You talk of her childhood, the one she actually never had because she was robbed of it, the day she put on her bandeau. Bedtime stories or the comfort of mother’s lap; she had experienced none of these. Her mother never wanted her daughter to do what she had been doing herself for the last four years- shunning off her womanly respect for a few bucks. With a few friendly foes around her, the days passed the way the previous days had- futile, fragile, fruitless and frustrated. She dreamt of being an entrepreneur, suited up in black, the same she had seen on the hoardings on the highway to the city.
For outsiders prostitution was a taboo sort of career, nobody talked about it much but ‘she’ did, for ‘she’ had seen her dreams shattering, ‘she’ knows how it feels to be lonely and ‘she’ had been into what ‘she’ strongly disliked.
The world is cruel, merciless and worthless, she thought during her early days in this profession but now she has repudiated everything, everyone. ‘She’ has become mean, she has swallowed that. ‘She’ is narcissistic, she accepts it. No one actually knows how it feels to be ‘her’, to be called a ‘whore’. Not because we can’t but because we don’t wish to.
Now each day she hears the conch blowing from a distant temple as she tiredly arranges herself on the bed. Is she tired due to the ’workload’ she had, the previous night or is it something away from the realization of you and me?
-Archit Aggarwal
