Being a Girl in this Country of Mine

Sometimes I wish I were born in another century and sometimes I feel I should have been born in another country. At times I wish I was born a boy and most of the times I wish I was not born at all.

Being born a girl in this country of ours is a curse that befalls not only on us but the entire family from the moment we are conceived in our mothers’ wombs. You men may think it is the safest haven, but for us it is that place where we first experience fear – of death before life.

Some of us are very lucky. We have parents who are happy that we exist and nurture us and love us even when everyone around them rebuke them for bringing us up ‘as sons’ and for giving us the right to study, to play, to not help our mothers and aunts in the kitchen, to be ambitious, to choose a life partner, to go out of the house and work and sculpt an identity of ours. The rest of us, well, do we even need to say it out loud?

We grow up hearing that grandmother of ours reproach our mothers for having borne us and telling us each day of our lives that we mark the end of the ‘glorious’ family name. Our uncles question our upbringing if we don’t learn to slave for men, take our decisions and speak up against abuse. And all the time we are told how useless we are because we know not how to cook and stitch and fulfil a man’s desires in bed.

No, we are not allowed to climb trees or play cricket; for us are the dolls and ‘mini’ kitchens. We wear not shorts nor go for a swim in the river, for there are monsters looming large.

And only we are to blame. It is we who are guilty and always wrong. We are guilty, first and foremost, for having being born. We are guilty because we are ugly and some of us are beautiful, because men stare at our fully clothed bodies and wish they could strip us naked, because we refuse men who then drown us in acids, because we cannot win the heart of our husbands and they sleep with whores, because we don’t bear a son and because we choose to walk out of a marriage where we are abused and belittled every instant till we can take it no more.

We are educated and we are independent. But that doesn’t mean a thing in this country of ours. Here we are hired because the boss thinks we can be an asset, spelt eye-candy, for the male employees. And if we are the boss or hold an office of importance, it is because we are whores. Here we are beaten up in the middle of the night by our husbands and almost dragged out of the house because we dare to raise a voice. And the cop tells us it is a figment of our imagination because no one saw it happening. Or worse still, we do not complain. Here the tailor grins at us if we want a deep neckline, adroitly manages to lose our measurements each time and feels us up every time we visit him. Here the gym instructor, the swimming coach and even the music teacher eye us with lust writ all over. Here men walk straight up to us and knock us down, smile and say “am sorry” and smirk behind our backs for having touched ‘yet another girl’ and making her feel abused. And no one speaks up for us; they only enjoy.

Why don’t we speak up? Because speaking up is not always the easiest thing to do unless we are battling for our lives in hospitals or have been crippled for life. We can bring to trial those ‘they’ have seen but what about the uncle or father or brother who rape us throughout our childhood? Yes, what do we do with the molesters that reside in each and every Indian family, making our nascent minds believe that we have been born to be abused by each and every man that we come across in life? What about the husbands who rape us every night of our married lives because we have been given away to them? What about the teachers in school and the professors in college who invite us over to discuss assignments and snatch away a bit of our modesty?

We should hang them all.

 So what does the country do? Castrate a few rapists and hang a dozen more? No, this is never happening nor is any rapist serving even a life term. Because in this god forsaken country of ours, women have no dignity, no identity, no voice and they do not deserve anything at all, not justice, not life.

Why do we like to believe that this country of ours, that boasts of a skewed up sex ratio, would be bereft of 95% of its men folk, read preservers and protectors, if all these molesters were tried, jailed or hanged?

The most that we can expect is a lot of hue and cry after every shameful incident, marches and protests, debates and bickering in the media and even in parliament. But even after incessant acts of abuse, in public and personal spaces, we do not deserve a law that takes away from our abuser what he took away from us; nor the pain or the death that he gave us. Not even a law, even if we forget about its implementation because no law in this country ever gets implemented, that would make him feel a miniscule of what we have endured.

And we are very proud to be born in this nation of ours!