Kumu: Meye bela

Kumu was born five years after Peara. Five long, whisper-filled years. Peara, the third child, the first son, the long-awaited heir who arrived with the weight of joy and expectation. Before him came Bulbul and Tuntun–two girls with soft feet and striking beauty–and after him came silence. A pause. A space too wide to ignore.

In those in-between years, the house in Bogra filled with questions the way courtyards fill with laundry: daily, uninvited, flapping in the wind. What had gone wrong? How could one son carry the lineage? The house must be filled with children. Was it the evil eye? A curse? Something Nani had eaten, or not eaten? Something her body had forgotten to do? Everyone had an opinion. Suggestions arrived wrapped in pity. Boiled herbs. Aluminum amulets. Unpronounceable oils from faraway villages. Someone suggested sleeping under a new moon. Someone else, an old aunt with no children of her own, whispered of dark water, "phoo" (breathing), and old gods.

Nani bore it all in silence. Not the noble, defiant kind. Just the worn-down, practical quiet of a woman already raising three children and a thousand invisible demands that didn't wear names but still drifted through her house every day–loud, invisible, and constant as breath. There was no time for tears. Not in front of others. Not even in secret.

She folded her disappointment into her sarees, into the soft pleats she tucked beneath her navel each morning, into the threadbare ones that smelled of turmeric and firewood, and the crisp white one she saved for Fridays, starched like hope.

She stitched her shame into kanthas, old sarees reborn as stories. Of women bent like question marks, of birds mid-flight, of fish with eyes too wide. She chose her threads like memories, green for envy, red for rage, blue for waiting. Every stitch, a silence; every color a wound softened by time. She wasn't just stitching warmth. She was stitching grief into flowers and leaves. Stitching longing into patterns that didn't ask for explanations. She stitched to keep her hands busy. She stitched to hold something still before it slipped away again.

And then, as if by accident, as if her body remembered something the mind had stopped hoping for, there was Kumu. Kumkum. Born in Bogra, in the back room of a house that held its breath for her. Her birth was witnessed not by doctors or nurses, but by her mother, her grandmother, and two watchful sisters–hands steady, hearts braced.

Outside, the mulberry trees stood bare-boned and brittle by the hemanta air, their last yellow leaves clinging like rumours–whispered, half-believed–rustling stories of a summer long gone. Their branches reached crookedly into the dusk, sketching ink-thin lines against a sky bleeding vermilion. In the corner of the courtyard, a cow lowed softly, calling her calf home with the insistence of instinct.

And inside, the house, heavy with the scent of kamini blossoms and the stillness of waiting, sharpened by the anxious waiting for a life to arrive. Three generations of women braced themselves. Knees pressed to cold floors. Sarees tucked in. Eyes unwavering. They held their breath between contractions. Folded screams into silence. Swallowed pain, swallowed joy–lips sealed tight with centuries folded inside. They carried their mothers' losses and their daughters' hopes in the quiet strength of their spines. Water boiled. Invocations were murmured. Sweat and tears ran together, wiped away with the threadbare end of a saree.

And then, without ceremony, with the muted explosion only birth knows, they made space. Raw, wide, aching space for one more girl. In a world that never gave them space unless they carved it out themselves, where every inch of space had to be earned in silence and struggle.

Kumu arrived in the folds of a kantha Nani had stitched for this day–sewn from worn sarees and older sorrows. She was received into hands that had stirred pots and buried grief, that raised daughters on the strength of dreams never spoken, only carried.

After Kumu, the children came like rain on a metal roof. Tultul, two years later, wide-eyed and always reaching. Then Bacchu, Faruk, and finally Lucky, the last–the lightest, the one Nani cradled with the exhausted love. Eight children in total. And Nani stopped. Not because she chose to. But because her body, one day, simply said "enough". It whispered no in a language only women's bones understand. Her hips refused. Her womb closed like a fist. Her strength, once infinite, began to slip quietly out of her joints, like water from a leaky pot.

When people asked her why she stopped, she didn't give them reasons. She gave the truth to her.

"Bochorer e matha ar o mathai shudhu atur ghar," she would mutter half under her breath, half into the pillow she was thumping into shape. Speaking to no one, yet heard by all. That year, to her, was nothing but a blur of birth: her cradle at one end of the bed, someone else's screams of labour at the other. A year bookended by blood and breath, swaddled beginnings and sweat-soaked ends.

And that was that.

No ceremony. No announcement. Just the quiet retreat of a woman who had birthed eight children, survived the gossip, the bleeding, the endless boiling of milk and pain and still managed to cook two meals a day with very little help available.

"Kumu" is a living memoir of Selina Hossain's early life, told through carefully chosen themes reimagined by her daughter.

Lazeena Muna writes occasionally, weaving together gender and politics, and often exploring memory, movement, and meaning.