The sun is blazing above my head. Deafening sounds surround me. Drillers are drilling into the rock and cement mixers are churning concrete. Large groups of colorfully robed women are noisily transporting 16×14 inch cement bricks on their heads. Soon a pile of 300 cement bricks forms beside me. It is nearly nine o’ clock […]

‘You can’t have everything you want simply because you want it’, ‘Can’t you think of anybody but yourself’, ‘You don’t really want that!’- were the common remarks with which I grew up. They made me feel weak and as if, no matter what, I couldn’t do anything. I was living with my other two brothers […]

I saw the cruelty of the world’s oppression through the eyes of a naive child. My four sisters, my mother and I were burdens on our father’s shoulders. He ousted his anger and disillusioned outlook on giving birth to five ‘futile’ girls by getting drunk. He traded his conscience for alcohol. Alcohol took with it […]

I was rejected-rejected by my father, rejected by my family, and rejected by the closed community to which I belonged in rural India. Even before I could open my eyes into the world, society condemned me for something I never did. I was an accident. I was the immorally famous child only because my mother […]