ILLUSTRATION: AMREETA LETHE

SAMARA SUBAITA

Saiyara didn’t wave a flag to voice her rights on the streets. She had never marched in a protest line, never chanted beneath the dark blanket of smoke-heavy skies. Her revolution was quieter, and it carried a little soul swaddled in a bassinet beside her, traces of milk on her lips and dreaming eyes. Her days were soft and stitched with lullabies. Three months ago, she gave birth to a beautiful daughter, Layl, meaning “night” in Arabic, inspired by her quiet prayers during a power cut, lit by candlelight and hope. This was a new beginning for her.

That July afternoon, as the city began unravelling in slow, furious rage, she stood barefoot on the marble-tiled balcony of building 57. The sun was beginning to bend towards the west. The sky above Narayanganj churned and bellowed in hues of smoke bombs and shots. Helicopters circled the air like vultures made of steel, orbiting over houses as if waiting for death.

Saiyara wasn’t watching the chaos; she was absorbed in watching the wind, the way it carried dust and the history we were to make. She looked up at the sky, tracing the skyline with her eyes like a silent prayer, unaware of the grief that would befall on the joy of her motherhood.

“Maa,” she called inside. “It’s getting louder by the minute.”

No answer from the kitchen.

Inside, her mother washed the rice for lunch with shivering hands. A flash of a red dupatta fluttered on a rooftop in a building across the street.

Then it came.

Not a bang.

Not a warning.

A rupture in the sky.

Something crueller.

A bullet sliced through the iron grill like it was meant for Saiyara. It passed through her skull. Her knees gave out first. Then the silence. It did not pause to consider the cries, the innocence, the milk contained for the child or the lullabies waiting to be sung.

She collapsed without a cry, her body folding around her daughter’s cradle, imitating a final act of a mother protecting her child.

Layl did not cry.

Not until her grandmother broke down in tears.

The men who walked in later said it was a stray bullet. As if the violence had no master. As if the weapon had just departed without a destination.

Saiyara was not collateral. She, like many, was not an item in a line of someone’s spreadsheet of unrest.

She was a mother. A daughter. A breathing vessel of stories that may never unfold.

The balcony stands still today. The iron grill carries the same dent the bullet hole had imprinted on it, like a dark eye watching people walk on the street beneath it. The concrete wall has been repainted, but it peels off every monsoon, like grief refusing to be silenced.

Layl is a year older today—hardly walking, babbling half words like ma and dada. She does not understand death yet, but she understands absence.

She traces her grandmother’s face for someone she cannot name and sometimes hums to the wind like it might carry her lullabies back.

Today, she does not speak of protest.

But one day, she will.

And when she does, her voice will be of inheritance.

Samara Subaita is a student at North South University.