The Bitter Angels

She was born sometime in summer of 72. No one knows when, not that they ever wanted to keep that record. When your parents are poor,craving for a son,and you the fourth kid is also born a girl,you are lucky if instead of dumping you in a garbage can, they bring you home and feed you twice or thrice a day.

A baby,toddler,little kid understands two things very clearly- the feeling of being loved and not being loved.

she was not an exception

From the very day she started understanding anything, she knew she was not welcomed but then neither were her other sisters or mother. All of them lived with her father and his parents as if some big favour was done by allowing them to have shelter and food despite her mothers great crime of having four girls.

It was a small tin,rag house( hut made from anything they could find)near a pipeline where every one had just one room,toilets meant where ever you find some space behind the bushes ,walls,railway tracks….

These are places where sitting inside your “house ” you can hear and sometimes even feel what your neighbour is going through…so absolutely no privacy there…

Her mother was beaten/thrashed almost everyday,in fact every mother in that locality was beaten/abused everyday..

well women are women and men need to vent their lust and anger and that is why they get married( sorry forgot also for free services like cooking,cleaning etc)

A woman would be lucky if her husband after beating her would tell her he didn’t mean to cos he loved her and then show her the physical side of it,that is if he still had energy left after trying to kill or discipline his wife,and as for her all she had to do was to let him.

She was growing up believing whatever she saw around her was her future too and if and when she gets married she must give a son to her husband’s family to be considered lucky.

In the mean time her Father remarried and moved to another tin house with his new bride in hope of having a son. That also meant her mom had to start working and that she did by washing and cleaning at others houses.So did her two elder sisters and soon the other two were also going to join them.

and down came an angel in that filthy little space

one bitter afternoon a woman knocked at their door and requested their mother to let the kids study in schools. They didn’t know her,in fact no one in that slum knew her. she was, she said a worker from education awareness scheme for girl child,which made no sense to anyone.

Cos what is a girl child ?

a girl is a girl a burden but never a child.

anyways the woman didn’t give up and after few days of relentless pursuing her mom agreed to send just one kid to school but on condition that she would never pay for anything,the woman agreed.

She didn’t know but her life was going to change.

At this point i don’t know to cut short or elaborate. i think i will cut it short.

she was a good student,scored enough marks in her school to get scholarship in college, and then with help from another institute gave an entrance test and got a good job in Bank. ( sounds easy but it was not,specially when every meal you have,every cloth you wear is someone elses and you are made aware of it every time, when you know the negative forces of society are way too powerful than the gravitational pull)

Very few survive that kind of antagonistic environment luckily she was amongst the winners.

Today she is going to sign a form. A form which will allow 10 girls like her to get education,she would pay for that of course. Something which had been in her ‘to do list’ for a long time now. she looked at her mom who has been living with her for some time now,she smiled at her and then thought if she could do something more for her sisters but by the time she got the job all three of them had being married to that filthy life. she does help them financially whenever she can,but is not enough and by the looks of it,it will never be enough.

Today as she signs the paper, range of emotions play in her head. sadness,bitter thoughts, rage,and then finally some peace that she would be able to make difference in at least some lives.

she also thought of her father and other people like him…bitter memories danced and left a scar on her taste buds.

Some say its important that you forgive to move forward and have some peace. she says for her it is this bitterness that never lets her forget her mission,her past is not something she can change but to make peace with it would mean to be ok with it. she doesn’t want that. she wants that scar to motivate her and she will earn her peace by signing more forms by giving better future to other girls.

Today she is an angel, bitter angel on a mission

finding peace piece by piece

with every good deed.

she will not stop

she will not rest

she will not look back and cry

she has tasted freedom

and she will give that chance to every little girl

she has forms to sign

and with every form she signs

she will give herself one more chance

she will one day have an army of angels

angels like her

may be bitter

may be not

but an army of angels

creating a new world for every girl

so that all their choices get a chance

an army of girls

of women

of the ones who are called the ‘fairer sex’

and treated so shabbily

she will one day

she will…..

she will.

© somkritya