Short Story by
(Faryal Bukhari)
Her head is rested on window’s glass. Her brownish red hair are falling down from her shoulders like a cascade. Her face has unreadable expressions. Her hazel brown eyes are drilling something outside the window but their deepness and thoughtfulness is easily noticeable. Her rosy red lips are twitching. She is pondering on something very deep. Her hands are holding each other and fingers intermingled and clenched. She is afraid of something. Anyone can smell her apparent feelings but nobody can guess about the dept of the wound she is feeling at a moment. Whenever she is afraid of something she acted like a child but she is well aware that she needs to be strong. But how? At that moment her brain is like a maze, from which she wants to get out. But how? Her brain is about to explode but she can’t allow her magma to come out of her because it would be fatal for her. But why for her when she is innocent? Her feelings are shattered, her physical existence is indifferent to the world, numbed and fragile. She wanted to shout but her voice is stuck somewhere in her throat. Her mind again and again repeat the humiliating statements passed by some loafer rascals… chamakchaloooo khn ja ri? ary ary yeh attitude… uffffff jan lo gi in adao say kia? kbhi to lift kra do janu….. and the list goes on. Then her brain again stuck with today’s incident… one of the cheap rascal stopped her on her way and then grabbed her hand…. this was gruesome. Thought of this made her more and more frustrated, and she grappled to think about something else to ease her mind but she found no way to get away from this poignant memory, she clutched her head hard and a drop of tear fell out of her eye, rolled down her cheek to her jawbone and her throat yelp. She never wanted to compete men. She never raised slogans against men to prove women more worthy than men but she always took stand and spoke for rights of women which Religion has given women… right to live as a human being, right to be honored, and all those rights which a common man deserves. She has always been realistic and knows that gender equality was a myth, is a myth and will stay a myth and what truly needed is equal respects and proper rights. She wonders why eve teasing is considered as a by birth right by many men? They have no idea how harsh those statements are, how spine chilling are those thoughts of bearing all that with silence. Her mind repeats lines of Sadat Hassan Manto….
“For us woman is one who is our family, others are not women but a butcher’s shop and we men stand outside that shop like dogs whose greedy (lustful) eyes are always on meat“.
She knows the facts and figures against daughters of Eve… She was well aware that between 500,000 to 2 million people, the majority of them women and children, are trafficked annually into situations including prostitution, forced labour, slavery or servitude. Aaccording to estimates… more than 130 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates that the annual worldwide number of so-called “honour killing” victims may be as high as 5,000 women. , over half of women with disabilities have experienced physical abuse, compared to one-third of non-disabled women. And the most pathetic part is women themselves are considered as a reason behind rape, eve teasing, and violence. In many societies, rape victims are blamed of engaging in premarital sex or adultery…. Among all such situations who is going to encourage her to face them like a lion because she know she is part of a society which will blame her… isi nay phly koi signal diya ho ga, to tm ghar say bhir jati he q ho? huhhh parh lia bth ab sakoon say ghar baitho is say phly k kuch gul khila do or khandan ka nam doob jay… and sooooo onnnnnn….. Thought of all this was making her sick. She wanted to bang her head with something but she knows that she even can’t do this to her self… She sigh! and rested her head on her knee.
ABOUT WRITER:
Syeda Faryal Bukhari belongs to Sargodha. She is a housewife and a student of MS English Literature at Foundation University.