When I walk with my mother to the fields in my
nondescript village in the northern Indian state, of Uttar Pradesh, to work in
them, I let the brown of my surroundings seep into my consciousness.
It is a game I have loved to play since twelve
years of age, and, today at nineteen, my sport is near-perfect. In our daily
one-kilometer walk, I let myself believe that my community, its five families,
and I, are part of the society, not outcasts forced into the margins of the
village.
During this walk, I allow a feeling of freedom to
run like a river through my veins. In my mind’s eye, I first conjure the brown
thatch of my hut. Then the textured skin of our neem tree, its long bark
playfully splayed with brown fingerprints all the way up.
My eyes proceed to the bundles of thin brown twigs gathered and tied with tensile-tough brown jute strands. Then to the familiar, nurturing brown earth of our semi-arid lands, varying from sandy loam to clay loam, that holds fields of white and black millet, maize, cotton, paddy and lentils.
And, finally, my mind’s eye comes to rest on my own skin, browner than the normal
Indian brown, singed and scorched by the sun under
whose gaze I work every day.
I bring these varying images together and shift all
these mind-pictures from the periphery to the centre of the village. From the
corners of my mind to its centre. These are my seized moments of omnipotence.
My moments of triumph.
Today, like every other day, the world of consequence becomes real as we near the fields. The sounds of our feet crunch the brittle brown leaves, the autumnal leaves in the morning of September. The visions from my inner-scape begin to dim but I try to hold on to them just a bit longer.
This even as I leave my mother some distance away to work with the other women labourers. To gather golden brown stacks of millets into bundles. As I walk deeper into the fields to cut grass for our six buffaloes and cows, I see the millet stalks stand audaciously above their muscular stems, brown in their insolence, like a buoyed up life force.
I wish I can mimic their energised rise above their station. Just as I begin my task of cutting grass , I see four boys from the upper caste, who shirk even my shadow in public, tower over me. They bind my mouth, drag me deeper into the tangled fields, into a viscous mixture of liquid and solid, violate me, break my spine, and cut my tongue.
For what?
For being an impure shade of brown? For surging their frontiers in my mind, in my
daily walk from home to work? For trying to be a
person even though I am a mere woman?
Through my pain, I am aware of being rushed to the police station and then to three
hospitals. In 6 days time, men in khaki burn a dead
me on a lonely pyre set up close to my village, in the absence of my family.
The irony is unmistakable. Dreams of a brown girl
undone by men in brown. Yet not really so.
Look closely. I am there in the furrows of my sister Sita’s brow. In the daring of my neighbour Vimla’s smile. In the clenched fists of my friend Sneha. The dreams of brown girls will come alive. Soon.
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