Saving kittens to save the girl child:Mredula

“My mother wanted to throw Comly away,” said Mredula Ahmed, Jackia’s teenage daughter, “but I refused. I took it from her and continued to look after it until it recovered.” The two of them stare at each other for a while, and then burst out laughing. “We decided to start adopting female kittens, which are abandoned in dirty drainages, because we want people in Bangladesh to start valuing females.”

Jackia said somberly, “I don’t know why people hate girls. Men in Bangladesh and India have been killing their daughters for a very long time. There are many cases where a man will walk into his wife’s bedroom, right after she has given birth, so that he can establish the sex of the newly born child. If the child turns out to be a female, he then strangles it with his bare hands until it dies.” Jackia fell silent for a while, obviously moved by her recollection of such brutality.

I sense that my colleague, Gina Dizon, is also just as deeply moved, and after a while, we all get submerged in an intense discussion about female infanticide in Asia. Eventually, our conversation swings back to Jackia’s moving tale, and we bombard her with intriguing questions.

“I am a poor woman, and I can barely take care of my family, but I will not sit aside and look on helplessly when men are killing off female cats and girls. Together with my daughter and son, we will continue to adopt cats which are abandoned, until people’s attitudes towards females in general, change.”

This family of three- Jackia aged forty, her daughter Mredula Ahmed- aged thirteen, and her son, Jahangir Alam- aged twenty, now take care of three cats, namely: Comly- aged one year, Pushi- aged six months, and Tushi- aged three months. They have become so attached to these cats, so much so that they talk about them as if they were an integral part of the family, and indeed they are. But of all these people, it is probably Mredula who has developed the strongest social bond with these cats, partly because she is often left in the house with them for hours on end.(continued next post)