My Obituary

You don’t know me. You never will. I am gone. Long gone, by the time you read this.

I was born a little more than four years ago, in Ghansaur, Seoni district, Madhya Pradesh.

I was a lot of things. If you had asked me who I am, I would tell you that I loved kulfis (frozen milk bars), I love the morning sunshine, the red sands of my village, my fathers gruff laughter at the dinner table, my mother’s odd but earthly scent, the black sky full of stars unknown — and dreams! All of my dreams!

To most people though, I was just another burden, another XX chromosome, another in the long line of underdogs, another ordinary girl child. Another half-person, who needed to be controlled, stifled and used for the mighty man’s earthly needs.

Twelve days ago, Firoz Khan, honorable and respected, decided it was time for me to understand my role in this twenty-first century civilization of “man”kind.

Thirty five, ample experience and a mind blossoming with the joys of sexual starvation, he found me playing in my back yard. His ordinarily incapable hormones decided it was time to prove himself a man. I’m not sure if I was special, not sure whether I should be complimented that I was able to change an impotent animal to a raving mass of machismo and egotism.

All night. He touched. He took what I gave unknowingly, and even what I didn’t give. He bit, he snarled, he demeaned what couldn’t be demeaned. He tried to sate himself, but how does one be sated without satisfying the other? The mighty Khan had not learnt that lesson yet. Thirty-five, and he didn’t know it. I was four, yet I did.

Then the pain, the red, the chills from my nudity, the shame that I had done something wrong. What, though? My four-year-old brain couldn’t comprehend. What was so disgustingly, humiliatingly special in me that I had unleashed the mighty Khan? I didn’t know. I surrendered to oblivion.

That was twelve days and three hospitals ago. I am tired of fighting. I can feel the vestiges of my dreams leave me. The night sky has no stars anymore. The sun has shed its warmth. My father has not said a word. My mother’s scent has vanished — there is only a rivulet of water flowing down each cheek, shameful, helpless, and hopeless. I see my destiny in those streams. I see my summer days, my morning glory fade into an apocalypse, all too soon. Wasn’t the sun supposed to move overhead? Why did it not anymore?

I could hear the whispers. Those eyes. Accusing. Those fingers, pointing. Those cameras waiting like a pack of vultures for my last breath. Those papers waiting to type out my obituary before I turned cold. I screamed. And in that one final release of my soul, I wrote  myself this obituary.

Don’t pity me. I can’t take it. Don’t publish me. Don’t make me another statistic. Don’t turn me into another victim, another political issue, another TRP fodder. See the me. I beg of you, you intelligent homo sapiens, see me for who I was. Different for my vitality.

Don’t grieve me. Grieve my dreams. Grieve for your pitiful selves for being fools and depriving yourselves of my vivacity. Grieve for the cemetery of testosterone-ridden that cannot produce another me on their own. Grieve for who I will never live to be — a strong woman making your economy, bringing up your child, flying the Columbia, running your country, talking world peace.

Grieve, you fools, for what you have left is a rotten, flesh-infected microcosm of destruction. Grieve for yourselves.

When you read this, I will have gone. My screams have died down, my eyes have closed, there is only peace now. There is only vacuum. The cameras have snapped, the typewriters have written, the headlines are there, maybe the candles will light up.

But this? Only you can read this. You are special. Because you can understand. You can know the real me. You can tell the world who I was. I trust you. I know, when you know me, the next time I visit your world, you will let me live for more than the four this time, you will make this world all right, you will help me walk my dreams.

You will, won’t you?