The Aurora Review
|
Winter/Spring 2005 |
This Is Your Home
This
isn’t the summer of my childhood. Muri isn’t my constant companion. I
can’t skip all the afternoon teas and dinner parties and shopping trips
to play outside or swim in the pond. My grandfather doesn’t come back
from his morning walk with hot and spicy daal puris for breakfast. He
is not walking with me through my grandmother’s garden, tearing off
banana leaves and folding them intricately, precisely into pretend
watches
with bands and everything, his bent curly head mirroring my own. Nana
has been dead for seven years, but it is only now that I feel it,
now that I’m here in his house again, walking through the jongol
garden, crooked banana leaf watch on my wrist. My only context for him
is fading from my already faded memory. But Nanu is here, and she has always been the
centre of my Bangladesh experience. Her shuffling walk, her wrinkled
hands, the way she croons, Nanu, Nanu as she hugs me, harder, longer
than I expect. My tiny grandmother is a force, a woman of
reckoning. One of the first Bangladeshi women to graduate from college
and go on to get a Master’s degree, she has spent her life in pursuit of
miracles, not the least of which is the education of village
girls. Nanu traipses from village to village, walks through the grey
concrete classrooms with their empty windows and brackish chairs and desks,
talks to headmasters, teachers, and parents to finds the girls who have
escaped infanticide and child-bridehood. She has spent decades
fighting to keep our dark-chocolate-cream-skinned, bony, lithe, huge-eyed
daughters in school.
continued |
Lagoon with Sunset by Ione Citrin |
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