“Is that woman mute?” a man nearing sixty murmured softly. No one knew for sure, because the woman wearing a wide hijab had never spoken to anyone.
The sun had not yet fully risen when a woman stood on the porch with a cup of jasmine tea she had brewed herself. Her eyes stared straight at the downhill road, already crowded with vehicles as the morning began to stir.
It was a routine she had followed for the past year. No one cared, no one asked questions—not even the people in the house, who seemed to have forgotten that a year ago, a mother’s heart had shattered so completely that the pieces were almost impossible to recognize.
The door opened, and Anjar stepped outside in neat clothes, ready to leave for work. Zura followed behind him, carrying their one-year-old toddler.
“Dad’s heading out now, sweetheart,” Anjar said, kissing Fatim’s cheek. The chubby baby giggled when her father’s mustache tickled her smooth, soft cheek.
“Be careful, Mas,” Zura said, kissing the back of her husband’s hand.
“You too. Don’t overdo it. Poor Fatim if her mother gets sick,” Anjar replied, pressing a kiss to the crown of Zura’s head.
Anjar left without glancing at the woman sitting on the porch. It was always like that, as though she had never been there—or perhaps they already considered her dead.
As though she had no need for a goodbye, the woman stepped outside and headed toward her old car, which had not been parked in the garage for a long time. She started the engine slowly, then eased the car forward, cutting through the increasingly crowded streets. Her destination was the same as always: a small house on the outskirts of the city, a place where her presence was more welcome.
Several months after Fatih, her child, passed away, she had begun spending more and more of her time with more than a dozen orphaned and abandoned children. It was the old house her parents had left her, which she quietly continued to maintain without her husband’s knowledge.
At first, she had only felt sorry for a child scavenging through trash in front of her house. She invited him to stay and asked him to clean the house every day. The next day, the child came with a friend. Unable to bear seeing how shabby he looked, the woman allowed him to stay as well. Little by little, more children came to live there. Some became street performers, some sold snacks, and others scavenged used bottles.
Now the house was the most comfortable place in the world for them to come home to. The woman got out of her car. Several children eagerly greeted her as the maroon car entered the yard.
“Peace be upon you, Bunda.” One child hurried over and helped unload some of the bags from the trunk.
“Wow, Bunda brought books again,” he cheered excitedly.
The woman only smiled, stroking the head of the little boy who was about the same age as her own child, then walked inside carrying only a few bags of food.
“Bunda’s here...!” shouted a boy named Hasan. The dozen or so children who heard him immediately came running to greet her.
The woman smiled as she welcomed the children, who jostled to kiss her hand. Hana, a fifteen-year-old girl, took the things she was carrying and set them on the table. The girl had once nearly fallen victim to rape. After being rescued, she became a trusted foster older sister responsible for taking care of the other children’s needs—the oldest of them all, and mature beyond her years.
The woman sat and watched the children compete for the food, all of them looking happy that day. She took a sheet of paper and wrote something down before handing it to Hana.
“Don’t tell anyone that I’m the one who gave this to you.” Hana read it, then nodded.
“But why, Bunda? You’ve already given so much to me and my younger siblings,” Hana asked.
The woman only smiled and shook her head. To her, kindness did not need a name. She never uploaded her activities to social media, either. In fact, she had never taken pictures from the beginning, never wanting to show anyone what she had done.
Once, a man whom Hana said was one of the mosque administrators where the children learned to recite the Quran wanted to take a picture of the woman with the children. The woman gently refused.
“Just take pictures of them. Not me!” she declined in writing.
“Why, ma’am?”
The woman fell silent for a moment, then began writing again.
“Let them have memories of their childhood. I don’t need to be in them.”
The words sounded simple, but the middle-aged man saw a very deep wound behind them. He tried to understand that wounds did not always look like open sores. Sometimes they were kept tightly hidden so that all anyone could see was kindness.