The Day My God Died...

 "Who do you want to be when you grow up?"

Asked my teacher, Miss Anita in the class that day.
Everybody raised their hands.

Deepika said she wants to be a teacher.
Roshni wants to be a tailor.
Josna wants to be a housewife like her mother.

And then it was my turn.
" I want to fly a plane!"
Anita teacher looked at me for a long time.
"Who told you you can fly a plane?"

I did not know someone had to tell me who I should be...so I looked at the other girls starring at me now and some of them were giggling under their breaths.

"I see a plane flying every day. Mum tells me someone makes it fly and they are sitting in there.....I want to fly it some day!"

Anita teacher now smiled. " You will.....but you have to work very hard for it...study a lot........only then you can fly it!"

I nodded in excitement! All I heard her say was..." You will!"

I dreamt about it the whole time in school and I was still dreaming when I was on that bus to take me home. There was a landslide and the road was blocked. Our bus was stranded. Since the entire area is hilly, these things are quite common. I was very thirsty then and saw two ladies with a bottle of water. They saw me looking at them and offered me the water.

I drank it.
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Dreams.......they are made up of so much  unreality, made up of so many lies....
Dreams they say do come true if you really try hard.....
Dreams....I was riding on...
The highest dreams I had amongst them all.....
Then why.....??
Why me lord??
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I woke up in a dark room that had one window, but that too was closed.
The room was dirty and unkept and gave a foul smell.
For a while I felt disoriented...I could not distinguish between my reality or whether I was still dreaming.....Is it this dark inside the plane? I wondered!

I crawled to the door and knocked on it.
After 5 minutes a dark woman opened the door. I had never seen her before.
She helped me stand, and she inspected me.

"How old are you?"
"10"
"Okay."

She held my hand and brought me outside the room. It was almost a drag. But I was confused, why was this woman being so harsh on me?

She opened another door. There was a bed in that room.
"Are you hungry?" She asked.
"Yes."
"Then do what he asks you to do. Only then you will get food. Understand?"

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That was just the first amongst many of the warnings I got  there......and within a day the warnings were followed by beatings and kicking, and if that was not enough burning cigarettes were put on my skin to burn me slowly!


I wouldn't do what the uncle's asked me to do....
I wouldn't do what the old aunties asked me to do...
I wouldn't budge.....
I did not know what part of the world I was in,
I did not understand the language they spoke in.

My "No" had no meaning to them,
My "Dreams" were starting to lose their meaning to me,
The stripping, the rapes, My screams, My pain,
All lost its meaning day by day,

If there is god, as my mum said, I want to ask him," What was my fault?"
If there is god, I want to know, why he can't hear my prayers and my calls?
I want to know why my feathers were chopped off so harshly even before I could fly?
I want to know why should I only have to cry?

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"The Day My God Died!" is a documentary I found on youtube while reading about girl trafficking. The stories of the young girls, in this case Nepalese girls trafficked to Mumbai are horrifying , terrifying!

I know that most of us watch or read about such stories by completely disconnecting "Our" lives from "theirs"!

Because we've had secure childhood,
Because we have our parents always protecting us,
Because we have the money and the education,
Because we belong to a particular family,caste .......

We think we are superior, untouched by the filth that surrounds us.

"Oh those Prostitutes.....they are the black sheep of the female species!",
" Those women are so cheap!"....

Most of us have seen at least 1 standing at a road side, or walking on a road at midnight in some part of the city,sometime.

"They do it because they enjoy it!" .....

Is it really?

Please watch the video and decide for yourself where our human civilization is heading and what are we doing about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV5W6F4L5i8&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV5W6F4L5i8&feature=related