ABSTRACT
It was only after my mother had left this world that I realized how little I knew of her as a woman with her own aspirations and dreams. My sisters and I had only seen her as a wife and mother. Ma hardly talked about her past and we, in our egocentric youth, never asked. It was as though she did not exist prior to her marriage! All that we knew was that she was from a village called Noyna, in present-day Bangladesh, and that she and her family had crossed over to India a few years before Partition.
