“I had no friends. Not that I was an introvert but simply because I demanded as much as I gave in a friendship. So, not many could fill the bill. Books did!
I read almost anything and everything. The poems that my dad wrote, the sexually adulterated books which my aunt would give my mom to read, the side effects leaflet that came with medicine bottles and whatever I could.
Later during my college years the library became my other home, I found my solace in words written by others.
While the other kids would jump with joy on completion of the last exam of the final semester, I would dread it, days before. For me, it meant that I had to visit my maternal side and go through the grueling experience of travelling in an overcrowded train without reservation, where I would be assigned a place to sit mostly in some unknown lady’s lap or besides an equally unfamiliar stranger man; face the constant abuse of my Nani (Maternal Grand Mother) who would remind us of how our father was a complete failure and that being born as a feminine gender was a curse.
Curse it was for sure, the mangoes were to be collected and laid on the wooden floor amidst dried grass, but we weren’t allowed to eat more than one, while the boys of the house, the future men, could eat as many they wanted.
All of them would get a glass of milk at bed time but we three sisters would simply be told to go to sleep since the next morning the otla had to be cleaned before everyone wakes up. Surprisingly all this humiliation we three girls, women of tomorrow, were subjected to by other women of the house, my Nani, my aunt, and my mother.
We still managed to sneak in the heaps of mangoes at times and ate an extra one. That one would be the sweetest of them all.”
*Do catch up, next Friday, with your late afternoon cup of tea or maybe coffee, the story of sHE continues.
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