A Life Less Ordinary by Baby Halder

Author:Baby Halder
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780061871245
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2008-06-17T07:00:00+00:00

AND SO TIME PASSED AND I FOUND MYSELF PREGNANT again. On top of this I was worried about how to send my son to school. How would we manage, I wondered. Eventually we did get him into a school, but it wasn’t easy. My husband was no help. He’d gotten into the habit of giving the boy money when he was still very small. Every now and again, he’d hand him fifty paise and the child would take the money and run to the shop. He often missed school because of this, and this led to a lot of tension between us. The child became quite a bone of contention between us, and only I know how much I had to suffer on his behalf…

Once, when the child was only three and still feeding at my breast, my husband and I had a fight one day and he beat me up and threw me out of the house, telling me never to return. As I was leaving, he snatched the child from my arms and later, he sent him away to his younger brother’s home. I was at my father’s home but I couldn’t settle down to anything. I missed my child so much and worried about him all the time. Baba brought my little niece and put her in my lap, saying she was also a child and perhaps her presence would console me. But it was no use. Finally, I went in search of my son and when I got to my brother-in-law’s home I found him there, playing happily with the other children! I called out “Babu” softly and he looked up and saw me. In an instant, he shot into my arms like a little bird and began grabbing at my breasts with his little hands, trying to pull them toward his mouth. I carried him with me to a temple across the road from their house and let him suckle. As we sat there, a girl of some fifteen or sixteen years of age stopped to watch us. She asked if I was the boy’s mother but I did not respond. I thought, If I say anything, it will lead to more questions—so I just kept quiet. Soon more girls collected, my brother-in-law’s wife among them. “Didi, don’t take the child away from here,” she said. “His father left us with strict instructions that he is not to go anywhere and also that if you came we were not to give the child to you.”

“Why,” I said angrily, “does the child belong only to him? Look at him! He’s just a baby! He’s still suckling. How can you keep him? Do you have any idea of what I have been through without him? And what will you gain by keeping him away from his mother?” She wasn’t willing to listen to reason at all, and in the end, she had to snatch the child away from me. He didn’t want to leave me any more than I wanted to leave him.

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