Debola Mondol: A woman who helped deliver 2500 babies

Debola, in her 70s, remembers life by events—Independence, marriage, exile—and has delivered babies as a daima for 54 years, starting after the war. Photo: TBS

Debola Mondol was packing bricks around the edge of a mosquito net when I arrived, pressing them down with the flat of a spade so the corners wouldn't lift at night in her small cowshed. The afternoon light was already turning soft and yellow, the kind that arrives early in the Sundarbans, when the river begins to look wider than it did in the morning and the forest feels closer. 

She worked slowly but without hesitation, her hands moving as if they had memorised this task long ago. These were the same hands, she told me later, that had delivered more than two thousand babies. 

In the Sundarbans, where distance is measured in water and delay can be fatal, a midwife's reach can matter more than a hospital's address.

"I can't sit still," she said, without looking up. "If I don't work, my body becomes restless."

Debola is in her early 70s—she has stopped counting exactly—but she remembers dates by anchoring them to events that mattered. Independence. Marriage. Exile. 

Her life as a daima (a traditional birth attendant) began a few years after the war, when the country was still learning how to breathe again. "Not during the war," she corrected me, when I asked. "After. Everything started after."

She estimates she has been delivering babies for 54 years. The number of births is harder to pin down. "Two thousand? Two and a half?" she said, shrugging. "All over. This village, the next union, across the river." She named the places as if reciting a walking route—Chunkuri, Harintana, Gholkhali, Bajua, Dhopadi—villages separated not by distance so much as by water. In this part of the coast, roads give up easily. Boats do not.

In the Sundarbans' climate — six months of monsoon followed by salt-laden dry seasons — water is both sustenance and threat. Scientists have documented rising salinity in drinking sources that is linked to hypertension and dangerous pregnancy outcomes like pre-eclampsia, miscarriages, and other reproductive complications among women in southwest coastal Bangladesh. These risks are compounded by a near absence of accessible formal healthcare facilities in the remoter villages, making the presence of experienced attendants like Debola a matter of life and death.

"Earlier, pregnancies were strong. Now, with this water, women get tired quickly, pressure goes up, and sometimes the child cannot stay. The water does that."

At night, when a call comes, there is rarely time to think about danger. "If there is fear," she said, "you don't feel it then." She crosses rivers by trawler, sometimes in rain so heavy it erases the shoreline. Once, she went out in a storm to a relative's house near Chalna, riding in a creaking choyalla van, its metal frame rattling like loose teeth. "Dangers come," she said. "You have to overcome them."

Debola carries very little with her now. There was a time when the government supplied small, practical things such as blades, thread, antiseptic, nail cutters. That ended years ago, when policy and practice shifted decisively toward institutional births. 

"Now everything is in the hospital," she said. "So they don't give anything." What remains is experience: the ability to read a laboring body, to know when waiting will save a life and when delay will cost one.

"If I see I can't manage," she said, "I take them to the hospital."

The nearest reliable facilities are in Mongla or Khulna. At three in the morning, that journey can take hours. Sometimes, the baby does not wait. She told me about a woman from Harintana, traveling by private car toward a clinic in Jhanjhania. The pain came suddenly, violently. 

"I said, don't say anything," Debola recalled. "Let whatever happens, happen. I am holding it." The baby — a boy — was born by the roadside, under the beam of a three-battery torch, with the hospital already visible in the distance. At the gate, Debola lied. She said the birth had happened on the way to Khulna. It was easier that way.

Babies have been born on boats, too. Once, in the middle of the Pashur River, a girl arrived between tides. The family, hoping for a boy, refused to continue to the hospital. "So much money will be spent," they said. They turned back instead.

Now, the tradition is fading. Younger women prefer hospitals; hospitals prefer C-sections. Debola is blunt about it. "They cut," she said. "They inject the spine. The pain stays for life." In the villages, by contrast, a new mother lies down for a week, fed and cared for by the household. It is a different economy of attention, one that does not translate easily into policy.

Gender expectations still shape what Debola does, sometimes forcing her into quiet improvisations. She described a woman who, after two ultrasounds, had been told she was carrying a girl. Furious, the mother said she would throw the baby away. Debola was called in the middle of the night. The child was born—a boy. Debola hid him, telling the mother it was a girl. Outside, on the phone, she whispered the truth to the baby's paralyzed grandfather. "Bring sweets," she told him. "And don't tell the mother yet."

For her work, Debola is paid little. Five hundred taka is common now, sometimes a bit more. Earlier, people gave cloth, plates, and glasses. She is wearing one of those gifts — an orange sharee — today. "Nobody gives anything extra," she said, without complaint. Relatives often give nothing at all.

Her first delivery was for Ajit Pakhi's son, in Jogai Mathay. That baby is now middle-aged and living in India. "He has lost his teeth," she said, laughing. Her most recent delivery was just days ago, near Chalna, at Buluk's house. The calls do not stop, though she moves more slowly now.

Debola was married at eleven. She left for India in 1978 and returned home in the month of Magh, shortly after independence. Her husband, Nirode Mondol, was a postmaster, a quiet, sharp-minded man who supported her work. "A very gentle man," she said. Together they raised four children — two sons, two daughters. Each child has two children — all of whom were born by her own hand. All eight of them. She recited their names carefully, as if counting rosary beads.

She has never been to Dhaka. Her formal training came much later, in Banishanta, when a woman named Regina arrived to teach midwifery to a group of local women. The police station helped organise it. A government doctor spoke. Fifteen trainees showed up. "After I had already started," Debola said. "Long after."

Now, the tradition is fading. Younger women prefer hospitals; hospitals prefer C-sections. Debola is blunt about it. "They cut," she said. "They inject the spine. The pain stays for life." In the villages, by contrast, a new mother lies down for a week, fed and cared for by the household. It is a different economy of attention, one that does not translate easily into policy.

When I asked how it feels to walk down the road and be told again and again that someone was born by her hand, she shrugged. "So many people say it. You don't remember all of them." Still, she notices how people treat her. They call her Grandma, Aunt, Sister. They ask her to sit. They feed her.

As evening came on, Debola returned to her bricks, checking that the mosquito net was sealed tight. 

"You have to go in people's danger," she said. "To be a friend in danger — you have to go."

"So many stories of birth," I said to her later, thinking aloud, still trying to absorb what I had heard. "So many miracles."

She smiled — not in agreement, but in mild confusion — as if the word "miracle" were slightly misplaced. When I asked her why she went out at night across rivers, she looked at me with an expression so unguarded that it almost felt like a question in return — Isn't it the right thing to do, to help people when they're in danger? It was not a moral declaration; it was closer to a practical one.

Debola Mondol has been answering calls like that for more than half a century. Often, when she walks down a village lane, a woman will stop her and point to a grown child nearby. "Dekhen, Didi," she'll say — "apnar hater baccha. Koto boro hoyeche dekhechen?" (Look at this child; it is from your hands. See how he or she has grown.)

Debola listens, nods, sometimes smiles. Too many faces to remember now. Too many lives that once fit, briefly, into her palms.