Born Free

It felt warm and tender. I wondered how it would be to leave this nest and go out to face the world. It was exciting but at the same time it terrified me. The world as I see it is bad and ugly, rude and heartless. I doubted if there was place in it for me- a child born of RAPE!

I had heard the word so many times and it echoed as it passed through the womb I lay curled in. The woman who is to give birth to me was already being called by a number of names- witch, slut, bitch, wretched creature… I don’t know why, I don’t understand either. All I know is that to me she would be the world; I will call her “mother”.

She talks to me every night and I listen to her silent sobs, feeling helpless that I cannot wipe them. She tells me of that stormy night when a rogue exploited her and left her with nothing – no honor, no happiness and no respect. The only thing he left behind was me. I am a mistake he made, a trace he left behind, a puzzle to the mystery the investigators are trying to solve, a clue to finding the serial rapist who left no woman in his path untouched!

I hear voices whispering and sympathizing with her dismal future. It makes me angry; I shout “What was her fault in whatever happened? Why should she lead the life of a victim? Is she not entitled to a normal life too? My voice is drowned by the tears she sheds and I am once again consumed by the darkness within. I hate that man who did this to her, the man that society would call my “father”.

Father??!! I feel like a prisoner of my own birth. My very existence is from the man who has transformed my mom into a creature that exists but does not feel and who breathes but does not live. What kind of civilized society is this, where man kills man, man cheats man and man exploits man, and yet we call ourselves the superior creations of God! Tomorrow, I would be born and would have to leave this haven that I have been living in. I would be looked at with piteous eyes at being the child of a single parent and having to grow without a father figure. Some even wanted me to be aborted rather than lead such a life.

But I want to live. I would be the one thing that my mother still has and can call her own, a support, a reason to hold on and a source of joy to the wounded heart. I want to face that man and so many others like him and show them that it takes more to breaking a spirit than breaking a hymen! I want to lead a normal life, just like the children who I hear playing in the parks my mother walks in and the temples from which my mother is shooed away.

Dear mother, I wish to be born free- free from the society that has done this to you, free from the father that I will never call my own, free from the branding and the names they’ll call us by. I will give you a new birth, and under the twinkling stars, you can tell me stories of another time, a time when you were happy, and a time when the world was a better place.