THE famous writer Amrita Pritam lost her mother, Raj Bibi, when she was just 11 years old. She once asked Sahir Ludhianvi, who was very close to his mother (Sardar Begum), what defined and epitomised a woman. Sahir told her that it was motherhood that encompassed a woman’s entire being. No wonder he wrote, “Aurat ne janam diya mardon ko, mardon ne usey bazaar diya (the woman gave birth to men, but they pushed her into the flesh trade).” In the 1990s, a tall and elegant teacher named Aameeza Andaleeb taught English to me at a school in Tehran. Elementary English was offered as Iran had, and still has, a system of parallel options for students even at the school level. I opted for the languages — Persian, Dari (Afghan variant of Persian), Arabic and Pahlavi — right from the beginning and had to choose English rather late as my Bengali-speaking father insisted that I must learn at least a smattering of the language at school. Ms Aameeza was also the Vice Principal. Since I looked different from Iranian students and my name sounded “un-Islamic”, she asked me in English, “What is your name?” I replied after struggling to understand her question. She then asked me in Persian about my background. When I told her in Persian that I was born in Ireland, she was flabbergasted. “Yet, you can’t even understand basic English! This is strange!” I told her that my father, a medical adviser, had brought me to Iran when I was just two years old. “I will teach you English,” she said. She hailed from an elite family of Iran; her Shia father was a bureaucrat, while her Sunni Muslim mother taught anthropology at the University of Tehran. Ms Aameeza did her schooling in England and the US; her family had a house in Hampshire. Her command of Persian and English was impeccable. She brought books of elementary English and started giving me tuition. Despite my beginner’s awful English, she would patiently correct my jumbled-up sentences. Though a devout Muslim, she never asked me about my religion. When she came to know that I didn’t follow any religion and had no faith in God, she encouraged me to remain a good human without any man-made faith or belief in a supernatural being. She exempted me from attending classes on Quranic studies. She was herself a non-denominational and non-sectarian Muslim without a Shia/Sunni tag. Ms Aameeza stayed in touch with me even when I was in India and England. She would come to meet me in London, where I was pursuing higher studies in Islamic theology and the Persian mysticism of Rumi and Shams. Alas, she passed away in 2016. I still remember her as a dear teacher, mentor and mother figure. There is indeed a mother in every woman, regardless of her age, ethnicity and creed. The writer is a Pune-based columnist