LESSER WOMAN?

The sunrise was pretty much similar in this corner of the world too. The only difference was that she could not feel the rays of the sun warming her up. The dilapidated house with its dingy, unmade interiors clouded her vision further. The chirping of the birds was never heard in this corner of the world for this lane belonged to the koyals who had lost their voices to the cacophony of the unwavering carnal obliquity of their customers. They were none other than the ones who came day after day, sometimes leaving behind waiting wives and so-called true lovers back in a world considered high above than this hole of an existence.

A sparrow fell on earth. Its wings covered its face. The heat was unbearable. No one to quench its thirst or to feed it food, it fell down without much noise. A truck crushed its mortal remains, sending it in different directions. The winds resumed after a pause that evening and took with them the vestiges of a life known by a very few.

I sat and wondered how similar its story was to the many tales of women (or 'lesser' women?) whose bangles clunk just a lane away from me. There they were, around twenty of them, on both sides of a lane that would never be chosen by women usually, at least at this hour of the night. But here they were, with flowers adorning their hair, shiny bindis, bloody lips and clothes that always tried hard to accentuate their worn out bodies and souls. They smile, pass comments, make merry at the cost of their own now-irrelevant-dignity.

The men came. They devoured them with their eyes first and then took the worn out road. They trampled those wilted buds, ripped apart the tattered, sewn remains of a life that bore a huge brunt even without them actually realizing it.

And that’s where I met Malini. That it was another name for Goddess Durga was a sheer coincidence or not- I do not know. Barely 20 years of age, there she was sitting, watching her 3 year old daughter being ogled at by the usual visitors of the approaching dark. I was observing her from the last three months. Her tummy seemed to have bulged out a bit more than when I saw her last. Last trimester- she told me.

I was the only woman who did not belong there and yet had looked into her eyes, she had said, and that my eyes held a genuineness that gave her the confidence to look back into them. That was enough for two women to share a bond that would surely remain special. She looked up to our weekly interactions as much as I did.

She didn’t know who the father of her daughter was. Sadly she would not know this time too. There would just be one difference. Her second daughter would neither know her father nor her mother. Maybe she will only know the four walls of the brothel she would be brought up in, only to be fed to entertain the fantasies of men in whom she would always search for her father. Unfortunately, it was like what Late Malini had once told me, “For us, men are neither fathers nor brothers. We know them only as those shadowed figures that come to us seeking our bodies in return for notes that let us survive another day and to meet yet another man to repeat the cycle.”

Malini’s memories remain reminding me of R.Frost’s lines-

And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.