Short Story: Woman Alone by Dr. Niaz Zaman

Dr. Niaz Zaman shares a moving story based on the Liberation War of 1971, which ended on December 16.

It was raining the day they laid the freedom fighter to rest. There were few mourners there except for his two sons, two nephews, six elderly men – three with walking sticks, two in wheelchairs, and one holding the arm of a young man – and the attendants at the graveyard. But he had been a freedom fighter and had fought many battles, losing his right arm in the last one. His name was on the list of gazetted freedom fighters and at his quiet funeral the last post had been played before he was laid to rest in the arms of his mother who had passed away thirty years ago, twenty years after her husband. She had been a strong woman, with strong opinions. She had not said anything to her eldest son when he married his Swiss colleague, but she had refused to let her youngest son marry the Hindu girl whom he had met in the music school and for whom he had often played the tabla when she performed. She had been very popular in the late sixties and through the seventies and eighties but then had withdrawn from the public eye.