Gargi Vyas
You said you never wanted her and you threw her mother out for bringing this burden into the world full of cruelty unmatched by your own paying no heed to the tears flooding down her cheeks that were as purple as the eggplants she spent forever pickling for you despite the blistering summer heat and her blistering sore feet, wiping her miserably unadorned brows with her sari that she received as a favor when you set a price on her before bartering her into your life but oh the irony, she was already dead and now that sari is tearing up too as you shove her onto the roads dotted with potholes bigger than the voids in your heart and she is crying out, you shamelessly think for you but no it is for a future her child could not have because she was born with the wrong chromosome and believe me when I say it was wrong because her eyes were dimmer than the street lights she studied under, the street lights she huddled under to escape shadowy glances in the dark towards a body that was too young to know what those gazes lusted after and her heart ran faster than the pace of her unattainable dreams when she walked back home and waited for her mother to return as she leaned over the grimy window strangely prophetic of the punishment for the crime of being born a woman in a world that did not see you as one because you were either meat to be stolen or sold, and if not either you were just a creature with humanoid appendages that could only cry and beg while those with the right chromosomes could judge your meritocracy as a human being but don’t underestimate the tears because they fell and washed the grime away and when she walked out this time there were no streetlights and her heart was calm as she recognized the pale, resigned face on the soiled white sheets and she did not see her mother’s soft leather wallet which she had carefully scribbled her initials on but it was okay because she did not want the money that gushed out of the pockets of hungry, wicked men who grabbed for her mother’s numbly made up body faster than the speed of sound as her cries rent the air so she walked out once again and this time from society’s plan for her as intricate and deeply set as the jewelry her mother wore that night and I suppose the metal cooled quicker than her indignation because soon she was walking erect in a world bent to bend her and her eyes shimmered through the smog as bright as the taillights of a car she swerved around every stupid myth about her kind and she cried, oh yes she cried but before her tears could dry she had her heels on and she towered above the world set to belittle her and her dainty hands were clenched in brutal fists that craved to be raised into the sky but instead they slowly unravel and wipe my tears away as she picks me up and brings me close to her heart heavier than the bats you point at me when you tell me to not cry like a girl, but if this is what a girl is then I will cry like a girl in your fucking face and be the one to raise my fists to the sky while I cry for every nightmare she spent screaming for her mother and for every bleeding fingernail she chewed to nothing and for every pair of purple cheeks that became cold before their time.