The power and struggle of a widow...

Written by Buddhadev Nandi
It was a decade or more ago. Every evening I would drop in a shop housed in a shabby hut to buy handmade chapattis. The shop was run by a septuagenarian widow who had lost her husband when she was in her mid-forty. Though both sides of the road were lined with a number of shops selling chapattis, never did I find her counter sparsely crowded with customers.Her humbleness, as well as amicable gesture, seemed to have sweetened the chapattis more. Needless to say, she never compromised with the quality.
But there were some other different reasons that attracted me to the shop. It was her struggle for life single-handedly. I heard from her that when her husband died of a heart attack at the age of fifty, he was survived by his wife, three daughters and a son. He left behind the roadside shop and a small house. As a pure housewife with no experience of earning a single penny in life she was at sea. The son, the youngest of the four children, was still a toddler.
Though her parents halfheartedly wanted their ill-fated daughter with four children to live with them, she refused to accept their favour. Rather she was determined neither to give in to the tough luck caused by widowhood nor to be an object of pity to others. Instead of being engulfed in the ocean of bereavement, she, immediately after the last rites of her deceased husband, reopened the shop with a little capital. She would bring all her four children with her to the shop in the evening. The daughters would sit to study and look after their brother in the little space behind the room where the customers would sit and take tiffin when their father ran a food stall. The two elder ones would also assist their mother when the counter was pressed with customers. The old lady with her little knowledge would also guide them as per her capability. Above all, she could ingrain with her children the thought their days of misfortune would someday disappear if they concentrated on their studies.
Years passed. All the three daughters got masters. The eldest and the youngest ones were then working as teachers in a primary and a high school respectively. All of them got married to good and well-ff families. Her daughters entreated their mother not to run the chapatti shop anymore and led a comfortable life with them. But she paid little heed to their advice. A sense of self-respect always deterred her from depending on others economically. The catastrophe in the family after her husband’s demise had made her a self-sufficient lady who with her power of resilience could withstand any sort of hardship in life smilingly. However, her daughters when came to visit their mother’s house would help her to prepare chapattis and maintain the counter.
Her chapatti shop popularly known as “Burdir Dokan” (old lady’s shop) was the best one in the town. What was special about the shop was that about half a dozen old ladies worked in the shop to eke out their livelihood. All of them were widows. Yet only concern of the lady was that her son, who was then about thirty, had mental disorderliness.
After long years I came across her on the way. She was sitting with her son in a rickshaw. I stopped my bike in front of the rickshaw and asked her where they were going. She just beamed amicably and said that she was going with her son to her daughter’s house at Durgapur to attend the marriage ceremony of her granddaughter. When my attention drew to her son, she voluntarily informed me that her son after prolonged treatment got fully cured. She added that her son was now at the helm of the chapatti counter. The news overwhelmed me with pleasure as she also won the battle that had perhaps seemed to her invincible.
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