelong scar in their psyche. Things were no easy for the older ones either, since especially my mother Khaleda, who was stepping in her teenage years by now her only and closest friend was her own grandmother Sabeda to whom only she could confide everything and seek solace. The oldest of the surviving children, my mother’s older brother responded the unmooring of the family structure by teenage rebellion as a boy of this age might be expected of doing.  

The younger children cried for days but were too young to understand or comprehend what this meant for their future. 

Rob, the oldest of the children and a boy reacted by spending more time outside and in being rebellious. Khaleda, the girl spent the time in retrieving inward, sobbing, and overtaken by a feeling of loneliness as if she was in a solitary confinement in a prison, she was all alone emotionally. She found no solace in crying, mourning, she found her world collapsed on her, she felt totally gagged and totally helplessness, but had to keep the feeling to herself since as a girl it was not socially acceptable to do anything otherwise and certainly a girl was not allowed to have any outburst. 

With the departure of Sabeda, the oldest daughter Khaleda was the only female figure left who resembled both in body and spirit of the diseased mother Pori. Sabeda could be gotten rid of as a representative of the old wife but Khaleda, she is the daughter, she had to stay. Now she was the constant reminder, and she was the spirit ghost of the old wife in the house, she was the Cinderella of the Chowdhury family. 

Unlike Disney movie Cinderella, real Cinderella with a living father may have even a harsher life. Khaleda became the main target of neglect, frustration, and abuse as she unknowingly or knowingly thrusted herself to fill in the role of helping and taking care of the younger siblings, a role left gapingly open by sudden traumatic departure of their grandmother Sabeda. A teenager herself, now she took on the role of a mother figure, a nurturer for her younger brothers. 

Situation compelled her to grow up prematurely and she had to step in to take care of her four young brothers and unbeknown to herself, she started to fill in the void of her grandmother Sabeda in defending them and in nurturing them. She had to step up to become their sole advocate. Such a role is not easy for any of the parties involved on both sides and comes with inevitable competition and clash.

The premature death of a mother with lots of young children thus started a multi-generational tragedy that spared no one in the family. It left all the children helpless, without motherly love and protection, at the most crucial moments of their lives, as eventually with time, their father turned into a stranger. 

When the new wife came in the existing family of children, she was constantly reminded of the fact that she had arrived at someone else’s family, a family that was already set, already arranged, a family that already had a culture and a rhythm of its own. She cannot go to bed without the thought that she was sleeping with someone else’s husband. She cannot help but be constantly aware that she was being judged against someone else’s standards both inside her family and outside. Thus her life was not any easy either.

The feelings of insecurity, helplessness and jealousy that ensues as a result in the heart of any second wife in such circumstances as a natural human emotional complex was perhaps unfathomable for anyone else to understand. After all, no girl or woman ever dreams to be married to a man who was already married with six living children and the house had a living-in ex-mother-in-law of the deceased wife. Thus, human kindness and sympathy that every stepmother feels initially for orphaned minors and stepchildren are sure to disappear in the boiling crucible of other complex human emotions.

The most tragic of all family matters is perhaps a tale of the surviving children of the deceased mother. They become a constant reminder to the new wife that she is the second one to come, an intruder of a kind whose arrival was ushered in by a family tragedy.  These children also live with survivors’ guilt, sometimes they even see themselves as the cause of their mother’s death.  To the stepmother, they are the living ghosts of the deceased wife who built the family before her. It is only natural for the stepmother to see these children as competitors of her own and her own future children. 

The Telling of Time

Sabeda, my great-grandmother although was expelled and excommunicated from the lives of six young children, my mother being one of them, their mutual love, friendship, trust, and their concern for each other could not be extinguished. It remained true for other children also. To be loved and to give love is an inviolable law of nature. Such remained true in case of the six orphaned children and their relationship with their grandmother, Sabeda also.

For many years after Sabeda’s forceful departure from the Chowdhury home, the children were kept excommunicated from her. But the unending love and fate eventually found them together again later, and by this time the children were in their adolescence and few in early adulthood. 

And as time had borne out, Sabeda was still so pivotal again and again in the orphan children’s lives. Three of the six siblings, including my mother Khaleda, graduated from schools and colleges under Sabeda’s shade and were sheltered by her as eventually some of them were expelled from their father’s home later.

My mother, Khaleda, the second child of Pori and Antoo, had to leave her father’s home to avoid the chronic abuse at home, and the resulting tardiness at school since she was only allowed to leave the home for school after all her younger siblings were fed. On top, she was the target of physical beating by her father, most of which used to take place in the evening after he came back from work according to my living uncles whom I have interviewed for this article. 

On one such incident, after she had been roughed up by her father, she protested, “What kind of educated person are you if you beat up your own grown-up daughter?” This made him totally lost. He chased her down and caught up to her on the banks of a nearby river, a short distance from their home, where he hit her so hard that she lost her consciousness. Her brothers thought she was dead right there. But she survived, barely.

She realized that unless she leaves home, she would never graduate from the high school. The school had warned her parents multiple times of her tardiness, but they were apathetic to this impending expulsion notice of the daughter and threat to her education were not taken seriously. 

This was when my mother realized that she had to take control over her own life and her education and that she had to be out of her father’s house to have this happen.  She left home with the help of a servant and came to Sabeda’s home who gladly sheltered her, thus becoming once again a heaven-sent rescuer of my mother. She was the one my mother needed the most at this critical juncture of her life.  And for Sabeda, my mother’s grandmother, she had never hesitated to share whatever little she had or whatever she could pull together given her own predicament. For my mother Khaleda, she was the best friend, the best elder, and the best support, the best parent. 

My mother was able to graduate from her high school staying at Sabeda’s home. After my mother graduated from high school, she was married off to my father. But because of this diploma, my mother was able to find a job as a schoolteacher that she continued till her day of death.

Once my parents started having children, again Sabeda was on the side of my mother. Every child needs a mother to be nurtured properly, but for every woman need for the mother is the greatest during pregnancy and childbirth. My mother had lost her own mother in her childhood. So, Sabeda, my mother’s grandmother fulfilled this need. Sabeda was with my mother for every childbirth till she died. She supported my mother, her granddaughter, on every occasion, every crisis of her life for as long as she was alive. 

She helped raise us, at least six of us, out of nine children of my parents. I recall in our childhood as one day, she was braiding my older sister’s hair during the time she and my mother were nurturing my sister back to health when she had a long bout of illness, likely Typhoid fever. This time, my sister passed out and my Boro Amma Sabeda was the first one to cry for help and the emotionality that came out of her heart still rings fresh in my mind.

Sabeda’s love and care nurtured my mother as well as our family, without her perhaps my mother’s life would have been double difficult, and I cannot imagine that she would have graduated from high school and would have been able to have the career in teaching that she loved, a career that gave her the opportunity to raise all nine of her own children with the help of our father. 

Sabeda’s love and care were so much and so strong that in my own life, she has a towering presence, and she is truly the Great Mother, the Boro (Great) Amma (Mother) that we needed in this cruel world. And yes, the world could be cruel for all of us sometimes, but for the orphans, the world is always cruel, such was my mother and her sibling’s situation.

People like Sabeda, my Boro Amma, made the world better for us, she was the respite for the six orphans, Pori’s surviving children. She was the oasis in the midst of desert that saved the lost traveler. She was the sanctuary for the tormented soul.

I wish my mother were alive today to tell her own stories.  She kept a stiff upper lip, never divulging anything of her childhood, a childhood hardened by the bitter and tortuous experiences she had to endure since her early days.  She never wanted us to be bitter or biased from her own personal sufferings and she always wanted to shield us from the traumatic stories of her own childhood digesting and storing everything in her own self. 

I have only one preserved picture of my Boro Amma with me and even today, I feel reassured every time I look at this- her determined face, the same brown eyes with a gaze that is piercing- as if she is telling the whole world to back off, she is our angel guardian watching over our family. I wish there were a Boro Amma or great-grandmother like we had for every orphan in this world. Then perhaps everyone, every orphan would have been redeemed and their quality of life and living experience in this world of ours would have been much smoother.  

My mother Khaleda was the only surviving daughter of Pori and Antoo, and my Boro Amma knew that, among the surviving children, my mother was the most vulnerable as a female. As a woman, Boro Amma knew this by instinct, so she always gave support and companionship to my mother whenever she could, until her stroke and eventual death from it.

The last memory I have of my Boro Amma was that of her lying in a hospital bed at a medical school after she had her brain stroke, paralyzed in all four limbs, and being fed by a nasal tube. I was young, perhaps seven-or eight-year-old. I stood by her bed, smelling the strange hospital odor, and watching her and her surroundings. I had never seen her in this condition, not only that but also, I have never seen so many sick people in a neurological ward all unable to move and as a result all were lying on their beds quietly. I was awed and was in shock. I remember her same piercing eyes looking at me for few seconds before they could focus no more and then drooping down in tiredness from the illness.

As God will confirm, later I studied medicine and graduated from the same medical school where she was treated. As a medical student, in my first Internal Medicine rotation, I was assigned to the same ward where my Boro Amma was treated. On this very first day, I knew that I was in a good company and who was watching over me: my own Boro Amma.

Today, as a gastroenterologist in America, with great humility and with a grateful mind, I often remember my Boro Amma, and my own mother Khaleda, their unending love and affection for each other and their blessings in my own life. I know that behind me, and my eight siblings’ education lies the sacrifice and dedication of generations of hardworking women like them. My memories of my Boro Amma are a treasure that cannot be weighed even against gold.

Monologue

            As a child beyond the years of infantile dementia, and even today as a mature man with significant life experience as a healer, I wonder why the events I described happened the way they did and how it impacted the lives of ours beyond the directly affected individuals in this family drama. I cannot but feel unfair that my grandmother had to die leaving my mother and her siblings orphans. But it is equally unfair for my step grandmother also that such in such a young age, she had to be married to my grandfather who already had six living children from his previous marriage. I and my siblings think often what was going through her mind when she first time came to my maternal grandfather’s house and were met by six other children two of them being barely younger to her by few years! And then seeing the ex-mother-in-law living with them? The mother of the ex-wife? Is it possible that any women not feel tremendous angst, helplessness, and disappointment? Is it possible not to feel resentment? Perhaps not on the part of any living human. If that is the case the way the events turned out, by eventual expulsion and ex-communion of my Boro Amma, was that the healing event for her pent-up anger, frustration, disappointment, and all other human feelings that is sure to arise in such a circumstance?

 

Boro Amma in her white sari at the Center. She always wore only white sari after she became widow.

Did God create Sabeda to be the punchball, the fall guy to absorb all the shocks for rest of the extended family? They say every creation has a purpose to its life, was that the purpose of Sabeda’s life? I wonder was the cause of the miscarriages were the accumulated mental anguish and unexpressed feelings on the part of a newlywed young lady? I have reasons to believe that because once Sabeda was out of her life, my step maternal grandmother successfully gave birth to many children, our step uncles, and aunts, whom we adore. Perhaps that was the real cure designed by nature in its own cruel and strange way. They say life and death are not in human hands, but so as the life we live in between as we see in our own family’s history: nature never hesitates to be cruel and unpredictable.

Nature is never tired of twist, tragedy, trials and tribulations, as in William Shakespeare’s language: 

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;”

In a man-made script of drama, many have the talent of playing well in the role while others may not be as talented, but in the realm of real life, everyone has been bestowed with the talent by the invisible power to play her own part. Each of the women in this true story had proven this by her own merit. They were all consummate soldiers of them for their own causes, angel guardians of their families and uncompromising fighters for their constituents. They were women, they were fighters; each responding to the call of one’s duties and each refused to waive or surrender even when path was trecherous. Nature and realities of life were especially cruel and harsh for Sabeda, her fall from grace, her demotion in life from growing up in affluent family and in being married in another affluent family and from there to becoming a widow in a mysterious death of her husband resulting in total deprivation of all inheritance and then finding her calling in raising her six grandchildren after losing her oldest daughter are all but unimaginable tragedies: each event by its own merit. Yet she remained steadfast, unmoved like the Mount Everest, and she never surrendered to fate. Without her, her six grandchildren could have never survived, never have had a proper education that eventually made them stand on their own feet. I am two generation away from my Boro Amma; but in a partriarchal society, men deciding everything and imposing everything in their own way, she is the example how women were shaped to bear, to fight, to be tenacious to be the face of humanity. Perhaps the values of good part of sapiens should be expressed as huwoman, not human!

 

A close up of Boro Amma and I, from the only picture I have. To me this is a story of womanhood, this is a story of generation of working women who suffered under the control of men, but did the hard lifting never giving up hope for their future generations.

9 thoughts on “Boro Amma- The Great Mother & Story of Motherhood”

  1. Well written and expressed. I knew bits and pieces of stories but after reading this I find myself to be even more humble and understanding of us and men’s shortcomings in a patriarchal society. We named our 2nd daughter Zoey Shabeda after her. Can’t wait to share this story with all our 5 children in time. It’s a cruel world, yet very interesting and amazing at times. Thanks for taking the time and efforts to write this. Our great grandmother Shabeda’s story needed to told, the world makes sense because of mothers/grandmothers like Shabeda. I don’t believe in heaven/hell but if there is an after life, I’d very much like to meet our mother Khaleda, Grandmother Pori and Great grandmother Shabeda.

  2. Wow. Your picture with your Boro Amma is 100% like you today. I say you haven’t changed much in years. Same sharp appearance and piercing eyes.

    Good read.

  3. We all need to be heard/told of the family history of our ancestors. So that we can appreciate our present life and thankful to God how fortunate we are compared to these women. Our lives are better off through the sacrifices of these great women like Sabeda, Pori and Khaleda. I shared your story with my three daughters. All three of them cried after reading the story of their grand mother, great grand mother and great great grandmother. But we all have to embrace the destiny of faith. Thank you Borobhaia for taking time and effort to write this memoir. Through your writing we also came to know about the socio economic conditions and cultures of our ancestors at that time. Keep up your good work.

    1. I just wanted to point out that Khaleda and Sabeda did not Sacrifice; they fought for their life, existence, and right to be human. The patriarchal society brainwashes us, associating this word with women’s sufferings. A person who sacrifices has options between a comfortable solution and one that’s not as comfortable or sometimes brings pain. In these two women’s lives, that was not the option. Their only options were to vanish (in other words, to kill themselves, given the nature of the society back then) or fight for their existence. I am proud of them for choosing the latter.

  4. This story highlights some obvious and, importantly, hidden consequences of patriarchy and the ultimate victims of such unequal power in a family. For example, Sabeda was deprived of her entitled inheritance due to her husband’s death, which is one such apparent unfairness. Or Auntoo Mia’s explosive power to be the executor of injustice without the fear of being judged or challenged by society is another blatant unfairness.

    As a psychotherapist, I am drawn to evaluate any human story from the lenses of human behavior in that specific environment. Therefore, I can’t help to notice the driving factors of the tragedies in these orphans’ lives. Human personality theorist Alfred Adler categorized human behavior into two different types, A Healthy Style of Life and A Mistaken Style of Life. Adler states that humans adopt one of these two lifestyles based on their social interests.

    A Healthy Style of Life is driven by contributing to the welfare of others, as we see from the story of Sabeda. A Mistaken Style of life is driven by self-centeredness, competitiveness, and striving for personal power. They engage in actions that are not usually obvious to most as they master manipulations and deceptions to take their competitions out of their equations for their personal power. A person driven by these motives would not function from the moral ground of ‘do unto others.’

    I strongly disagree with you about people not having an option for a healthy choice of their circumstances. There are many examples of similar circumstances where people have chosen a unified solution. One way to look at it from the lens of a Healthy Style of Life is the closeness of age with the stepchildren and the presence of an experienced elder, which offers an opportunity to establish a friendship for a harmonious life together.

    While the patriarch’s mistreatments of his orphan children and his widow mother-in-law display his utter selfishness for his pleasure and convenience, we must not justify the unfairness that the stepmother orchestrated. Everyone with privilege has the responsibility to recognize it and call it what it is.
    P.S. Excellent writing; I especially enjoyed learning about our mother’s story and understanding where the fire for equality and justice in me comes from.

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