Nani’s salt

"Amar moto sarata jibon ranna ghore katio na."

Her voice, thin as a whisper, sharp as a blade, sliced through the kitchen air thick with mustard oil and regret. The words echoed, bouncing off stained walls and copper pots that had borne witness to her life. My nani, Morium Nesa, stood stooped over a boiling pot of dal, her saree wrapped tightly around her frail 4-foot-8-inch frame. The smoke curled around her like a noose. But she kept stirring. Stirring was what she knew–what she had been taught to do. Stir the pot, smooth the tempers, swallow the rage.

In the early days of her marriage, my nani held on to the fragile hope of a good life—stitched together with respect, perhaps a little love, maybe a few sweet words under the soft glow of an oil lamp. But promises, like salt in warm water, tend to disappear, leaving only a bitter aftertaste.

The marriage wasn't heaven. It wasn't even earth. It was a battlefield. The daily routines–children, chores, the ceaseless labour of keeping a home–clashed with a sharp mind that knew it was meant for more. But what wore her down was not the work. It was the anger, rage that sparked over trifles by her husband. The salt in the curry was never right. Too much. Or too little. On such days, her husband's plates didn't stay on the table. They flew crashing into gardens, walls, verandas, wherever the fury flung them.

Read more

On invisibilised violence

My grandmother, cheeks streaked with silent tears, would cradle her father's photo, her last anchor to the idea of safety, and cry. Not loudly. Loudness was reserved for men. Her sorrow came quietly, slipping through the cracks of the house, curling into her daughters' ears. Women's grief, in her time, was meant to be swallowed. Like bitter medicine. Endured, not expressed.

But even in her silence, she made a promise. Her daughters would not inherit this. They would not live with hearts clenched in smoky kitchens. They would not measure their worth in teaspoons of salt.

"Not you," she told them. "Not your lives. Not your world."

Her daughters didn't just learn to read. They learned to unlearn. To unlearn the inherited hush passed down like heirloom jewelry: silent, glittering, and suffocating. They unlearned that a woman's value lived in the softness of her rice, or the approval of a man too tired or too entitled to see her.

My grandmother made sure of it. She didn't just raise daughters. She raised defiance.

She didn't just raise daughters. She raised defiance.

Her daughters didn't just learn to read, they learned to unlearn. To unlearn the inherited hush passed down like heirloom jewelry: silent, glittering, suffocating. They unlearned the idea that a woman's worth was measured by the softness of her chal and daal or the approval of a man too tired or too entitled to see her. My grandmother made sure of that. She didn't just raise daughters; she raised defiance. She told them: study. Dream. Break the script. Write your own. A life beyond the kitchen, beyond kitchen and obedience, beyond survival–one made of choice, stitched with dignity.

She never saw education as something to be folded into a dowry list, tucked between Benarasi silks and kansa thalas, one more bharis of gold to sweeten the marriage bargain. It wasn't a clever line on a biodata, recited between sips of syrupy tea, clinks of china and brittle smiles: "The girl knows English." "She can help with homework." "She'll raise clever children". All this murmured, as the matchmaker painted futures where daughters became mothers in someone else's house, their learning neatly domesticated.

Not for her girls.

Read more

Voices of resistance: Stories of women’s struggles and resilience in South Asia

To her, education wasn't a decoration to be admired on the wedding morning, like a turmeric-scrubbed glow. It was something else entirely. Education was the thing no one could take. It was the seed planted in the spine. It was voice, and walk, and the courage to look up. It was how her daughters would learn to name themselves, to write their own futures, to walk streets their mothers only passed in stories. It was not an offering. It was a possession.

Not a bridal ornament, but an inheritance, meant to be kept, carried, and passed on like fire.

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of Lazeena Muna's memoir, Kumu. Read the full chapter on The Daily Star and Star Books and Literature's websites.

Lazeena Muna is a global public health and development practitioner, who writes occasionally.