Kumu: Meye bela

The house in Bogura did not shout its presence. It stood quietly, as more than shelter, more than walls and roof. With some walls made of clay, the house was warm and porous, absorbing many things and remembering every monsoon. Others were tin–thin and loud–echoing every footstep, every childhood rush towards something or away from it. The walls also held stories, chatter, and smells. The memory of lullabies sung not only at night but in broad daylight; when the sun slid in through unopened windows and played kutkut on the floor. The hiss of oil lamps lit when the day gave up too soon. Arguments too soft to be called fights, too familiar to be remembered. Words that fluttered and died before they could bruise.

The cement floors stayed cool even on the hottest days, and the verandahs wrapped around the house. The thatched roof was patched just often enough to show care, sagging just enough to show comfort. They did not measure wealth in a well-kept thatched roof or freshly plastered walls, but in new books stacked carefully at the bedside and in small blackboards dusted white with sums and spelling. Wealth was a report card inked with numbers above ninety. Wealth was a glass of hot milk pressed into drowsy hands at sunrise or a spoonful of ghee dissolved into steamed rice–for brain food.

And above all, wealth was children, boys and girls alike, and their widening gaze beyond the courtyard, beyond the mulberry rows and the low clay walls, imagining a world that did not end where the village path did. Wealth was the understanding and the steady support to send them outward–to rise, to learn, to unfold into their own becoming. Because space on this earth is never simply granted. It must be claimed, with ink on fingers, with books held close to the chest, with the stubborn insistence on becoming.

So, if the house looked modest, it was only because its true architecture stood elsewhere, rising quietly in classrooms and libraries, in sharpened pencils and open books, in the invisible scaffolding of becoming that no visitor could see but that held everything up.

From its front verandah, the world spilled open into a sea of green, miles upon miles of mulberry trees stretching toward the horizon like a quiet promise. In winter, they stood stripped and skeletal, their branches brittle, their silence deep. But by spring, they softened. The same mulberries unfurled, their leaves tender as breath, trembling in the hush before dawn. These were not trees for shade or show. They were the living spine of the household’s survival, leaf by leaf feeding the silkworms that spun gold in silence.

Nani and Nana shared the central room of the house, just off the long, shaded verandah. It always smelled faintly of betel leaf and mustard oil–sharp, familiar, lingering in the air like memory. At the far end of the front verandah, in a small, dim room, Nani’s mother lay bedridden, quietly counting her days. She had once followed a man across rivers and then along rail tracks. When he died, she unpacked her sadness and came to her younger daughter, my nani, to stay. Not quite a guest. Not quite the mistress of the house. Just there, loved but always forgotten. That room held the scent of talcum powder and silence. Her eyes, even when closed, seemed to see everything.

There were three rooms at the back of the house, stitched together by a long, quiet verandah where shadows lingered and time staggered, especially in the late afternoon. The breeze came through the smell of guava skins, kamini blossoms, and mulberry dust, slipping between the slats. The largest of the rooms held the tender democracy of five small lives. There were rules, but broken as needed, and also rhythms–sometimes soft, sometimes wild.Kumu, at 10, already carried the seriousness of someone older, her hair parted with precision, her manner quietly exacting. Tultul, eight, was a tempest in a frock, her voice sharp as shattered glass, beautiful, reckless, and impossible to ignore. Bacchu, six, slept with fists tight and secrets tighter, always plotting the next bit of mischief he’d deny with a grin. And Faruk, four and a half if asked, five if not, wore his bewilderment like a second skin. He cried in installments, pausing mid-sob to follow the trail of an ant or wonder aloud why spoons shine. A spoon’s curve with sugar could derail his misery. A beetle’s shimmer restored his peace.

Lucky, the baby was fragile, feverish, forever curled into Nani’s curve like a comma in a sentence too long. She slept on the other bed, the quieter one, beneath mosquito nets hanging from the four bedposts: thin, porous, freckled with the ghosts of mosquitoes killed in the night, and always in need of mending.

In that room, with its corrugated tin walls and whispers tucked into pillowcases, on bamboo mattresses, dreams piled up. Some folded. Some crumpled. All waiting.

In the left-hand corner of the verandah, behind a faded curtain and a door that creaked the way an old complaint does–low, persistent, and unwilling to be ignored, was Peara’s room. It was a room of measured silences and unsaid things. Peara, five years older than Kumu, had already begun the business of becoming someone important. The first son. The heir. The vessel into which all of Nana’s unspent dreams had been poured. He moved through the house with an inherited gravity, circling the responsibilities fastened to him as the firstborn, laid across his shoulders before he knew how to shrug them off, before he knew he had been given no choice. He did not run or shout or chase mangoes in the garden. He studied in stillness, in solitude, barely glancing at the riot of younger siblings blooming and brawling in the bigger room. He had already stepped out of that world, one quiet inch at a time.

On the other side of the house, beyond a room kept ready for sacks of paddy and jars of mango pickles, was the room that remained Bulbul and Tuntun's. The beds lay stretched and smooth, sheets tucked tight, and pillows waiting with patience. Even dust seemed to hesitate to settle there, as though instructed not to disturb, for absence had been arranged carefully.

When Kumu was ten, the girls had been sent away to Bharateswari Homes, a place of ironed uniforms and echoing corridors, of bells that told you when to wake and when to sleep, of dreams lined up in dormitories like metal trunks. They returned only for Eid and long summers, stepping back into the house with the scent of starch and coconut oil clinging to them. Their braids were neater, their laughter lowered, shaped now by imposed rules for good girls and a maturity yielded as a result.

They arrived carrying stories of other girls, other worlds. And when they left again, the room resumed its waiting, beds pulled tight, air held still, as if absence, too, had been taught discipline.

Each return was a celebration. Each departure, a small mourning. The girls wept, clinging to the doorframe. But Nani did not weep. Nani, who had held eight children inside her body, stood still, dry-eyed and determined. There was no space for softness, not now. Education, to her, was not a luxury or a choice. It was the only raft. She let them go again and again, even as the house shrank without them. Because she knew staying was easy. Becoming something else required leaving.

The kitchen stood a little apart from the house. At first light, before the mynahs had finished arguing in the guava tree, smoke would begin to unspool from the half-open clay wall. It rose blue and thin into the pale morning, carrying with it the smell of damp wood and cow dung cakes. Nani crouched before the earthen chulha, coaxed flame from last night’s ash. She fed it splinters of dry wood, a careful breath, a twist of wrist. The fire caught reluctantly, then surrendered, then settled into its daily obedience. It burned until noon and thickened. Rice swelled and softened in dented pots, each grain loosening into steam. Dal bubbled into gold. Chicken from the coop released the warm scent of ginger and cinnamon, turmeric blooming into the air like a small sun. Vegetables–bhaji or torkari, depending on what the garden had offered up, gave themselves over to spice, collapsing into hot oil and panchforon.

When the last pot was lifted, the flame was not extinguished so much as persuaded to rest. Dinner had already been made alongside lunch. Rice remained perched above warm embers, held in a slow, patient heat, waiting for dusk to arrive with its second hunger. The kitchen did not follow clocks. It moved in rhythms older than schedules, answering to other authorities–school bells, the rumble of returning footsteps, and Nana’s cough across the courtyard.  Fingers burned and healed and burned again. Smoke stung eyes that had long ago learned not to water. No one ever formally learned this choreography. They absorbed it. Like language. Like breath.

Beside it, the cow shed squatted, part tin, part clay, built in quiet negotiation with weather. The front leaned on rusted sheets of corrugated metal; the back was molded from earth and straw, patched each monsoon with wet mud and unspoken determination. It carried the smell of milk and dung and the slow, patient shuffle of hooves against packed ground.

Three cows lived there, heavy-eyed and deliberate, their flanks warm, their breath sweet with hay. Calves tugged and mooed, restless with hunger, nudging at udders and ropes alike. Milk flowed daily–thick, frothing, poured into aluminum pails that rang softly when set down. The milkman came around ten, punctual as a habit. But before he arrived, nani would already be there, hands gentle and firm, murmuring to the calves, stroking their foreheads, as if tending not livestock but something softer, something that answered back.

The latrine, a proud afterthought of cement and caution, had two doors: one facing the inside world of family, another opening to the ambiguity of outside. The children argued about it as if it were a riddle their lives depended on. Which door mattered more? The one you entered through, or the one you could escape from? Was it a shortcut or a secret? No one knew. But they argued anyway–in whispers, in shouts, with the urgency only children assign to things adults dismiss.

The garden was a riot. Everything bloomed at once, nothing asked permission. Guava trees extended their arms, offering fruit and mischief in equal measure. Kumu and Tultul climbed them daily, their legs swinging down, whispering secrets to ants and pretending gravity was a suggestion. Beneath them, the world with its rules, its punishments, and its adults disappeared.

A jackfruit tree hunched at the back like an old wrestler, bursting with swollen, bumpy flesh that oozed sweet stickiness when cracked open. The papaya trees leaned into each other like conspirators, always in quiet conversation. The mango tree, older than any child there, held its mangoes like offerings to no one in particular–abundant, unapologetic, never in a hurry.

But it was the rose bush that owned the garden. Not delicate, not trimmed into obedience. Wild. Huge. Brazen. Blooming red like it had something to prove. My Nani’s favourite. She never cut from it. Said it didn’t need a vase, the bush itself was the vase. It bloomed on its own terms. No pruning, no pleading. As if beauty, when left alone, might become its truest self.

And by the gate, two kamini trees had lost all sense of propriety. They intertwined around each other like old lovers, refusing to be separated. Their white blossoms dropped like spilled secrets on the path below. Together, they formed an archway, accidental, perfect–the kind that made children pause before passing through, as if stepping into something sacred, or magical, or not entirely real.

This was my Nana’s house, and he was known to all as Borobabu. But to the children, he was the master of the white poka, the pale, patient silkworms who feasted on mulberry leaves and spun from their own soft bodies a thread that gleamed like quiet treasure, eating green and giving back gold.

He moved among the mulberry rows as though tending an orchestra no one else could hear. From leaf to filament, from hunger to shimmer, it was a kind of alchemy. In the dim earthen sheds, the pokas laboured without applause, their small mouths busy with the work of transformation.

The house was not so different. Nor were its people. They too took what were ordinary days of labour, nights of waiting, small griefs folded carefully into moments of happiness and spun from it something that endured. Like silk drawn from green, their lives unwound into stories: fine, tensile, luminous. Stories left behind for others to wear lightly, never quite knowing the work it took to make them shine.

“Kumu” is a living memoir of Selina Hossain’s early life, unfolding through carefully chosen themes and reimagined by her daughter, Lazeena Muna. 

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