A Sad Story behind the Beautiful Smile
For children, their mother is the world. A mother is the one whose special love inspires children throughout their lives. She is the one who fills the hearts of her children with joy unconditionally and reads her children’s mind better than anyone on this earth. Mother sings lullabies when her children are sleepy. According to my religion, the child’s paradise is under the mother’s feet. A person usually knows that a mother is the most important person in someone’s life. In most cases, a mother is the one who can even sacrifice her life without thinking twice. What pops in your mind if suddenly the concept of motherhood is changed?
Once I went for field study/research in Chittagong, Bangladesh. My family also lives in the same city. I was confused about specifically which area to choose for the study. After I thought for a while, I decided to select the area that my family lives in. The reason behind selecting that area for research was because there were some slums around it. The topic of my field research was “The life of urban slums people in Bangladesh.” The research was for a course that I was taking at that time called Applied Anthropology. Though field research was not mandatory for the course, I did it because I wanted to learn more about the peoples’ lives living in the slums around my city.
Now I would like to come to the main point. My friend and I went to a slum to do the interviews. The slum was near the building my family lives in. The friend who was with me during the research was from south India. Being very interested in foreigner people is a common scene among Bengali people. As my friend was a foreign girl, some children below age twelve became very interested in her. Mahima, a girl who was probably ten years old, her brother, and some other children were around us until we were done with our task. After we were done, my friend went back to her hostel and I came back to my home. At night, the time was around 11 o’ clock when I saw Mahima walking around the building I live in. I asked her, “Why are you not going home, your mom will be worried for you.” She replied with a beautiful smile, “My mom will not be worried for me because I do not have a mom.” After listening to her words, I thought that her mother was going to come back home late. I asked where her mother was. She said, “My mother has run away with a man.” Then I was thinking about the little girl’s world. How does she pass all these days without having her mother’s love and care?
Again I asked her, “Where is your father and do you have any other siblings?” She replied with a smile again, “I have one elder brother and he is in grade five. My father is at his work place and he will come by 12:00am.” “So, who will feed you dinner and who will tell you to go to bad?” “No one, I will be in deep sleep when my father comes home.”
For her and many others, not having a mother is not a matter; her days pass as always.
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