Asking Why



	Only God treats me the same.  The afternoon sun still
beats down fiercely and the rain stings just as hard.  But
everything else has changed.  My baby is dead.
	Today I look at the world from an angle.  My eyes slice
in diagonal pieces of reasoning, as if I have lost a center.  I
do not know if this means I have gone mad.  Or maybe I was mad
before and am now for the very first time, seeing things in
their real light.
	My baby is dead.  I am holding it.  It has been six days
now.  The flies have come to keep me company when all else turn
away at the sight of me.  Of course a few do try to talk to me
and tell me the right thing to do, but their right means nothing
to me anymore.  My baby is dead.
	There is something about me that scares people away.  It
is not just the scars on my face.  I think it is the hardening
of my jaws; the wrinkling of my brows; or the squinting of my
eyes that makes them wary.  Maybe it is the strength with which
I hold on to my baby that strikes them.  I know I breathe
differently too.  I have started to swallow in air, as if it is
cool water on the hottest of days.  Perhaps I am mad now, and
only they can can see it.
	My baby is dead.  When it happened I ran through
traffic.  Cars and trucks swerved to the side, and some stopped
to curse me.  But they were silenced when they saw what lay in
my arms.  When they saw the murder that they had all committed.
And I blame each one of them, because everybody turned their
backs when my baby was hungry, when it was sick.  And as I faced
them in their speeding vehicles, I was not frightened for an
instant, for I could see that soft spot of guilt, that tiny area
in their minds that I could push my finger right through.  And I
could reach it through all the glass and metal that separated us.
      I remind myself of a dog I saw a few years ago.  Someone
had driven over its mate and left the body lying in the center of
the road.  This dog stood beside the corpse, barking in the face
of the morning rush.  It refused to budge.  I had wondered then
if it knew that it was only a matter of time before it would be
killed too.  But I understand now that it probably did not
care.  If the baby has claimed a part of me, it has taken my
fear with it. And lajja my sharam baby uncertainty
is forgiveness dead hope forever.
      I still have my memories.  Though I have not looked at my
face in a long while, I know the scars are still acid deep. 
People say the fault actually lay with my parents: they failed
the television they had promised as dowry.  And when I returned
home, my face must have reminded them too much of that failure;
because they too rejected me.  But what hurt me more
was that children cried on seeing me.  Once there was this
woman that actually brought her terrified daughter up to me and
tried to make us friends, and I wanted it too, I tired, I
smiled, I moved my head in funny ways and my hands.. but the
little girl never stopped screaming and screaming until I ran
away, until I could take no more.  But the screams only ended
when my baby was born, because she loved me from the start.
	But now I have a new loneliness.  Very different from
the kind I grew used to when I left my village-home.  I have
worked in a cloth factory and then at construction sites.  It
was obvious from the start that people here have little
tenderness to share.  After all there are so many of us and we
are only worth our daily pile of stitched cloth or crushed
rubble.  It is as we should behave like machines; sew even if
there is a finger that will tear. Hammer, even if a hand may
shatter.  There are very few who can stand before me.  Most 
are trapped in dreams, in lies to themselves and others. 
Their failure to accept reality makes them as soft as wet
paper.  And I no longer hesitate to crush them in my fist; their
hopes and make-believe lives  for I have lost my tolerance for
lies.
       A common whore was the first person my eyes focused on
properly.  In her I found an understanding not tinged with
terror, but with a victim�s spirit of defiance.  I suppose that
was why she caught my attention.  Most of the time my sight
rests beyond skin, it is as if I wish to probe into the very
marrow of people; as if I want to hear their feeble excuses for
what was done to my child.  If the only sufferer were me, I
could try to understand, but there can be no reasoning for my
baby�s death.
      I still feel hunger, but food comes easy now.  Though I do
not ask, people stop and leave money by my feet.  But this means
so little to me.  If I go now to a shop or to a roadside stall,
chances are the owner will give me something to eat or wear for
free.  This is their way of holding on to what they must believe
in.  A trick to make themselves feel better.  Their way of
directing my anger elsewhere.  Otherwise how would they justify
the way we live and the way we are taught to look in the other
direction.  But with me, it�s just that I refuse to be ignored. 
I want their eyes to remember what they have done to my baby, to
me, and even if I am a woman, we don�t deserve this.
     And now my anger is ice.  Not a kind that will thaw in
time, or even melt under the warmest torch.  Mine is frozen in a
vacuum inside my veins, within a space that cannot be reached
anymore.  My baby has locked itself in my flesh and there is no
way to extract what has happened.  Even if my blood were drained
and my hair shorn, the truth will run through my body as my
realization continues to grow.
Though they say not to, I�m asking why.  And I hear no answers.









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