The Orphans

She was just sitting there under the star-apple tree, squatting on her haunches, head hanging over her chest, her spittoon cup and a plate of uneaten food by her side.

Returning from my lunch-break, I was late for school where I taught second grade and was taking a short-cut across the yard to save time, and as I passed her, I gave her the Islamic greeting “Assalamualaikum Grandmother”, but she paid me no attention.

But this story begins many years before that day. She was no relative of my family’s, but we children called her the honorary “Grandmother” given her age, and because her family lived next door to ours. I was not born when this story happens, but I heard it from my mother and the villagers.

She had been married to a widower who had three children – two girls and a boy. But he died shortly after leaving his three children in the care of his wife, their step-mother. Dear reader, this piece of my quilt is stitched with cloth of dark, somber colors. She, as a Muslim, had clearly never heard, nor read that part of the Holy Quran where Muslims are warned over and over about their treatment of orphans.

According to my mother, they were all expected to accompany her to the fields to work. No school for them. It was the job of the middle orphan, 14 year old Mina, to stay at home to clean, cook, wash, do the family’s laundry and fill the water barrels fetching the water from the artesian well that stood on the roadside before my parents’ home . They all expected her to get up at 4:00 a.m. light the fire, and cook the food for breakfast and for a packed lunch which would be taken to the fields.

The three orphans were subject to constant abuse – physical and mental from their step mother. Beatings were administered and curses shouted loud enough to invade the space that divided our home from theirs. Who was there to give them a hug or a smile, or a mouthful of rice when they were hungry? Being ill-clothed and ill-fed and made to eat only when the others had eaten, they were each expected to fend from themselves, and were made to sleep on jute bags on the floor.

Very often, Mina, who was left at home, was expected to find the things that were needed to prepare dinner for the family, and too often there was nothing. She knew the consequences if the stepmother and her children came come from the fields and there was no food.

My mother recalls how the unhappy, beleaguered young girl resorted to stealing in order to get the things necessary to cook to avoid the beating which she knew was forthcoming. One day, my mother coming home from doing her shopping, saw a trail of dhall (lentil) from her kitchen, across our yard and into the kitchen next door. She knew what this meant. Mina had come in to our kitchen while my mother was gone and had stolen what she needed to cook the dinner -dhall and aloo ( potatoes). She had put the dhall in an apron with a hole in it. Often, when there was no oil to cook the vegetables, she might ask my mother for a coconut which she would grate, boil in water and use the residue in which to cook the vegetables.

She sometimes borrowed my mother’s “girgirra” and walked to the canal to catch shrimps or fish for small snook and bassa which she cleaned and cooked. In short, her life was given over to “making gold from straw”.

To this abuse there was no end and the sorrow she bore was too much for her tired, young shoulders. What language is there to tell of sorrow, abuse, neglect, and burdens too large for young shoulders to carry? The older sister could do nothing to comfort her as she herself not much older, needed comfort. As well, the brother was epileptic, so life for these three orphans was an unending song of sorrow.

On this fateful day, the family did not get a packed lunch because there was nothing in the kitchen to cook. The step-mother sent the brother home to get the lunch that was expected to be ready. On his arrival home, he found the fireside cold and empty, not daubed, the dirty pots on the ground and his sister nowhere around. “Mina?” he shouted for her.”Weh you deh? I come for the food.” No answer. He searched around the yard and then went into the house.

What he saw in the room sent him screaming out into the yard. My mother, hearing the screams, ran over to see him pulling his hair and crying mournfully. He couldn’t speak but pointed to the house, so she went into the room and there she saw how Mina’s sad story on earth had come to a close. Mina was hanging from the rafters in the bedroom, her lifeless body dangling from a short piece of rope. Cinderella’s fourteen year old loveless life of torment, fear, hunger, neglect, and abuse were woven into that jute rope that ended her short, sad life.

Epilogue:

Now, let’s return to that day, many, many years later when I saw the step-mother (aka Grandmother) sitting under the star-apple tree in her son’s yard. Her asthma had taken over her respiratory organs that made breathing tortuous and speech impossible. She was a bag of bones and incapable of any movement, avoided by her family, put outside to spend the day and cough up her phlegm in her spittoon, rocking her body to and fro. Her food was given to her just there in a designated plate.

At 3:00 o’clock that afternoon, as I was walking home from my day of teaching my class, I saw a crowd of village people in the yard under the star-apple tree. I went over to see what the commotion was all about.

Her daughter-in-law had found her lifeless body right there still sitting under the star-apple tree. Thinking on it later, I was sure that when I passed her that mid-day sitting so still under the tree, she had already been dead, sick, alone and unwanted, flies buzzing over the plate of food that had been placed by her side and left untouched.

Note: The Holy Quran warns us over and over, in unequivocal terms about the treatment of orphans. One verse reads, “So as for the orphan, do not oppress him.” Surah ad Duha: v 9

And another: “Have you seen the one who denies the recompense of the religion? For that is the one who drives away the orphan.” Surah Al Ma’un: v 1-2

Years later, the brother suffered an epileptic fit, fell into the flooded rice field face down and drowned.