Written piece
The Lungi
Mira Cuturilo
Australia
About this piece
In the Rohingya refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, where a million people live beneath blue tarpaulin tents, a humanitarian midwife works to save a mother and deliver her child inside a women’s safe space marked by red flags fashioned from torn saris and lungis during a monsoon storm.
The Lungi
The rain began just as Tahmina started to bleed.
It was immense, a tarpaulin city of nearly a million people spilling over the hills as far as the eye could hold. Blue and white plastic stretched across bamboo frames, rising and falling with the land. Among the blue, one small space had raised little red flags that caught the light in the distance, triangular strips of cloth made from old saris and lungi tied high to bamboo poles.
Inside the women’s centre, the electricity failed and the tarpaulin walls shuddered against the storm. One of the midwives wrapped the newborn against her chest while I pressed both hands hard against Tahmina’s abdomen, trying to slow the blood between contractions and thunder.
Outside, two young men waited anxiously, barefoot in the mud.
We wrapped Tahmina first in her green lungi, a cloth carrying the echoes of many crossings. We then covered her with plastic ponchos and the two men carried her through the storm.
The camp watched us pass.
“A baby has been born,” children shouted through the alleyways, making way for us.
“Her mother needs the hospital.”
The next morning, after the sky had settled, and the child was sleeping peacefully beside her, I returned with the lungi, washed and folded.
Tahmina laughed when she saw it.
“Keep it, please,” she said. “My family made lungi. Even when we had little else, we still had cloth.”
Then she placed the baby into my arms.
“You name her,” she said.
“Asha,” I told her.
Hope.
Outside, sunlight broke across the camp, and the little red flags flapped and waved above the endless tarpaulin blue city, marking the way back to this small haven.