By Asif Khan, TwoCircles.net
“I don’t have any memory of my mother,” says Farzana, wiping the sweat off her forehead with hands still wet from washing clothes. She vaguely remembers how her father raised two children as a single parent. Locking them inside home after preparing food for both of them, he would leave for the day to earn a living as a rickshaw puller. This continued till the father’s protectiveness was overtaken by his children’s age.
Having never attended school, it was at a sewing class where unable to understand measurements, she realised the importance of an education. “I used to feel so bad, that I would just cry,” she remembered with a shy smile. She enrolled herself in an informal school, which helped her to understand not just numbers, but confidence too. The beam on her smiling face showed this: she had passed 12th standard in this year’s Madrassa Board results.
Her older brother, who works on a lathe machine, returns home by sunset. By then, Farzana looks forward to having Iftar with him.
“After all, what’s the point of having Iftar alone, without family?”
TCN Series: Ramadan 1437