The Quiet Heroism of a Woman’s Life

Some of the most meaningful stories of women supporting women do not unfold in boardrooms, campaigns, or public platforms. They take shape quietly in homes, in everyday acts of care, and trust.

The woman whose story I share here was the housemaid in our home, but the relationship we built went far beyond that description. Over the years, I came to see in her many of the qualities that define the strength of women everywhere — resilience in the face of hardship, fierce loyalty to those she loved, and an extraordinary ability to rise above difficult circumstances.

Our lives were different in many ways, yet they intersected in moments of support, understanding, and mutual respect. What I could offer her was often simple — time, encouragement, and a willingness to listen. What she offered in return was something far greater: a reminder of the quiet strength that women carry, and the powerful bonds that can form when women show up for one another.

This story is my tribute to her life, but it is also a reflection on what solidarity between women can look like in its most human form.

Amma Hanifa : An obituary

It has been almost fifteen years since Hanifa first came to work with us as a house servant. I remember the first time I saw her. She did not look like the regular house servants; her impeccably clean clothes and the dignified air about her compelled you to take her seriously.

What drew us together was a common love of tea. I told her how to make a perfect pot of tea, which is normally the first thing a new housemaid has to learn! However, nobody had ever made it into a sacred ritual as she did. Tea making was for her a serious business, and my approval was like a certificate of merit for her. At the time, it amused me that she considered me a connoisseur in tea and thus deserving of her respect and love.

We used to share afternoon tea, and it was during those sessions that I got to know her. Amma Hanifa was married at a very young age to a man considerably older than she was. He had been in the army and had a penchant for giving odd punishments on the smallest pretext. Once he asked her to stand on one leg for five hours because the food was not to his liking! After six years and two aborted pregnancies, she had her first and only child, a boy. From that time onward, her whole life revolved around him.

Everything she did or planned was meant for Yaseen, her son. She used to tell me how when Yaseen went to another city for three months in search of work, she stopped wearing kohl as it wouldn't stay in her eyes, which were always full of tears. That's saying much because I had never seen her without kohl, her only cosmetics. Fortunately, he never stayed away from her for so long ever again.

Amma married Yasseen off at a young age, and he, as if to make up for the limited fecundity of his parents, produced six children in a row, five girls and one boy. Yaseen's income from the tailoring shop was not enough to meet the growing expenses of the household. Baba – as Amma used to call her husband – had become quite old by that time, couldn't work, and his pension was quite meager. The children were growing up; all of them were studying, and the girls were fast approaching marriageable age. This is when she decided to share her son's financial burdens.

Hanifa was an old woman when she came here to work. She had high blood pressure and mild arthritis, but an indomitable spirit. She single-mindedly worked for the day when all the girls would be married, and the boy would be able to help his father in the shop. "Then my Yaseen wouldn't have to work so hard," she used to say.

It was some trait of Amma's personality that made her incapable of wide-ranging affection or love. Her son was the sole recipient of her love, and whatever she felt for her grandchildren was just an extension of it. It was always from the perspective of Yaseen that she looked at things. And when she came to work with us, I was the only one she lavished her care upon.

My sister used to say it was as if nobody else existed for her. After I started working, she would always ask me, "Noma, is the tea served in the office to your liking?" She was the only one who called me by this name of her own making. Maybe it was her way of showing partiality toward me. One of our long-standing arguments was about why I couldn’t take her with me to the office. “Why can’t you simply tell them that you need your amma there to make tea for you?” she would say.

She had been with us for seven years when chronic blood pressure and arthritis began to take their toll, and she started finding it increasingly difficult to spend long hours in the kitchen and climb the stairs. By that time, her two granddaughters were engaged to be married, and her grandson had completed his internship at a tailoring shop. But she felt she still needed to work to help her son make a proper dowry for the girls.

A midway home for destitute women, where I was involved, needed a housemother, and I recommended her. There, the work was light, and she only had to look after the women, assign duties, and get them to manage the house. She took great care of those women, and would listen with compassion to their tales of woe, and they, in turn, learned to trust her and depend on her sane advice.

During the three years she stayed there, her two granddaughters and one grandson were married. In spite of her age and precarious health, Amma was not willing to call it a day. There were still three more girls to be married, and it was always, “How would Yaseen manage without me?” However, this is exactly what he had to learn one day: to manage without her.

Still working towards making life easier for her son, one day Amma Hanifa suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage.

Her death was a great setback for us all, but for Yaseen, it was like losing his moorings. When I met him after Amma’s death, he seemed like a child lost in the wilderness. He had lost not only financial help but also immense emotional support.

Life goes on, and we manage to pull through; her son gradually learned to live outside the safety net that his mother created for him. However, some people have such great presence that there is always a gaping hole where they once were. Amma Hanifa was one of them.