[nukkad] The Life Story Of An Indian Woman...

["Samira Razdan" <>]

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If you don't execute your ideas, they die. 
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- The demand to sacrifice education, self-esteem, personal interests,
dreams – everything – for her parents, husband, in-laws and
children ...

- The awkwardness, humiliation and disappointment of being assigned
to an arranged marriage... with scarcely any preparation ...

- Watching her brothers receive preferential treatment... everytime...
simply because they are boys... "sons" ...

- Cooking and cleaning all day long amidst the relentless nagging
of a mother-in-law ...

- The horror of seeing her own metamorphosis... from a bright and
beautiful young woman into a replica of her mother/mother-in-law...

- Listening to her mother/mother-in-law/other elderly women in the
family profess that they had done all this happily ... and sensing
in the end that there was not a breath of truth in their words...

- Realizing that generation after generation of women have lived
like this ... ... not to fulfill the glorious ideal of
a 'husband-worshipper'... but out of fear of being condemned by
family/society if they didn’t.
    --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

And so... one day she said to me ...

There was a time when I believed in all those words...
This was the time when I was young...
I would listen... believing over the years...

But now my ears have become calloused and somewhat deaf to the words...
Because they are false to the heart from which they spoke.

I cried... often in silence from the hurts...
But the wounds always healed... and the scabs disappeared...
Leaving only a scar to remind me.

So now I listen with my eyes...
   Tears shed... tears dried up... that's all there is for me...

-Sam.







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