TAKE THE HINT,GIRL!

Hello readers!

Before we start, I want you to know that I appreciate you taking the time to read this story. Devoting time to something that’s not going to gain you much, but hoping it would. That’s the beauty of reading. You don’t know what to expect of a story, yet you hope for something good, something extraordinary. You only have the title and the first paragraph of a short story to decide whether you want to continue reading it. But considering I’m not giving much away in the first paragraph, you’re going to have to read the second paragraph too. Only to find out that I didn’t give much away there either. So you only have this vagueness, a paragraph of indiscrete words, a good news, and a title as fuzzy as that to decide whether or not reading any further is worth it. Wait, did I mention there was good news? There is, I am soon going to be a mother. See I told you something. Now you know I am a woman, a mother to be. You probably want to know more. Who is my husband? Do I have a husband? Am I even married? Or perhaps you didn’t find anything appealing in reading about a pregnant woman at all, but I just planted these questions in your brain, and now you definitely want to know more.

I do have a husband and he’s very loving and caring. Disappointed? Did you think I had a husband who harassed me? Did you think of me as a victim? What’s wrong with you? What is it with people wanting to read depressing struggle stories? Does it make them feel better about themselves, or does it give them strength to fight battles of their own? A victim myself or not, I am sure someone out there does have a story like that. A woman, as normal and ordinary as any other to the outside world. But a woman, as troubled and suffering as a trapped bird on the inside. Not being able to break free from the chains and shackles that are his husband’s dignity and the society. This is what worries me, the society that I’m about to bring my child to. And God forbid, she’s a girl. I have survived in this society up till now, and with difficulties of course. But I’m not sure I want to bring my baby girl to a world that would not treat her as tenderly as her own mother. A world that would not care for her as her own father. A world that would have her wishing she doesn’t give birth to a baby girl.

But wait, you continued to the second paragraph in hopes of getting to know me better, didn’t you? And now you feel deceived because all I did was worry about my unborn child. I am sorry friend, but after two utterly vague paragraphs if you still think I am going to give away something as trivial as my name, then you are wrong. There is no name to be disclosed. This is the story of ‘me’. You have to believe that this is a boon, not otherwise. I am giving you the freedom to shape me as you wish. Imagine me as your friend, your sister, your girlfriend. Or better yet, if you have the courage, imagine ‘me’ as ‘you’. Identify yourself with me.

Who is me? Me is the woman who didn’t marry the man she loved. Now that sounds interesting to you. You are now wondering what happened. And if I didn’t love the man I married, whom did I love? I loved my lover. Go ahead, imagine him as your own lover. Give him your lover’s eyes, his smile, his face. Your very first love. My first love. The love I wanted forever, I wanted to marry. But you don’t just marry who you love. In India, your caste, religion, your ‘stars’ have to match. Ours didn’t. And before I even blinked, his family found him another match, and poof! It’s crazy how quickly people move in and out of your life. But mind you, I’m not the kind of girls who give up on the guys they love. Yet I should have taken a clue. I should have taken the hint when the guy I loved yelled at me to get out of the mandap. I watched him take his marriage vows with someone else. Someone who probably didn’t marry the guy she loved either.

My family started looking too, for someone to marry a girl who wouldn’t love him. How do you move on? How do you get over your very first, sweetest, loveliest thoughts you weaved with your first love? How do you replace the face of that person in all those memories with someone else’s? Turns out you don’t. Turns out you just live with it, and stop whining about a lost love, because there are bigger problems at hand. Such as, no one wanting to marry you. The society knows you had an affair with the guy who is now married to someone else. And you feel like a used toy, thrown away in trash. Until one day your manufacturers pay a man to use you. I should have taken the hint when my parents paid a fortune for dowry. But I didn’t, neither did I when my best friend died a few years ago.

Looks like your attention keeps getting on and off this story. You come across an event in my life that I mention and you want to know more. You want to be moving forward. But you see we are working backwards here. You are reading a series of events that have added up, atom by atom, pulse by pulse to make me who I am. But you don’t know who I am, and what’s worse is I keep talking about taking a hint, a clue. A clue to what? Let’s hope you figure out eventually.

Now, do you have a girl best friend? Let’s say you do. You have this beautiful, caring girl for a best friend. You share everything with her, all your problems. She listens patiently, offering silly suggestions. You’re grateful to God for her. And one day, you find out she’s dead. You knew something was up when she didn’t call for several hours after you left her at the movies with her boyfriend. You knew it was something bad when her parents filed a report for their missing daughter. But you never expected it to be dead bad. What’s more is that someone didn’t just cut her throat, and left her to die. Someone raped her, and then cut her throat. I always picture her lying on the floor, bloodied, helpless, waiting for someone to help her. What kind of friend are you? What kind of friend am I? If only I could stop one small event, a tiny detail, the sum total might have been different. I keep wondering. It’s probably a good thing they killed her. I didn’t even hesitate when I saw the man with the knife. I was glad I would be dead, and it would all be over soon.
I am sorry I just confused myself with my best friend. Your best friend. In the last line, I meant ‘she’ wouldn’t have hesitated. I don’t know who I am anymore. Is this even my story, or is it something that happened to one of my friends? I am all those girls who have suffered. I am the girl who wishes she wasn’t a girl.

But again, I didn’t take the clue then. I should have known how cruel and evil the society and the people are. It’s a sea of unfortunate events out there waiting for you to slip. I should have taken the hint when my tuition teacher tried to ‘touch’ me. I should have been able to foresee the life I, as a girl, would lead. But what did I know? I was just a kid. Do you tell anybody of the sick, suffocating feeling that you can’t make anything out of? You don’t. You ignore it. You go on living a life of fear. You stay away from male teachers, drivers, bus conductors, uncles. You tie a cloth around your head when you go out, blaming it cowardly on pollution. You don’t stay out late at night with your buddies, partying.

But one day, you find out you’re pregnant. And it is supposed to be the best day of your life, only its not. It’s the day you finally take the hint. You see a baby girl, cocooned inside her mother’s body, away from all of world’s evils, the safest place to be. It’s my baby girl. She’s scared. Or maybe it’s me, inside of my mother’s womb. Having seen all this, having lived the labyrinth that is a girl’s life, I would trade not being alive for the life I lived as a girl. I don’t want to be born.