She was too tired to be visited by anyone else; she has had enough of visitors in her hospital cabin since morning. But she could not hold back her excitement sensing the presence of her daughter around her bed.
“Have you come, ma?” She stretched her arms to touch her child. “Where are you?”
Rumana Manzur moved her hands from side to side. She wished she could see. But not anymore. Rumana has gone blind in a brutal assault by her husband Hasan Sayeed Sumon, who pushed his fingers into her eyes on June 5.
An assistant professor of the International Relations Department at Dhaka University and a postgraduate student at the University of British Columbia in Canada, she is now being treated at LabAid Hospital in the capital.
Ophthalmologists in Bangladesh and India confirmed that her left eye has been completely damaged while the retina of the other one is not responding to her brain.
Rumana is blind now. All right. But the mother in her is not. She may be tired of this world. All right. But the mother in her is not.
“Which dress did you wear, ma? Are you happy to see me again?” she asked her five-year-old daughter Anusheh as she got closer.
Without waiting for an answer, she then felt Anusheh’s dress to figure it out for herself. “Oh! You put on a short skirt,” she said and kissed Anusheh. Anusheh kissed back.
Rumana’s mother stepped in to satisfy Rumana’s curiosity and said her daughter was wearing a skirt over a blue jeans and a black top.
“Will you stay with me for long today?” Rumana asked. The daughter said she would.
Just half and hour before the meeting of the mother and the daughter, Agriculture Minister Matia Chowdhury visited Rumana around 1:45pm yesterday.
“Please pray for me so that I can see my daughter again,” she told the minister holding her hands.
“He [Sumon] has not let me see my daughter for a long time.”
She told Matia how she returned from Canada on May 12 just to see her daughter after nine months.
“I want everyone’s blessings so that I can see again, and bring up my daughter properly.”
-With The Daily Star input
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