The orange and white kanthas were made by Lamisa’s maternal grandmother, whom she called Nanu. To others, she was known as Dr. Meherun Nessa. Her Nanu was born in 1926 in a small village called Panchbibi in Rajshahi in present-day Bangladesh near the Indian border. She was a trailblazer for future Muslim Bengali women doctors because at the time, that was very uncommon. At the time, most Bengali women did not pursue higher studies, especially not Muslim women. The few women classmates she had in medical school were all Hindu. She became an obstetrician and gynecologist who opened and ran a labor and delivery clinic on the bottom level of her home in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She delivered thousands of babies over the span of three generations.

Beyond her remarkable career, she was also an adventurous and very sociable woman. She taught herself how to drive before Lamisa’s Nana (maternal grandfather) did and created the space for close-knit family connections that I still get to experience. She suffered from a stroke in 2002, when Lamisa was 7, so the version of her that she remembers was frailer than her usual self. She was very selfless and thoughtful. Lamisa’s fondest memory of her Nanu is that every morning, she would give little shondha malotis, also known as four o’clock flowers, to everyone in the house as a du’a, or prayer. She passed away on September 12, 2011 at age 85. Even over a decade after her passing, Lamisa still gets to connect with her Nanu via the kanthas she gifted her.

Lamisa’s Nanu was taught how to sew in a home economics type class in school as a child and learned how to apply it to kanthas at home. She made kanthas out of her old saris and her husband’s lungis, which are traditional Bengali sarongs worn by men. Incorporating her and my Nana’s clothes into the new kanthas was a way for her to pass on the memories of the two of them to their grandchildren.