Sarah
(Re-posting old stories from dairies & blogs- This was from 8 years ago-2011 and I distinctly remember Sarah coming to me in a dream, very romantic but true!)
Sarah was a girl of knowledge. Someone who knew what she wanted, who didn’t roam around the ice-cream parlor deciding on what flavor to feast on. She loved books; the smell of books, her fingers would pass through those yellowed pages, making them yellower by the touch. She lived on a language none in her family spoke of or even knew of. She dreamt of dancing in the arms of the scandalous yet handsome Rhett Butler, of being friends with Darrell Rivers in her six terms of Malory Towers, of the trees of Nainital how they swished and swooshed as the times of the monsoon came.
She had her own little nook, where she’d elope when the night would give away, when the house would be bustling with hungry men drinking to the brim, where her innocence would be juggled by men with hungry eyes and hands the size of her timid body. All that separated her from the filthy shenanigans of the night outside would be a cranky door latch and a world of imagination tucking her in to sleep to a much safer abode, to a morning where the house would be so quiet that she could finally be.
Living in a man’s world was a task she was born with. She wasn’t used to emotions, to teenage love,to going crazy about the next MTV stint. She wasn’t used to staring at mannequins, to tapping away on trashy touch-screens, to manicured fingers and pedicured toes.
The house rarely smelt of food. Rarely would there be a pan frying or the sizzle of burnt biriyani masala her Ammi used to recklessly burn, but that was two years ago. Sarah was now the only woman in between the ravenous beasts.
Her only escape would be Charu and Panchali, people of the same mind set but with four-wheelers to step on to head back to their respective homes in the posh area of Ballygunge Place. Charu and Panchali might be her only solace but they would never understand, would never know how cold it was for her outside, how she was in this psychological trauma, this anxiety, how her very adolescence was a thing she was scared of. How the very sound of Abbu’s arrival with the Koran tightly held under his armpits was the most ironic image she had ever seen, even more than the fictitious work she was so used to reading.
Abbu was a child molester. Someone the crew from the new show Aamir Khan had come up with would pay a bunch of rupees to secure, someone they were taught to fend away at school, and someone who would be a felonious criminal in the eyes of the media and the public in general.
Sarah was a girl of knowledge. Someone who knew what she wanted, but had only patches of dreams of a reality she would never get hold of.
