There was a light drizzle in the late afternoon yesterday. In that drizzle, she -- a homeless woman in her late 20s or early 30s -- was lying under a tree on the wide road-divider of Alaol Avenue in Uttara. What does she do when it rains hard? No roadside shop or veranda house will give her shelter.
I have been watching her for the last three or so months. I had never seen her before. I almost always see her lying with her eyes wide open or sleeping in the daylight on that road-divider with a big synthetic sack full of who-knows-what by her side.
Sometimes I see her walking slowly on the footpath carrying that sack on her head. Her face and figure, if not deceiving, give the impression that she is from a good family.
She is a good-looking young woman in extremely dirty clothes -- disheveled pajamas and long kameez. Her mud-stained face is a telltale sign that she does not bathe. Where will she bathe, when she does not even have a roof over her head?
Her eyes and behaviour do not say that she is suffering from any sort of mental illness. A few times I have seen her exchanging words normally with a roadside vegetable vendor and the security guard of a nearby house.
I have never seen street urchins treating her as they usually do destitute people who are mentally ill.
Where has she come from? I can’t ask her this question, for the obvious reason -- I, being a man, and she, a young homeless woman. No doubt, she had a family, was married to a man. Perhaps she was divorced and was driven away.
She probably fell mentally ill, and then her husband and her in-laws, without arranging any sort of treatment, drove her out of the house. She does not have parents or loving siblings who could give her shelter, thus she has become a woman on the streets.
Gradually she was cured of her mental inflections. But by then, she probably lost all her avenues into a normal life. Perhaps her husband has gotten remarried and is not willing at all to take her back. Perhaps she has forgotten the way back to the place, somewhere in a remote part of Bangladesh, where she used to live.
She could be a good housemaid, being young and healthy. These days, Dhaka’s wealthy families are facing a scarcity of good housemaids. Yet, no house will hire her as a helping hand as she is dirty and her clothes are filthy, making her look deranged.
Being human, she certainly becomes hungry. Where does she get food from? She doesn’t have the money to purchase food. She doesn’t beg, most of her time she spends lying on that road-divider. I have never seen her reach out and beg to a passerby, and I have never seen passersby looking at her with compassion.
At night, does she fall prey to the clutches of predatory men? She is young and good-looking. Or does her dirty appearance and her ragged clothes keep such men away?
Will the government, say the Ministry of Social Welfare, come forward to rescue her from her miserable state? I can only guess. I know ours is not a welfare state.
In this part of the world, the state holds no such responsibility towards its citizens. Is there any organisation in Bangladesh which can extend a helping hand to this woman? Any woman-specific organisation that can come forward?
She must be yearning for a family and children of her own, and a cozy place to call home -- things that the average individual wants.
Will she have to spend the rest of her life on the streets like this? It seems she is destined to. Without a roof over her head, during the monsoon, she will get drenched, and in winter she will get chilled to the bone.
Why does she have to suffer so much? Only she knows what her suffering means, and what goes on in her mind when she looks around at other people.