She occupied the darkest patch of
shadow, darker than her wounds, chosen intentionally to hide her dreadful
nightmares which were all turning true. Pain has no face but has a voice. She
sat on the floor where her emotions lay brutally assassinated and her self
respect torn to pieces along with the pages of the stories that she was told
before marriage. She shied of her reflection not just because the facial and
bodily marks gave her a sympathetic look but her eyes flashed the memory of the
painful encounter. The marks on her face were still better than the cuts on the
heart, the bleeding of the wounds had stopped but the heart was still oozing
out the entire bloody twinge. It was killing her like a slow poison. Chhavi
always analyzed the past picture and tried locating her fault but when she
failed to find any she simply made one and convinced herself that she must have
been wrong somewhere. She consoled herself and started collecting the broken
vase that Vipul threw at her and a part of which gave her a new scar pattern.
It was more like a routine now. Every problem has a solution then why the
constant vituperation and violence ruled the house? The consequences turned the
walls of the house opaque to any ray of hope or happiness. Erstwhile they were
THE happy couple. Retrospectively, this was never meant to be this way. Vipul
was jobless, soaked his days in alcohol and nights in blood, everyday he
returned stained with a new rejection and tried washing it off with Chhavi’s
blood. Using manly musculature to dominate a woman only predicts his
spinelessness. Women in India are taught to worship their men, they are taught
to realize their commands and desires. But the two genders are comparative and
women remain a bitter competition to men in all attributes except physical
power. This weak point is often manipulated and used so well that it completely
changes her art of living. Chhavi is not the only one but she is just another
such woman who is fulfilling even this command selflessly. When a man cannot
defeat her on any of the sensible grounds, he beats her and tortures her to get
hold of her intellectuality which turns her insane and cracks her spirit to
live. When will this practice find a full stop? When will the status of a woman
rise up from the levels of slaps and kick to hugs and kisses? Only when he
wants to? Only when he is unwilling to sleep without a woman besides him? Does
violence makes them believe that she won’t run away with any other man and
remain a part of his kingdom not as a queen but as a vase on the table which
looks lively but is after all dead? Some stories are exposed and some torn
pages still hang from the sides of an old diary which no one is interested in
reading. Domestic violence is one sided and is unfair. I wish I could save such
women from the abuse and take them to a heaven where dead entries are not
mandatory unlike the one we have heard about.
