Mother: My silent healing meter

The color of my mother's smile is soft blue like grasshopper wings. When the sun shines, it casts a blue saffron glow, washes away all my sadness. Mother loved this me a little more in childhood. He used to take me across the blue desert of the ocean to the land of coconut groves to feed me rice. Yet when I was earnest—I would not eat rice without hearing the story of Arabya Rajni, still that tender blue of mother never turned black.

The story of the bhodar, stork, blue fox, tuntuni or tea bird still wakes up in my imagination when I take milk rice in my mouth. The taste of mother's hand, the scent of mother's hand is like my nectar. When I was very young I could not tell the difference between a grasshopper and a honeybee. One day mother's lips got swollen while saving me from a bee sting. When I asked, mother laughed and said, “The fish got pierced by the fork while eating.”

That's my mother—a silent healer hiding all her pain.

Mother used to tell me the story of a white horse on many starry nights. I had never heard that story anywhere else—not in the pages of a book, not in a long magazine column, not in a scripture. Mother used to say that on the evening of Hemant, a saffron-colored horse left the mother's womb with a child. And when that horse gets angry, it takes the mothers too.

Mother saw that horse when I was born. He snatched me from the horse and hid me in his chest. About twenty minutes after birth I heard my first cry. How many times have I heard that story sunk deep in my heart, and sought that saffron-coloured horse. where is he Who runs across the sky?

Mother used to look at Metho Moon and say, “You are my sweetest moon.”

I kept a number of gnats in an old glass jar in an aquarium. I used to call them 'Zuni Bugs'. “Birds have minds, insects have souls,” Mother said one day as she ate dinner in the soft light of the Zuni insect.

That day I understood for the first time – nature also knows how to feel. Since then I have not dared to hurt any beneficial insects or animals. Later, I realized that my love for nature and life came from my mother when I read Dwijen Sharma's jewelry on the edge of a forest or Inam Al Haq's birds. His wisdom has silently infected my heart.

I often saw my mother carefully collecting the silver rain water. Cooking was done with that water, water was boiled for drinking, many household works were done. As there was no fresh water tubewell at home, mother used to walk long distances to fetch water in a pitcher.

I had a bad habit when I was a child – I used to wake up and cry if I couldn't find my mother. One day mother went to fetch water. Not finding him, I cried so much that the house was flooded with sunshine and tears. Later, as a punishment, mother returned home with me in one arm and a pitcher full of water in the other arm for a week.

Just as water is another name for life, so is mothers another name for life—a silent healing instrument of life.

Even today, in the late nights of Kartik-Aghran, I suddenly remember my mother's face. The artificial light of the screen cannot fill the emptiness of the mind, cannot awaken that sacred blue. However, that blue is still spread across my entire sky, and my mother is forever dimmed in its blueness. Like the deep blue of the Malayan sea He is awake in all my senses.

Touching each blue feather, I still hear the sound of mother's breath. Whenever the world has slumbered, I am awakened by my mother's blue—an eternal, silent measure of healing.

Author: Post Graduate Student, Department of Animal Science
Faculty of Animal Husbandry
Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh-2022