Present day (setting in a hospital somewhere in Dhaka)
Today she saw blood on my pillow.
“Ammi, I know they will save you.” She whispered in a voice even more fragile than my own condition.
I smiled and coughed again with blood – and she knew that I was going to die soon.
I still remember myself long ago, fighting with the frightening thoughts of losing my own mother. I was also a kid, a small girl, but yes, with big, big, big dreams. My mother was really good at hiding stuff. “The painful stuff, I mean.” She used to hide her handkerchief, the pillow covers, her sputum, her clothes, and also her pain – she hid so well that I never knew the feeling, the frightening feeling of losing someone, as I only got to know about it when I had lost her already. She was good at hiding stuff – Yes, the “painful stuff” I mean. I see my mother in some parts of me. “Especially the most fragile ones.” The parts she was too good at hiding –
I want my daughter to see me in the strongest parts of her being, and not the fragile ones, not the painful ones, not the weak ones. But who knows what she sees in me, as here I am coughing with blood, just like my own mother.
Laila is my daughter and my only family.
She must be scared, might be crying, or might be losing herself – But in front of me, she acts alright. I’ve named her after my mother, and maybe that’s why she’s also good at hiding stuff – (The painful stuff – I mean) – she looks into my eyes and sees what I used to see in my mother’s eyes. A tired soul – A soul that has not lived, a soul that has just survived, a soul that has never dreamed. Or she might see in my eyes one day what I had wished when I was her age. As after that I never wished for anything but “The Pink Jacket’ —
30 years ago in Dhaka, Bangladesh (the biggest/ most populated, and most polluted slums) —
My Ammi was my everything, she was my strength, my love, my obsession, and my best friend, well now, as I’m old enough, she’s still the mirror to the most fragile parts of my soul. I loved her more than anything. She was a beautiful woman. I always wanted to be like her. To me, she was perfect – the strongest and the most powerful. But I never knew she was just as weak as I am right now. I used to think she was strong because she used to hold my hand so tight that sometimes I wouldn’t even feel my hand anymore. Maybe it was not her strength but her fear, the fear of losing me. She had lost everyone except me. Sometimes she was lost in me. Or it might be that she saw people in me whom I didn’t know, maybe I looked like my dad, or my grandmother, or someone she used to love.
Ammi and I worked in a textile factory close to the slums where my mother’s mother and her mother and her mother and her mother and many generations had worked. But I never liked it personally. It was dirty and triggered my migraine almost always in the beginning, but then I also got along with it just like the previous generations.
The factory was huge, but I was still very small, which no one saw.
I still remember her tanning the jackets and telling me stories. But she never completed any of them, unlike her work. It might be that she couldn’t imagine any further, or maybe she couldn’t tell what she had imagined in the end.
“It’s a loop, but it should end with me” she used to whisper all the time in the end of every story to herself.
“I dream to tann 500 jackets today and wake up alive tomorrow.” She said, tanning a jacket, with no emotion on her face, when I asked her about her biggest dream.
“I dream to buy the pink jacket.”, I pointed towards a pink jacket on a flex hanging right behind her. She turned her head to see it.
“Yes, I’ll buy you one one day,” she said with an unshakeable smile on her beautiful face.
It was the happiest day of my life. Or maybe the happiest illusion of my life. I had imagined myself wearing that jacket 100 times, every single day, till the day she left me forever. And after that, I almost forgot about my biggest dream.
But years later, when I grew a bit older, I saw it hanging in the factory. The area where we were not allowed. And that day I didn’t dream of buying it one day, instead I just wished to see someone wearing it. Maybe I knew now that this is all I could dream.
I just wanted to see how happy someone could be after wearing it. How happy someone could be after living my biggest dream.
Present day:-
I saw a lady beside me, wearing a pink jacket, the same jacket I loved. I smiled as the only dream of my life had come true, but I didn’t see anything on that woman’s face. She was just okay with it. I always thought to see so many emotions on the person’s face who could wear the pink jacket, but she was not happy. I always wanted to see people who could wear the jacket, but today I saw that these people wear it just as an ordinary thing, and not a dream. Maybe it’s just what they need and not what they want. It breaks my heart that we die in the process of making things that are merely a need and so ordinary to people for whom they’re actually made. But yes, now that I’m dying, my wish came true. I finally saw someone in the pink jacket. And now I know that it was just a pink jacket. Just a pink jacket.
“Ammi, I want to be a doctor” –
Laila whispered in my ear, pointing towards the doctor heading towards us.
I turned around to see her,
“You will be one day,” I said aloud with a crumbled faith in my heart. But “It’s a loop, and it should end with me, ” I whispered to myself, just like my mother.
This was written by our contributing writer, Safoora Bahadur.
Image Source: Unsplash, Ben Patton
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