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When 22-year-old Musammat Mumtahana came from Bangladesh to join her new husband in Britain, her family hoped she would find wealth and happiness. Instead she found a well of loneliness that led to her taking her own life and the lives of her two sons. Here for the first time her distraught mother in Bangladesh tells her story
The single-storey house has peeling paint and mildewed walls, a vegetable patch in the front yard and a wing with a rusting tin roof and wicker walls. Inside the furniture is threadbare, no fans resist the oppressive heat and, on a charpoy bed in a dank corner, lies a woman suffering emotions that few can guess the depth of. Mahmuda Begum's eyes are glassy, her expression blank and she chants over and over: 'My daughter was so beautiful. I don't believe she is dead.'
Family members say that Mahmuda has been 'devastated and bedridden' since being told that her 22-year-old daughter, Musammat Mumtahana, put a noose around her neck and hanged herself, 5,000 miles away in Britain. But that grief was only the start. Mumtahana's final act before taking her own life was to kill her sons, Reheem, aged two, and Nahim, aged one. Mahmuda had never seen her grandchildren.
The three bodies were found by Mumtahana's husband, Shuhel Miah, when he returned to his home in Birmingham on 5 October. She reportedly left no note to explain the suicide that was forbidden by her Islamic faith. Neighbours saw Shuhel leave the three-bedroom flat shortly after, clutching a child's blanket. Last week the 26-year-old district manager stood in the witness box at the city's coroner's court to confirm the personal details of his wife and children.
It was the stuff of Greek tragedy made flesh. Why did she do it? How could a woman take not only her own life but violate the maternal instinct by taking the lives of her children? It is a question begged in both Taherpur, Mumtahana's home village in Bangladesh, and her new home of Handsworth in Birmingham. Neighbours say she rarely ventured out of doors and, barely able to speak English, may have become depressed by loneliness and isolation. Some report hearing her crying and screaming after rows with her husband, who often did not return home after work until the early hours of the morning. Members of the city's Bangladeshi community suggest there was a rift between the couple's respective families. There have been no arrests in the case, and West Midlands Police are not treating it as suspicious.
Mumtahana left Taherpur, in the eastern region of Sylhet, three years ago to be with her husband in Britain. It is a rite of passage for thousands of Bangladeshis, especially from Sylhet, where ties with Britain date back to the 18th century and the arrival of the East India Company, the trading company which virtually ruled India until its dissolution in 1858 following the Indian Mutiny.
Since the Sixties and Seventies, men have emigrated to cities such as Birmingham and London in search of work, sending money home until one day, maybe years later, their wives and children join them. This migration can pose a special problem for women, particularly uneducated women struggling to learn a new language while raising young children in traditional and conservative Muslim homes. Census-based figures released this month show that half of British Bangladeshi women have never worked or are long-term unemployed. Monica Ali's novel, Brick Lane, was among the few attempts to peer behind the curtains at such lives of quiet desperation.
Conversely, wealth from Britain has transformed Taherpur. Grandiose mosques and markets dot the approach road, and brick houses - a status symbol that is a rarity in other Bangladeshi villages - in kitschy green and red colours are commonplace. Some are built in the style of country homes with pitch roofs, terraces and sprawling grounds, lying empty for most of the year, except when their owners come to visit from the UK.
'All the wealth you see here is from money sent from London,' said local journalist Ahmed Azad, explaining that 'London' is the generic term used to describe Britain. Located 90 miles north-east of the capital, Dhaka, property prices in Taherpur and surrounding areas are rising every year. 'There is a race among our people who live in the UK for who can buy the best property back home and build the most lavish house on it,' Azad said. He believes that at least 50,000 people from this district alone have struck gold in the restaurant business in 'London'. 'Almost every family here has at least one son or daughter living in the UK, and receives about £500 every few months,' he said. Such an amount is a fortune in a country where the average annual income is £200.
Mumtahana's family home is comparatively modest. Her father died last year. Her uncle, Sherajul Islam, 54, a primary school teacher in the village, said: 'Since Mumtahana's father, Mostofa Ahmed, was the eldest among us, our brother who migrated to the US in the early Nineties sent some money back home to make his house pukka. My brother was a madrassah teacher and health worker and although we are all educated, we are one of the poorest families in this village.' Asked if Mumtahana ever sent money back home, Sherajul replied: 'She never got the chance. She said she wasn't even allowed by her in-laws to come and visit us after she had her two children.' Mumtahana's mother, Mahmuda, 42, claims that her daughter found it difficult marrying into a family already established in 'London', by which she means Birmingham. 'She called me secretly because she said they scolded her if she called us,' she told The Observer. 'She cried to me and said that I should never let another daughter in the family marry into a "Londoni" family. From the very first day that she went to London she did not like it there. She did not speak the language, and although she was a patient girl she was very lonely and missed being able to see or visit us. Even when her father died last year Mumtahana was not allowed to come and visit. We didn't even have any close relatives there who could go and visit her often.
'Even so, she ran away to my distant cousin's house in London three times in the past three years because she was lonely, and complained that her in-laws treated her like a servant, always reminding her that she came from a poor family and making her do all the cooking and cleaning. When she could call, she would tell me that she liked the saris I sent for her and that she wore them often.'
Whatever the cause, the account speaks of a desperate woman in need of help. According to the family, Mumtahana and Shuhel were married in March 2002 after Shuhel, back for holidays in Bangladesh, saw her in the village and instantly fell in love with her. Her uncle, Sherajul, recalled: 'Our Mumtahana was so beautiful that a few days after Shuhel saw her in the village, his mother came to our family with a proposal for marriage, saying her son was adamant that he would marry her. Shuhel wanted the marriage so much that even talk of dowry was postponed until after the marriage, lest it caused a delay.'
Mahmuda said: 'Why not? My daughter was educated, she had passed her [school leaving] exams, and she was pious and beautiful. She was the eldest child among all her cousins - she was the apple of the eye for the whole family. She was so caring. If I was sick, she would feed me in bed with her own hand. You know, if she went to town she would always wear her burqa [which covers the whole face]. She loved to watch TV and in the afternoons she would teach her brothers and sisters to read the Koran.'
Mumtahana went to live with Shuhel in Birmingham in 2003, initially staying with her in-laws before moving into an £85,000 flat inside a converted house with her husband six months ago. Mahmuda recalled: 'We married her into this family, knowing that if she went away we would not see her very often. But we wanted her to live in happiness and peace, to not ever be poor again. London is the kingdom of dreams - how could we know she would not find peace there?'
For Mahmuda there is a prevailing sense of disbelief. 'When I heard the news, my life became dark. I cannot believe that my beautiful daughter would ever commit suicide. She was such a patient, polite girl, she could never kill her own children. No one has as yet told me anything in detail. We have called distant relatives who say she is dead, but my son-in-law's family does not take our phone calls. We don't know why she died, how she died, if something had happened in the past week that made her desperate.'
On a bleak Wednesday afternoon last week, three bunches of flowers and a teddy bear rested on wrought-iron gates outside the flat where Mumtahana killed herself and her boys. It was raining hard. There was a stillness and a sense of desertion at the home, part of a large Edwardian villa on a tree-lined and well groomed suburban street. Curtains were drawn behind its windows. Upstairs a panel of wood stood in for glass in a window frame. The drive was empty.
There was no reply at the adjoining home, and next door to that, at a residential home for the mentally disabled, staff denied knowledge of the family. But on the immediate right of Shuhel's home, a neighbour, Bernard Bates, was not reticent about the couple. 'He used to leave her alone all day and sometimes get back at three or four in the morning,' the 60-year-old publisher said. 'We heard him shouting and her screaming and crying - but what do you do? There are places she could go for help, but she wouldn't have known about them. She couldn't speak English, she couldn't go out and do anything, so she seems to have gone over the top and killed herself.
'He is very westernised in his ways. He comes across as friendly and I get on well with him. He never mentioned his wife at all. It was as if she didn't exist.'
Shuhel's family declined to comment on the deaths last week. He released a statement through the police which said: 'I have suffered the most tragic loss that anyone could imagine. My wife was the most beautiful gentle person and my two beautiful sons were my pride and joy, who had their whole lives to live for. As anyone with children can imagine, I am finding the loss impossible to comprehend.'
The Observer understands that police and social services have been contacted by Mumtahana, or in relation to Mumtahana, before on more than one occasion. Birmingham's Sunday Mercury newspaper quoted a neighbour saying she saw Mumtahana sobbing in the street, and reported that a police car had been seen outside the couple's home a few weeks before her death. There have inevitably been questions in the community about whether the authorities could have intervened sooner, especially if Mumtahana was showing signs of mental instability. West Midlands Police and Birmingham City Council social services declined to comment until the coroner's inquest was completed.
The triple deaths have stunned the city's Bangladeshi residents and forced a period of self-reflection. 'A painful thing has happened. Islam condemns suicide: you have no right to kill yourself,' said Emdad Hussain, president of the local Bangladesh Council. 'It is a big question in the community: why has she taken these lives? We are pleading, if you bring your bride from Bangladesh, make sure there are good relations between the families. These days most brides and bridegrooms from Bangladesh are well educated and can adapt to problems. But sometimes they come and their families isolate them. At least we have learnt a lesson to take care of newcomers from Bangladesh and develop a good support network.'
In Handsworth, many Bangladeshis live within a maze of redbrick terraced houses on long and winding streets, far from the shiny regeneration of Birmingham city centre. Among them is Abdullah Ismail, 33, an immigration law consultant, his wife Sayeda Jaweriah, 30, and their children Maimuna, four, Tahiya, two, and one-year-old Abdullah Yusuf. Typical of many Bangladeshi families at the time, his father emigrated in 1979 to seek his fortune in Britain, becoming an imam at a Birmingham mosque.
The family were reunited only on occasions when Abdullah's father could travel back to Bangladesh. It was not until 1992, when Abdullah was 20, that he and the rest of the family were able to join his father in Britain.
'I was excited about coming,' Abdullah said. 'A new country, a new culture, a new lifestyle. That proved to be true but there were some challenges as well. In some cases there is discrimination - I found it difficult to get a job in law for local government. There are still problems: the government is saying to us to integrate into society but, because of the foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is more difficult for the Muslim community in 2006 than it was in 1992.'
Abdullah, sitting in a living room decorated with Islamic symbols, said he was aware of the additional challenges facing Bangladeshi women who come to Britain. 'It's different for men and women here,' he said. 'Bangladeshi men work unsociable hours at night - more than 80 per cent are doing restaurant work - so the women have to spend a lot of time with the children and find it difficult to cope. The husband goes to bed late, sleeps until 1pm, goes to work at 4pm. He has little time to spend with the family. It is harder for the women to integrate. They have an unrealistic expectation of life in the UK: they come here and their husbands are working and they get frustrated. At home in Bangladesh they used to work in the day then in the evening go to gossip at the market or a friend's house. But they come here and have no social life because it's work and more work.
'In Bangladesh, they used to have servants who help with the kids. Now they have to do everything, cooking, looking after the children. It's difficult to get help from the community because everyone is so busy.'
From the kitchen came the sound of a child wailing. Abdullah, pointing, continued: 'Now my child is crying. In Bangladesh it would not happen because of servants. How many things can she cope with? I have reduced my working hours and I know I must leave work at 5pm to spend time with my children.' His wife, Sayeda, was invited to speak but declined and remained in the kitchen.
Other female voices are increasingly being heard, however, in a community which numbers 282,000 across the country, according to the most recent census. Ayesha Chowdhury, 32, who left Bangladesh at 16 to join her father here, runs a property business in east London and has been a councillor for five years in the borough of Newham, which has a high Bangladeshi population. 'At the beginning it was difficult because of the language and cultural barriers,' she said. 'For a couple of years I still felt that Bangladesh was my home, but Britain became more welcoming and is definitely my home now. I suppose if I wasn't involved with the community, I might be saying something different. Overall I think women have equality in the Bangladeshi community. There are one or two cases where the man is dominant and won't allow the woman to go out but I would say it is 1 per cent. When I compare the Bangladeshi community with some other communities, I think women have more independence. I have a son and daughter, and if I decide to stay at home for a year or two to spend time with them people should not assume my husband is pressuring me.'
For women like Ayesha Chowdhury, Britain is, perhaps, the 'kingdom of dreams' Mahmuda Begum believed in when her daughter left to open a new chapter of her life. Mahmuda does not believe it now. Still grieving at her modest home, she points to her six-year-old son, Sabbir Ahmed, sitting at her feet, and tells how it was Mumtahana who raised him from infancy. 'She would call and tell him not to cry because she would come back soon with presents for him.'
The shock and depression sit etched on her face. Mumtahana will not be returning with presents ever again.
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