My mother

An orphan in a patriarchal society where women worth dependent on their male providers and protectors.


Luck smiled upon her when the mother of her best and shiniest of distant cousins (living in england) arrived and dropped a marriage proposal on a platter. For that moment heaven itself could not have held more allure for her. However, this would not be a fairy tale ending.



Sadly, her handsome husband thought her beneath him. It was thus that her married life began.

This woman survived the constant threat of abandonment in favour of a prettier one or two. The problem with social status in a patriarch society is that you cannot attain one with brilliance, nor beauty. Obsessed with creating a family she kept having babies to her husband's annoyance who only wanted 2.4 children…preferable all boys.


When forced to abort the pregnancy, anesthesia did not work and she screamed out so horribly. I imagined that sound waves traveling through the universe followed by later screams from electric shocks treatments for mental illness. Perhaps god was even further than the distant planets.


Her self esteemed at minus zero manifested in crazy behavior, which soon descends into paranoid schizophrenia. When she was thirtyish. She survived electric shocks. The miracle cure in the 1970s and 80s. This is life so eventfully lived but not without humor that even steven king could not envisage it in his wildest of dreams.


Upon hearing the news of her husband's fatal crash, she began an immediate burning of his belongings. When asked mum 'what are doing' she explained, "he is dead what else can i do". She refused to pray for his soul or cry in front of the family who was devastated by the loss. Her desire to please the male 'protectors' meant that she bought up her sons with an excessive sense of entitlement over and above the rights of their sister or mother. Accruing everything fiscal and denying all fiscal rights to her and daughter. Left out in the cold she continues to worship her sons. Her daughters grow up to tread a fine line between geniuses and dysfunction, some more than others. Her boys became well-healed men respected and married into respected families of the Muslim community. Although females being denied inheritance is as common as forced marriages in the Muslim community. It is the lesser known evil. This woman is my hero because she is my mum.