The Letter never posted!

 It all begins with the sonogram predicting the gender of a still in progress human being and well

sometimes, ends right there. You’re safe with just the machine predicting it, since it shall remain

indifferent and do its job irrespective of your gender. However, disseminating that knowledge to my

family almost gave me a mini heart attack but thankfully they weren’t radical conservatives. I

couldn’t help but notice the expressions change, as their mystique hopes had apparently spiralled

into perennial anxieties, me being the cost of it.

Akin to how the new born clinches their modish hands amid the air to grasp one of the talents

guised as scintillating hues, even I recall clinching my hands but seldom did I know that all those

colours were bewitched under an Obscurus of Inequality, prejudice and gendered subservience.

After all, Shakespeare was a smart person to write Seven Ages of The Man, if you come to think of it,

these 7 discrete ages are for men only, while we live in 2 ages throughout our life, the one before

marriage and the one thereafter. (No offense to the noble work of Shakespeare though) Ironically

enough, we exhaust the latter one, preparing to perform well in the former, and the former one,

striving like hell to get validation, all in vain.

So here I am now, been through umpteen travails and regretting the way this society is conditioned

to always bog women down when it comes to giving them wings, the fact that you need to accord

them their wings is haunting enough already. Why am I the one to get all those smirks from my in-

laws (yes, I’ll call them that because they never made me feel like their own daughter) even if I step

out of the house for 15 mins without getting their nod. People advocate that it’s just the way a

generation can be conservative and it’s not their fault, albeit why don’t they get that the problem

evinces at the point in time you start controlling the fragments of others’ way of living in your own

way. What’s the big deal in just being conservative about your own self and give the requisite space

to others? They talk about glass ceiling and how it’s hedging the women down, I’m not educated

enough to understand it all but if you don’t solve the problem way beneath the ceiling where

women are swarming in with not even a floor to stand on, then how would the Liberation come by.

Of course, it’s easy for the top-notch class to deal with such issues. The affluent ones don’t actually

care if the women of their house are sweeping their homes or not, since they have the means to

child care facilities and can afford the rest, but the bracket of class we live in, ends the discussion by

scooping in the feasibility card. “Who’s gonna take care of kids if you go out and work”, Well, why

can’t both of us work part-time… just because the socio-economic structures don’t have any such

provisions. Certain industries do open doors to that, but then again, we are not among those people.

Don’t get the wrong idea that husbands are willing to take up household chores either, they are

definitely not, with the corrupt system providing them a good excuse for not complying with.

With bureaucrats tokenising by offering to pay wages to women for their household work, my

personal gets political in a slippery manner. That’s not how it would work up until the point in time

it’s just regarded as our place of work. It rather emboldens the hypothesis that we are supposed to

do your laundry, pick up your dishes, wash ‘em and keep sweeping day and again, getting

reprimanded for no reason at all. Don’t confuse this with me as disregarding this kind of work, but

it’s assignment to a particular gender. Not just that, it further nudges women to make their work

even more fulfilling.

While your dad has his provident fund being carried forward periodically in lieu of retirement, my

kind of job doesn’t even account for retirement, so I can’t even plan my heydays ahead, apart from

trancing into an illusion of some far-off parallel reality.

You have seen my bloodshot eyes after every time I cry over a fight with your dad. Those tears

delineate that I’m not fervour-less, I don’t deserve to shut up every time by a raised chastising voice,

he doesn’t have to shirk off my rants by ridiculing that I’m still better off than being downtrodden. In

spite of spending my entire life taking care of family and back-burning every personal ambition,

don’t tell me that my life has no purpose attached to it and don’t endorse your mental pressure

from work on me. Yes, I couldn’t fight these issues on my own and trust me, I’m not proud of that

either.

Beta, you keep asking me that why don’t I drive in spite of having a Driving License, just because the

society, or let me say, your own ‘otherwise cool family’ doesn’t trust a woman with a steering wheel

in her hand. I don’t get why they instil fear to gain respect when the same can be achieved through

love and freedom. I fear, yes, and that is precisely why I started to write this letter. Whatever I wrote

is not unassailable, but know this, that it took a lot courage to pen down the truth. I’ll make sure this

letter doesn’t reach you until it’s too late (because that’s what I’ve been indoctrinated into, to

internalize it all), or hopefully it’ll never reach you and perhaps, one day, you would come to the

crux of it all by your own.

While for men, it might be depressing to go through all those seven ages, however it’s still a privilege

untouched, unbeknownst to us. I don’t know about the corporate glass ceiling, but I hope there’s a

ceiling on the no. of sacrifices we have to make. I implore the world to atleast recognise our

sacrifices, appreciate them, stand by our side and don’t take them for granted as if it’s our job to

always make our feelings take the side line.

All I ask of you is to not let my lived experiences get generalised, I can’t entrust you with the Entire

sphere, but make sure that there’s no need for such kind of letter to be written ever again by anyone

in this house.

By Akshat Kalra