In my mother's eyes, I never should have happened. On every birthday, dating back as far as I can recall, Ma would remind me that my gender had been a cruel mistake. “You were supposed to be a boy!” she'd lament, wringing her hands, as if willing me to be replaced by a male heir. “You kicked around so much. I could feel you were going to be a boy!”
Each year on my birthday, my maternal grandfather Dadu would pull me aside. He dabbled in astrology as a hobby, and he had logged the exact time I was born: year, month, day, and time. “According to the astrological charts, the moment you were born comes just once in a century,” he'd say, pausing for effect, his eyebrows raised and his voice somber. “The moment is called chura moni: chura, the peak; moni, the jewel. When a boy child is born at the very time that you were born, the universe ensures that he will reach great heights.”
At this point in the story, which I heard many times before, I always hoped the ending would be different. I longed that Dadu's reading of my fate this time would dictate that I, a girl child, would reach great heights too. I wanted assurance that this historic and once-in a-century moment of fortunate birth, chura moni, could include me.
But the story always ended the same way. “But alas, the moment of chura moni was wasted on you,” Dadu would say sadly. “You were born a girl.”
To understand my mother's and grandfather's dismay, you need to understand my family. You need to understand the land of my birth, Bangladesh, and Bengali culture. I was born in Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, the fourth daughter of a mother whose very happiness depended on the gender of her children. Three sisters had come before me. First, came Mahreen in the late 1950s. As the first child, she was my parents' favorite. Then came Sharmeen in the early 1960s. She was bright, with a photographic memory but always sickly. A few years later came Tazneen: the most feminine, beautiful, and delicate of us all. And then came me. In the brief span of a decade, my mother gave birth to four girls.
It wasn't unusual for a woman in our society to pin her hopes on producing sons. Many cultures still reward women who bear male offspring. Gender bias, specifically preference for sons, means that globally there are about 1.5 million missing female births every year due to sex-selective abortions. This phenomenon is most acute in Asia, especially in China and South Asia. Patriarchal values across many countries still tend to give men and boys incredible advantages and control over opportunities and resources, and factors like gender-based violence, unequal access to schooling, and child marriage harm girls and women.
So in the time and culture in which I grew up, a wife's greatest responsibility—some might argue her only responsibility—was to produce male offspring. If she were lucky enough to give birth to a boy early in the marriage, she could move on to other things. But if she failed—if, like my mother, she produced four girls in a row—her value as a wife, as a person, remained in question.
Ma had a traditional arranged marriage to Papa when she was nineteen. Papa was twenty-six. Keeping to conservative Muslim tradition, my parents were in separate rooms during their wedding ceremony. They had not met before the ceremony, and this custom ensured that they would not meet during the ceremony either. Nevertheless, both my parents answered yes three times when asked by the imam if they would take the other person as a life partner. They were already husband and wife when they met each other, for the first time, on their wedding night.
They were a mismatch from the very beginning, but neither wanted to admit it. They had too much to lose. Their union was a practical one, designed to benefit the extended family. Papa was an academic on track for a promising career in government. He came from no money but had a well-known family title and smarts galore. Papa loved his books, doing crosswords, and playing chess. His mother, who arranged the marriage, saw in Ma a means to improve the family's lot in life. That stemmed not only from the reputation and wealth of my mother's family but also from her beauty.
Without question, Ma was beautiful. With lush dark hair, big brown eyes, flawless skin, and an enviable figure, my mother was like a Bengali Daisy Buchanan, the charming heroine in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Draped in a beautiful sari, Ma could hold court and cast a spell on all men and women who met her. Ma could also pick up languages effortlessly. She was fluent in Bengali, English, Urdu, Sanskrit, and Hindi. She could speak more dialects than I could count on my fingers and knew a smattering of French and Persian. She loved to socialize. At dinner parties, she was the flame around which guests gathered, charming people with her jokes, puns, and stories and fluidly moving from one language to another.
Ma longed for her life to include traveling, watching movies, and socializing. But because Papa's family was not well off, and he was the eldest son, he sent most of the meager salary he earned as a civil servant to his family to support his parents, eight sisters, and two brothers. My parents lived with my mother's parents, who in turn supported them. And without any other sources of money in the family, this is the way their lives would always be.
So when I entered the world, I wasn't just a source of disappointment, I was a constant reminder to my mother of her inadequacy. As a little girl, I had to wrap my mind around this heavy truth: I was the emblem of my mother's failure, as a woman, to deliver.
My maternal grandmother, whom we called Bubu, married my grandfather through an arranged marriage when she was just eleven years old. Back then this was not uncommon, and it was hardly taboo. No one would have thought of her as a child bride; she was simply a bride. At the time of marriage, Dadu was seventeen and considered a man.
For Bubu, marriage at eleven was a way of life in which she had no say. Even one hundred years after my grandmother's marriage, according to the United Nations (UN), South Asia still has the highest rate of child marriage in the world, and Bangladesh has the highest rate in Asia. Close to half the women in the region are still married before the age of eighteen, and nearly one in five are younger than fifteen. These child marriages put girls at high risk of exploitation, violence, and abuse. In the blink of an eye, a child bride like Bubu goes from being her father's property to her husband's, and she is often used as a negotiation tool among families.
As my grandmother was relatively dark-skinned, she was considered unattractive and potentially not marriageable. To overcome this, her father used the promise of foreign education for the potential groom as a bargaining chip. After the wedding, however, Bubu's family reneged on this deal. Dadu never forgave Bubu for this, although she had had no voice in any part of this transaction.
Not that a lack of a foreign education held Dadu back. He attended one of the top universities in British India on scholarship, earned his law degree, and went on to become a prominent judge in the Indian state of East Bengal under the British Raj, or colonial rule. Meanwhile, his young wife remained in her village home, led a quiet, pious life, took care of her family, and never received a formal education. Bubu's learning was limited to signing her name and reading some Bengali with much difficulty. Years later, when I was teaching women in rural villages to sign their names to receive the first loan of their lives, I would see Bubu's smile on each of their faces as they beamed with newly acquired power. With one signature came a measure of freedom.
Once Dadu returned from Calcutta and joined the judicial service, Bubu's existence revolved around taking care of him and setting up a home wherever Dadu's position took them. Over the decades, it was her job to clean and fold his clothes. It was her job to prepare the foods he liked and to make certain that his yogurt was just the right consistency. And it was her job to clean and polish Dadu's hookah, the three-foot-high water pipe with a brass base.
But never—no matter how faithfully she cooked and cleaned for Dadu—could she bring herself to look into his eyes. And never could she call him by his name. For as long as I can recall, my grandmother referred to my grandfather, the father of her only daughter, in formal terms, as Joj Shahib, or Mr. Judge. It was as if she had never shared a bed with the man, as if she lived in awe and perhaps even fear of him.
Yet the kitchen was her domain. Bubu would sit on the floor and grind spices with shil patta, the Bengali version of stone mortar and pestle, and spend hours in her garden to find the right ingredients to make bhorta (a side dish of mashed herbs, spice seeds, or vegetable paste to be mixed with rice) to spice up our otherwise humble meals. Knowing my love of food, Bubu would indulge me with little treats of bread when I got tired of eating rice. She would heat the bread for me and gently admonish me, “How can you be a good Bengali girl if you don't like rice? When you get married, you will need to cook rice every day. What do you think: you will marry an engrez shahib (a white man) and eat potatoes all the time?”
As Bubu watched me drink my milk and eat my bread, she would give a lot of free advice on how to cook a special dish or take care of the fruit trees. Occasionally she would add in some advice on boys and men. “Remember: men are like children,” she would say. “They don't understand the ways of the world very well. That is why we women have to take care of them and do the thinking for them. Let them scream and shout. They don't have the power; we do.” I would just nod my head.
While Dadu ate his lunch in silence—alone and precisely at 1:00 p.m., per his Ayurvedic practice—Bubu would stand and serve him, anticipating his needs. Once Dadu had finished his lunch, smoked his hookah, and retreated to his room for his afternoon nap, the whole household would come to a sleepy, slow, midday rest. Bubu, who took her midday rest after others, waited for this moment.
When it was time for Dadu's after-meal smoke, I would watch as Bubu carefully placed the burning charcoal on the clay tobacco holder. I'd watch as she blew gently and steadily into the clay receptacle to get the tobacco burning at just the right temperature.
I was the only person in the household who did not sleep in the afternoons. It was the perfect time to climb trees, play with my slingshot, or sneak a taste of the various fruit pickles Bubu put in glass jars out in the sun to marinate. But sometimes, before starting my afternoon adventures, I watched as my grandmother transformed into someone else entirely.
Looking around the house and making sure nobody was close by, she would sit next to the hookah in Dadu's chair, a comfortable wicker chair nobody else was allowed to use, on the veranda. She would settle in, take hold of the pipe in one hand, close her eyes, and inhale deeply from the pipe. With that inhale, Bubu changed before my eyes. She would take in the loud burble of air bubbles in the brass water base of the hookah and then languidly open her eyes and let out the smoke, her lips curving into a smile.
Hiding behind a curtain, I wondered at her bravery and defiance. In a society where only men smoked and only the elder men smoked in public, here was Bubu, smiling, nodding, and happily smoking away. Smoking that pipe was, for her, a reclamation of something—an assertion of her right to take up space. There are many ways to be a rebel, she seemed to say.
Observing their marriages, I vowed I would never live like my mother or my grandmother. I did not want an arranged marriage. I did not want to be a child bride. I did not want a disinterested or unloving husband or to be treated as a servant or a trophy wife. I did not want to get respect only when I bore a son.
No. When I grew up, I would neither allow a system to dictate my life nor settle for a false sense of power. I would not be a rebel in secret only. I would inhale joy and independence without worrying about who was looking.
Durreen Shahnaz has worked both in high finance on Wall Street and in microfinance in the back streets of rural Bangladesh. Following stints as an investment banker, development worker, educator, media executive, and social entrepreneur, Shahnaz founded a pioneering impact investment firm that brings together investors, development agencies, and entrepreneurs to advance sustainable development and empower millions of women. Shahnaz is on the Forbes 2021 “50 over 50” list and received the 2017 Oslo Business for Peace Award, often referred to as the Nobel Prize for Business.
To find out more about the book, The Defiant Optimist, please check out www.defiantoptimist.com