It will perhaps be beyond the imagination of a couple today that the year-old baby they are cuddling so fondly as their keeps-forever heart and soul, may in two decades (or a little more) totally ignore them or worse deny the bond written in blood. Parenthood can sometimes be reduced to being a source of licensed birth, and no more.

A young mother died at labour. Her surviving daughter was hugged into this world by her only sister, still sobbing, who from day one brought up the child as her own, if that is possible some will opine. And yet it is. Relationship is least founded on blood, but more on association, mutual feeling, reciprocal need, and some amount of trust. 

The baby daughter grew up to be a fine young lady, and in time, was married off to live a life of her own in a foreign land. Nothing wrong with that. However, for reasons we will never understand, she did not feel the need to remain connected with her foster mother, more so her blood aunt. Psychologists say love has a downward tendency, and the coming generation has thus been eternally benefitted. So, perhaps the girl moved on. Given the trends worldwide, in some respect, nothing wrong with that either.

The girl's aunt or foster mother, whichever way you look at it, has been diagnosed with a life-threatening severe illness. Her body can no longer bear the pain, she can barely move. Being a divorcee for over two decades, and her parents long gone, she has no family here. But, hey, she has a 'daughter' (call her a niece, if you will) abroad.

The disease is in an advanced stage. She has to be taken abroad if she has to have any chance of survival. Doctors and colleagues contacts the 'daughter', and readies papers and travel plans accordingly. The day before the patient's flight to Singapore, they call the 'daughter' (call her a niece, if you will), and the young 'lady' living abroad in an advanced society drops the anchor: she won't be able to do anything for her 'aunt/mother' (the patient), because she was leaving for Pataya on a pre-planned holiday.

Not even for your aunt who nursed you when your birth mother died? Not even for a blood relative who sang you lullabies for years as you dozed off to sleep? Not even for a human being who cleaned up your mess that others would not touch? No one asked her any of those questions, because it seemed that as a young individual, she has the right to enjoy the occasional vacation. And, look here people, she was not even a doctor. Yet it is true, not many can look into a similar future that is but a couple of decades away.

A story from a briddha ashram (old age home) - probably fictional, but not far from truth: an ageing mother wrote her son a letter stating she hardly had a few days left, as she was very ill. She pleaded with her son to arrange for a ceiling fan in her room, not for her, she quickly added. The son was thinking between the handwritten broken lines, "Why does she need a fan now of all things after having stayed in that 'home' for more than seven years?" She wrote, as if in reply, "Khoka, your son will also send you here soon, and I know that you cannot sleep without a fan."

Men are no different, obviously. The following is a true account. The name has been changed to protect a man despised by all, save his mother. Manik left for England in the late 1950s. His mother lived for another forty years before she was buried, physically, that is. During all those years, the ageing mother, becoming frailer by the decade, waited for her son to come and see her. She too wanted to see her manik.

He had a great job in a UK multinational company that took him to Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore several times, sometimes every three months. However, he was too busy to stop over even once in Dhaka to meet his Ma, not even during the long Christmas and New Year holidays that everyone in the West enjoys every year. He had at least forty such occasions to put a smile on his mother.

Is the Western world that glittery that it can blind a son's vision and cloud the face of a mother who carried him beyond childbirth? Is life in that part of the world ruled so much by mechanics that the heart ceases to function? Does an economically developed country have the right to snatch a baby from its cradle? We hastily blame the West, and do so without rhyme or reason, because of the fault lines in the actors who have sold their soul to alienism. They do not know at what cost.

If relationships were only a matter of blood, then a husband-wife bond, one of the strongest among humans, would never have blossomed nor flourished, despite both claiming that matrimony is not a bed of roses. But, it is a bed nevertheless.

The write is a practising Architect at BashaBari Ltd., a Commonwealth Scholar and a Fellow, a Baden-Powell Fellow Scout Leader, and a Major Donor Rotarian.