routed

Sometimes you feel something so beautiful that a sharp pain goes right through your insides. It hits you at a particular point, say somewhere slightly to the left of your sternum, and then blossoms and blooms and pulsates and spreads right the way through you until this feeling becomes almost unbearable and you feel as if you're suffocating, and your eyes smart as if you had been stung and a hot cloud cushions your ears and muffles your hearing and you do everything you can to just breathe.

Yeuk thats disgustingly corny.

I do NOT feel like this when I have an exam in two days.

I think my mum is a wonder. She's blind in her left eye, and with her right eye can barely see, but she hardly ever sits down without reading something. I guess she's the original bookworm of this family, and from whom my sisters and brothers got their love of books from. I always thought it was my dad, but now realise that my mum had more to do with it. I remember her reading Road to Makkah by Md Asad (Leopold Weiss) when I was barely waist high (translated to Bangla of course) and so many other books I only realised the value of very recently.

As a child, I remember having friends over from school and being surprised that they were surprised at the amount of books in the house. My dad built shelves on every available space on the wall, and where my friends had pretty ornaments, we had books. Every colour, size, shape, condition, language you can think of, it was there. I remember being about six years old and (pretending I suppose) to do my salah in front of a particular bookshelf which had some dictionaries at the bottom, and every time I would bow, I'd read the words 'anthropological and etymological' until i made them into a kind of rhyme. (Erm, I still don't know what they mean, this was all obviously wasted on me).

When my mum became diabetic and a few years later began losing her sight I remember she use to cry a lot and I remeber she would sit up late into the night reading and writing, often making notes from tafsirs - my sister told me later it was because she had begun to panic about not being able to do this for much longer.

I think my mum is a wonder because when she got married at 15 to my dad, she couldnt read or write - her rich landowner dad didnt believe in sending pretty young girls to mixed schools. My dad taught her to read and write. She came to England when her 9th child was was 3 and I was born here, her 10th. She didn't know a word of English, but still taught us how to read a write bith Bangla and English fluently. How? by having us copy the numbers from the salah calendar and the months from the same. My dad would bring back'Peter and Jane' books from the Sunday market at Brick Lane and we would have to copy these out too.

She would pack us off to school, and go out and do dawah in the community all day coming home exhausted but still able to cook in time for us coming home. She set up circles in houses, community centres, clubs and even led one in a church. Even now, when she goes for a walk, she'll inevitably end up inside a house where someone whoes recognised her has invited her in and we'll panic not knowing where she is. People are eternally grateful to her because she has taught generations of children how to read Quran and you'll get grown men passing her by saying Salam who were once the kids she taught.

Now my mum is 64 and has 32 grandchildren. She lost her oldest son (and ally when she was alone with 9 kids and things were the toughest for her in the village in Bdesh - my dad was in England) when he was just 23.

I think my mum is a wonder. She is beautiful and I DO feel like this when I look at her.

Rabbirham huma kama rabbayani sagheera.