Criminal

Her mother always told her to believe in God. Someone who was so powerful, that he could shift the entire fate of the universe in the whiff of a finger. Someone who’s so divine and forgiving, that he’d forgive any crime if you repent to him enough. Someone who’s so kind, that he wouldn’t let any of his children be miserable if they looked up to him.

And so, she’d always wondered why he decided to take the only life she had ever known away form her; just when she was reaching out to him. She still remembers everything, quite distinctively. Her family would stay up all night to pray and take seheri even when it wasn’t Ramadan. Her dad was almost never home. And when he was, almost never able to bring around 3 meals. So they would fast, using that as an excuse for the hunger. They’d look up to the heavens every night with their hands clasped together only to ask for one thing, salvation. From the life that they’d been granted.

Salvation. And now,

She wakes up every morning feeling dirty. Every muscle in her body creaks like an overused old armchair. Her head almost gives into a thin, sheering pain. The kind of pain that you can hear, like a telephone that’s been put out of the dialer for too long. She wonders if cutting her head open would cure it. She wonders if it’s worth it.

The steady ray of sunlight fills her bucket faster than the meer trickle that seeps through the rusty tap. The faint beam gently sneaks through a small hole on top of the quadruped tin structure, cradles her soft naked skin for a bit and then slides down into the barely occupied plastic tub. It tries to remind her that she’s alive. A reminder she desperately needs to prepare for the next day.

Emptiness , often followed by a feeling of dissipating sorrow fills whatever soul she has left as the thin stream of water rids her body of the sins from last night. She doesn’t know what she wants in life anymore. All she knows is that the marks on her body and the sins they carry pays for her food. She doesn’t know where she’ll go or what she’ll become when she’s too old. When the customers stop coming or when her body’s no longer appealing. She doesn’t know who’ll be there by her side when she’s finally “free”.

Freedom. Taken. Never given.

Her father was and probably still is a drunkard. She has’t seen or heard much of him in the last 3 years. Except the one time he came around to ask for money. She could smell the alcohol dripping from his beard through the thick air freshner in the brothel room. But she gave him the money anyway. Less out of love and more so because she knew if she didn’t, he’d go home and hurt her maa.

The funny bit is, he looked lost. As if he stepping into her world made him contemplate the gravity of the decision he made.

She still wonders if she really meant that less to her father. A commodity, exchangeable for money. They were cooking that night, when they heard the gradually louder exchange that went on outside. The loan-sharks had sent men.

The men had started to pillage through every room in the house, looting everything they could carry on their bare hands and destroying what they couldn’t. They were going to either take the money or take everything they had. She took refuge in a small storehouse behind the kitchen. But one of the men found her.

Apparently her dad had kept her mortgage for half the money he owed. Twenty thousand taka. That’s how much she was worth. Not a penny more. She hoped that her father would come for her or atleast try to take her back. But he was always to drunk for that. She’d like to think that her mother was trying to get to get to her somehow, but at one point even that seemed a faint possibility. And they promised her a good life, the people who took her. One free from poverty and hunger. Free from the devils she’d been fighting all her life. And so, she took it.

Today, some new girl in the brothel told her that her that maa had died. Some old man came around and sent her the message. But apparently he warned her so that she wouldn’t show up to the funeral. She’d only ruin the sanctity of the programme. His words sounded like he was accusing her of something. Of some crime she was so extremely guilty of, that she would be too unpure to attend her own mother’s burial.

Sanctity, pureness, holiness whatever you call it. She gave up all of that three years ago when she ‘chose’ this life.  She wonders if she ever really had a choice. She wonders if  God would still forgive her. She feels used, only to wash herself off and to be used again. She feels like she’s a parasite living only on the edges of ‘pure’ society. They look at her like she deosn’t belong, careful not to touch her like she’d somehow spread some fatal virus among them. They look at her like a criminal, someone who’s on death row waiting for her time to come. She’s a criminal, she knows that. She’s a criminal for the ‘choice’ she made. She’s a criminal to herself, to her society, her family. But above all that, she’s a criminal to her God.