#SheWrites Day 6: Woman, Ramadhan and Exam – The Nights My Mother Held My Hand Through Both

The intermediate exams begin this week. Every morning I see young girls walking to exam centres with hall tickets in one hand and water bottles in the other. Their eyes carry that familiar exhaustion. The kind that comes from staying up after sehri with textbooks. The kind that comes from wanting to pray and study and make everyone proud all at once.

And every time I see them, I travel back fifteen years to my own BA exams during Ramadan.

I was in my second year of bachelors program then. Four papers in ten days, all falling in the last Ashra of Ramadan. The pressure was crushing. My friends had stopped answering calls. My notes were spread across every surface of my room. And I was surviving on chai and sheer determination.

But I was not surviving alone.

My mother would wake up at 3am, forty five minutes before sehri. She would come to my room first, place her hand on my forehead, and whisper something I could never quite hear. Then she would go make sehri. Not just quick leftovers. She made whatever I asked for. Parathas if I wanted. Omelette if I needed protein. Sometimes just fruit and nuts when my stomach was too nervous to handle more.

She never once complained about the extra work.

After sehri, while I clutched my textbook for those last precious minutes before Fajr, she would sit beside me. Not talking. Not disturbing. Just sitting. Her presence alone told me I was not alone in this.

During the day, fasting and studying, I would hear her tell visitors “She is studying for her intermediate exams. She cannot come out.” She protected my time like a guard at the gate. She absorbed every relative’s disappointment so I would not have to.

And on exam days, she walked me to the door with my hall ticket, prayed over my head, and said the same thing every single time. “Go write. I am making your favourite for iftar. Whatever happens, this too will pass.”

I passed that year. Not with distinction. But I passed.

Looking back, I do not remember a single question from those papers. But I remember her hand on my forehead at 3am. I remember the smell of parathas before sehri. I remember her voice telling visitors to come back later.

To every girl sitting for intermediate exams or BA papers this Ramadan while fasting, look around. Your mother is probably doing the same for you. And one day, years later, when you see another girl walking to an exam centre in Ramadan, you will remember.

You will remember that you never carried the weight alone.