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Left hand

Essay. One hand born left. One hand trained right.

Contents

Table and masjid, childhood

I write with my left hand. I throw a cricket ball with it. I hold a table tennis bat with it. My left hand is my first hand.

At the dining table, it waits. I was taught to eat with my right. In the bathroom, it works. I was taught to wash with my left.

My parents never beat or scolded me for it. They trained me. Right hand for rice. Right hand for salam. Right hand to touch the guest’s hand. Left hand for the private work nobody names at the table.

As a child, for a few months, I went to the masjid to learn to read the Quran. The book rested on a rehal, a folding wooden stand. First I did oju, the washing. Then I could touch the book. Once I reached with my left hand without thinking. The hujur reminded me: the Quran is holy, touch it with the right. The book had a side. So did I.

The rule did not stay with the book. In front of the hujur, the right hand took the water glass. The right hand paid his fee.

So a hand is more than a hand. It is a timetable. It sorts the clean from the unclean, the public from the private, the guest from the toilet.

Desk, chair and camera, school to film work

At school, the desks were plain. In exams, two students shared one desk. When my seat was on the right, my left elbow met my neighbor’s right elbow. I never shared an exam desk with another left-hander.

In 2002 I began mathematics at the University of Dhaka. First-year classes met in the Science Annex, opposite the Shaheed Minar. Each of us had a wooden chair with one writing arm, fixed on the right. To take a lecture note or work a problem, I leaned my whole body across the chair. Upstairs, three of us sat at one long desk, if I remember right.

On the page, the habit had a side too. We wrote the unknown on the left and the answer on the right: x equals five. The left side asks. The right side answers. Five equals x is just as true, and we rarely wrote it. An equal sign has no side. Our reading gave it one.[1]

About one person in ten is left-handed.[2] The chair was built for the other nine.

Scissors hide the cutting line from my eye. Later, film work split my hands. On a Canon 5D Mark II, my left hand held the body and pulled focus on the lens. My right finger pressed the shutter. The left hand found the focus. The right hand took the shot. In Adobe Premiere, J, K and L run the film back, stop it and run it forward, under the right hand.

None of this is a ban. It is a default. A default does not punish. It charges one hand a small tax, many times a day, with no receipt. In the Science Annex the tax had a shape: a bent back over a fixed arm, doing mathematics.

Search box, the adult years

I grew up. The rule stayed in my muscles. Nobody had shown me where it was written, so I went looking.

The Quran sets no table rule. It gives the record of deeds to the right hand of the saved and to the left hand of the lost.[3] The table rule comes from hadith: eat and drink with the right, since the devil eats and drinks with the left.[4] I found it on Bangla websites, between ads, with a Facebook link pasted under one of them. The hujur of my childhood had one book. The hujur of my phone has a search bar.

I wanted to know how far the rule had traveled, so I asked a chatbot about other scriptures. It answered in seconds. I checked it for an evening. Ehud, a left-handed hero of the Hebrew Bible, kills a king with a blade hidden on his right thigh. The gospels send the goats to the left. Arjun of the Mohabharot is Sabyasachi, the archer of either hand.[5]

I have stood before Durga many times. A museum catalog describes her ten arms: a right hand drives the spear into Mohishashur, and the lowest left hand holds him by the hair.[6] Even the goddess gives the strike to the right. Her left hand holds. In 1909, Robert Hertz described the human left hand in nearly those words: it helps, it supports, it holds.[7]

Kali in Bengal stands two ways. Dakshina Kali steps forward with her right foot, and households keep her. Bama Kali steps with her left, and those who have left the household keep her.[8] The left is not the devil here. It is another road, for another life.

I read no villain in these texts. I read one idea traveling, picking up a text and a teacher wherever it stopped. Too many texts, too many gatekeepers, too many versions, and no git.

The idea traveled in words too. In English, right means correct. In Latin, dexter means right, and dexterity means skill. Dakshin means right, south and skillful. The left gets lyft, an old English word for weak, and gauche, the French word for clumsy. The dictionary is right-handed.

Even so, the bad left depends on where the priest stood. Roman augurs faced south, and a sign on the left meant luck. Greek seers faced north, and the left meant harm. Sinister took the Greek side.[9]

Screen, 2025 to 2026

Around Left-Handers Day, 13 August, I read four Bangla news pieces.[10] They read like one article in four voices, built from English sources. Their lists of famous left-handers ran up to twenty-four names. Shakib Al Hasan was the only Bangladeshi. Einstein appeared in three lists. He wrote with his right hand.[11]

The facts argued with each other. One piece said left-handers earn more. A larger study found they earn less.[12] Two said we are creative because we use the right brain. A third said the evidence is thin.[13] One said four-legged animals have no handedness. Cats do.[14]

The day turns the old story upside down. The left hand stops being the devil’s and becomes the genius’s. The pair stays. The chair stays too. The Daily Star Bangla asks right-handed readers to try left-handed scissors, or to write with the left hand at a right-handed desk. It asks nobody to build the desk.[15]

On Netflix I watched Left-Handed Girl, a film from Taipei by Shih-Ching Tsou. A grandfather sees a small girl eat with her left hand and calls it the devil’s hand. I knew that table. The family polices the hand so the house stays calm. If I remember the last scene right, her sister takes the girl’s left hand in hers, on purpose. Netflix’s own feature on the film then sets the girl beside Chaplin, Obama, Oprah and Lady Gaga.[16] The celebrity list followed her into her own film.

I have watched a TED-Ed lesson on left-handedness several times, once more today. Its model says left-handers stay a minority because cooperation, such as sharing tools, favors the majority hand, while competition favors the rare one.[17] The chair sits inside the evolution.

The comments moved me more than the model. Strangers wrote about elbows on shared benches. Parents, uncles, teachers and doctors pushing the right hand, some with a beating. One student’s university bought chairs with the writing table on the left, after five years. Another commenter, from what he called a “third world country”, had a teacher who told his mother to let him write left. I found my exam desk in their lives. For a while, I belonged.

This morning, 12 November 2026, near five, I asked Gemini 3.8 Flash to draw me for this book: my left hand doing many things, like Durga. It gave me many arms and put the pen in my right hand. I wrote: my left hand working only, no right hand. It painted my sentence on the wall behind me, and drew the pen in my right hand again.

I asked it to reverse the picture, to turn the chair’s writing arm to the left, to put the pen in my left hand. I also asked it not to make me look disabled. My own prompt carried a default too. The last image gave me nine borrowed arms, holding scissors, a camera, a book, a bat, a plate, a glass and money. The pen stayed in my right hand. The writing arm stayed on the right. My own left hand rested on my knee, doing nothing.[18]

It could give me nine arms. It could not give me a left hand.

Table again, now

When someone asks which way, I can see the turn. The word comes slower. I look down at my hands. This is my left hand. This is my right. Then I say it out loud: turn left.[19]

I still eat with my right hand. Now I know where the rule came from, and how far it traveled. Knowing leaves the habit in place. It takes away the habit’s right to go first.

I found little research on how families and religious teachers in Bangladesh train the hand, or on what that training costs a left-handed child.[20] The stories are everywhere: at tables, on benches, in a comment section, in a film from Taipei. The record is thin.

When someone says a true thing, I could nod and say: yes, left you are.

So I add my own row. One hand trained by a parent, a hujur and a university chair. One hand born left, and kept.

Endnotes

  1. Robert Recorde introduced the equals sign in 1557, as two parallel lines of equal length. The relation is symmetric. The habit of solving for x on the left is a reading habit. Arabic school mathematics in several regions runs right to left, following the script, and the W3C documents these regional notations for the web. There, the asking side sits on the right. A bias can live in a convention that looks like logic. W3C, Arabic mathematical notation (2006)

  2. I had heard ten percent. A meta-analysis of more than two million people puts the best estimate at 10.6, and anywhere from 9.3 to 18.1 depending on the measure. It names cultural pressure against the left hand as one reason the count moves. Papadatou-Pastou, M., Ntolka, E., Schmitz, J., Martin, M., Munafò, M. R., Ocklenburg, S., and Paracchini, S. (2020). Human handedness: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 146(6), 481-524. doi:10.1037/bul0000229

  3. Quran 69:19 and 69:25, in Surah Al-Haqqah; also 56:8-9, the companions of the right and of the left. The text honors the right as a sign of salvation. It does not set a table rule. quran.com/69/19

  4. Sahih Muslim 2020a. A second version, at 2020c, carries an addition from Nafi, the freed slave of Ibn Umar: do not take with it, do not give with it. Sahih Bukhari 5376 tells of the boy Umar ibn Abi Salamah, told at the Prophet’s table to eat with the right hand and from what is near. Sahih Muslim 2021 tells of a man who answered “I cannot” and was cursed for his pride. I leave that story out of the body. It is not mine to interpret. Two Bangla pages carried these texts. One, an edition of Islami Jibon Dhara on hadithbd.com, lifts the rule for a right hand that cannot work. The other, with no clear author and a Facebook link under it, calls the left-handed meal makruh, disliked. The English renderings are mine. sunnah.com/muslim:2020a, sunnah.com/bukhari:5376, sunnah.com/muslim:2021, hadithbd.com, Islami Jibon Dhara

  5. The chatbot gave the leads. I checked them in the text: Judges 3:15-21 for Ehud, Matthew 25:31-33 for the sheep and the goats, Bhagavad Gita 11:33 for Arjun as savya-sachin, the one who draws with the left as well. The machine was right on these, and smoother than the sources. It also offered lines on Vedic ritual direction that I could not trace to a primary text, so they stay out.

  6. The Brooklyn Museum describes a ten-armed Mahishasuramardini whose spear is held in one of the right hands while the lowest left hand holds the demon’s hair. It notes that images with the same iconography are attributed to Bihar, Bengal, Orissa and Bangladesh. Clay pratimas vary from maker to maker, so this is one documented arrangement, not a rule. Brooklyn Museum, Ten-armed Mahishasura Mardini

  7. Hertz argued that a slight organic asymmetry is amplified by society into a religious polarity: the right acts and takes, the left assists. My hand was trained by that map before I could read it. His thesis was later tested in China and parts of Africa, where the polarity bends or reverses. I found no reading of Bengal’s goddess images against it, though my search was short. Hertz, R. (2013). The pre-eminence of the right hand: A study in religious polarity (R. Needham and C. Needham, Trans.). HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(2), 335-357. Original work published 1909. doi:10.14318/hau3.2.024

  8. In the usual description, Dakshina Kali has her right foot on Shiva’s chest, and the fiercer Vama Kali her left. Vama Kali is worshipped mainly by those outside household life. The tantric left-hand path is called vamachara, in Bangla bamachar. The sources I read treat the split as a choice of path, not a moral rank. Wikipedia, Dakshinkali Temple

  9. Etymology as an interface: a word carries a ranking before any speaker chooses it. Latin dexter and Sanskrit dakṣiṇa share an Indo-European root for the right side. Dakṣiṇa means right, south and dexterous, and the south sense comes from a worshipper facing the rising sun. English left probably comes from Old English lyft, weak, as in lyft-adl, paralysis. Sinister meant left in Latin and turned unlucky under Greek augury, which faced north. Genuine Roman augurs faced south, so sinister also kept a Latin sense of lucky. Read semiotically, left has no fixed meaning. It means by difference from right, and by where the reader stands. Online Etymology Dictionary, sinister, left

  10. The four pieces: The Daily Star Bangla, 13 August 2026; Jagonews24; Jamuna TV; Prothom Alo. Their famous-name lists hold 0, 9, 24 and 16 names. Their stated sources are the BBC, the Times of India, CNN, Healthwire and Days of the Year. Jagonews24 cites a book on handedness from University College London, and its author, Chris McManus, arrives in Bangla as a name I could not search. A translation chain can lose an author while keeping his claim. I looked for numbers on how the day is marked in Bangladesh: events, clubs, products, school policy. I found none, and none of the four pieces reports a local event. Daily Star Bangla, Jagonews24, Jamuna TV, Prothom Alo

  11. Photographs show Einstein writing with his right hand. McManus corrected the claim in print in 2005, and the American Psychological Association’s Monitor called it a myth in 2009. A celebrity list works like a citation without a source: the name carries the authority, and nobody checks the hand. APA Monitor, 2009

  12. Same country, different samples, opposite headlines. Ruebeck, Harrington and Moffitt found a premium of about 15 percent for left-handed, college-educated men in the United States, and none for women. Goodman, with five US and UK datasets, found left-handers earn 10 to 12 percent less a year. The Bangla pieces kept the flattering number. I found no study of handedness and earnings in South Asia. Ruebeck, C. S., Harrington, J. E., and Moffitt, R. (2007). Handedness and earnings. Laterality, 12(2), 101-120. doi:10.1080/13576500600992297. Goodman, J. (2014). The wages of sinistrality. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28(4), 193-212. doi:10.1257/jep.28.4.193

  13. In one study of 326 healthy adults, language sat mainly on the right side in 4 percent of strong right-handers and 27 percent of strong left-handers. A minority, even at the far end. I believed the right-brain story once. It flattered me. Knecht, S., Dräger, B., Deppe, M., Bobe, L., Lohmann, H., Flöel, A., Ringelstein, E.-B., and Henningsen, H. (2000). Handedness and hemispheric language dominance in healthy humans. Brain, 123(12), 2512-2518. doi:10.1093/brain/123.12.2512

  14. Cats show individual paw preference without a population bias, with males leaning left and females right. Wild red and eastern grey kangaroos show a population-level left preference, and tree kangaroos none. I live with three cats. Which paw Tuktuk offers first is a field note still open. Giljov, A., Karenina, K., Ingram, J., and Malashichev, Y. (2015). Parallel emergence of true handedness in the evolution of marsupials and placentals. Current Biology, 25(14), 1878-1884. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.05.043. McDowell, L. J., Wells, D. L., and Hepper, P. G. (2018). Lateralization of spontaneous behaviours in the domestic cat. Animal Behaviour. NPR summary

  15. Derrida describes two moves for undoing a hierarchy: first overturn it, then displace the frame that produced it. Left-Handers Day performs only the first. Genius replaces devil, and right against left stays in place. In the terms of my unlearning framework, recognition changes and the default does not: local, never institutional. The left-handed child still meets the fixed arm. Derrida, J. (1981). Positions (A. Bass, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Original work published 1972.

  16. Tsou has said her own grandfather told her not to use her left hand because it was the devil’s hand, and that this seeded the film. Taiwan is one of the places where my searches found forced hand-switching documented. The film was Taiwan’s entry for the 2026 international feature Oscar. Cinema’s left hand deserves its own node. Netflix Tudum, Left-Handed Girl joins a line of legendary lefties

  17. The lesson draws on Abrams and Panaggio, who model handedness as a balance: cooperation favors same-handedness, as in sharing tools, and competition favors the rare hand, as in fights and sports. Read from my chair, the model names design as a force in evolution, then leaves the design unquestioned. On 12 November 2026 the video, posted 3 February 2015, showed 11,279,434 views and 27,587 comments. I read the top comments and paraphrase them without names. They are testimony, not a sample. A comment section is an archive nobody curates. Abrams, D. M., and Panaggio, M. J. (2012). A model balancing cooperation and competition can explain our right-handed world and the dominance of left-handed athletes. Journal of the Royal Society Interface. doi:10.1098/rsif.2012.0211. TED-Ed, Why are some people left-handed?

  18. One session, about five prompts, three images kept in my archive. It is an encounter, not a controlled test. I am not the first to notice. In February 2025, at the AI Action Summit in Paris, India’s prime minister said image generators cannot draw a person writing with the left hand, and journalists then failed to get one from DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Grok. Researchers have shown that text-to-image models struggle with spatial relations because spatial words are scarce in training captions. I found no peer-reviewed study that measures handedness in generated people. The usual explanation, too few left-handed images in the training data, is still a hypothesis. A second one fits my session: the model may read left from the viewer’s side, not mine. Left again depends on where the priest stands. PetaPixel, February 2025. Chatterjee, A., et al. (2024). Getting it right: Improving spatial consistency in text-to-image models. ECCV 2024. arXiv:2404.01197

  19. I wondered if this pause belongs to left-handers. The studies disagree. One found left-handers quicker at naming left hands. A larger one found left-right confusion limited in healthy adults, and found that a hand strategy, like mine, shapes the answer. Constant, M., and Mellet, E. (2018). The impact of handedness, sex, and cognitive abilities on left-right discrimination. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 405. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00405. Van der Ham, I. J. M., Dijkerman, H. C., and van Stralen, H. E. (2020). Distinguishing left from right. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. doi:10.1177/1747021820968519

  20. The record exists elsewhere, in small pieces. Porac found that about 9 percent of the adults she studied reported attempts to switch their hand, usually pushed by parents or teachers in early childhood. Small interview studies of left-handed adults name suppression, scissors and desks. My searches found forced switching documented in Taiwan, Japan and Malawi. I found nothing comparable for Bangladesh. Four gaps sit side by side in this essay: no South Asian data on hand training, none on handedness and earnings, none on how the day is marked, and none on handedness in machine-made images of people. Porac, The switch is on, Wikipedia, Bias against left-handed people