Didriksha

Close your eyes. What do you hear? A dog barking, a car driving past, birds chirping, children screaming? Maybe you hear the splish-splash of the puddles, or the drumming of raindrops. Didriksha heard none of these.

She sat where she always did, playing the events of her life over in her mind. She was born to a middle-class clerk in a family of seven-four boys and three girls. She remembered being beaten up for a reason she hardly understood; her organs of reproduction were different from those that they had desired.

Then there was marriage at sixteen. She had secretly hoped for sunlit days and fairytale nights, but Destiny saved her the trouble of having to remember a new spectrum of events. The beatings started at her husband’s house too because she didn’t bring as much gold with her as her father had promised them. Time passed, and the promised dowry failed to arrive. Cigarette burns, kicks and acid splashes followed. One day Didriksha opened her eyes to find herself within four white walls, with their frocks of fungus and blooms of algae.

This was where she had been imprisoned all these years. It was only once (or was it twice?) in a day that the flap in the door would open and a handful of what was presumably leftovers would be scattered on the floor. It was in the room itself that she relieved herself- the red mixing with the white and the yellow. Sometimes she wanted to cry, but all her emotions seemed alien to her. Sorrow, laughter, life and death were all the same or, nothing at all to Didriksha.

The walls looked at her and smiled their silent, undimpled smile. They had been her oldest companions. They shared a common language- silence. It isn’t a language you and I would understand. It can only be understood by furniture stored away in a room, waiting for a death that they know will never come.

Walls never lie. They told me about Didriksha’s death. They showed me the dark stain on the wall where she had banged her head. They told me about the heaps of rice that accumulated on the floor weeks after she had gone. They showed me the room, within the confines of which lay Didriksha-whose name means, “the desire to see”. But I do not wish to get into those details. Let silence, the language of the walls, act as the catalyst for the realization that all sad stories do not have a happy ending.

And that all Didrikshas don’t die.

While she lies there, dead, the craftsman works in his shed. He moulds the clay taken from the banks of the sacred Ganges into the form of the Mother Goddess, the form in which the feminine force has been worshipped, for centuries.

I wonder why.