From before I remember seeing the beauty of earth, I remember burning. My skin peeling off layer by layer, the screams of pain reverberating in my skull yet no voice escaping my throat.
I, who is called yajnaseni, the one who was born from fire, I despise my creators, the negligent parents who decided to give me life through fire, but it is not because even at my genesis I felt like death was carving a statue out of my body, it is because for me, the one who is born of fire, my eyes are too fierce, my steps too hot, my tongue knows not how to soothe and my touch alone can burn.
For me, the one whose body is not made of blood but whose veins scatter around in mayhem trying to control my fire, for me who is sent to earth, thrown away by parents without a cause or purpose, for me whose tears are acid to my own face and whose smiles are generations of nights spent writhing under nightmares, for me, who is fire incarnated, the earth is too shallow a container for my flames.
I was not born crying like a baby, with small hands that hold onto fingers ready to protect them forever. I was not born without the knowledge of how to talk, eat and walk. I was born a beauty, a fire whose scalding steps were feared first, then castaway hidden until they could be tamed, chained and made into an object that will be displayed in the shiniest market, adorned with jewels that will become a source of envy, wearing clothes that no one's fingertips would touch in ten lifetimes and sold to the highest bidder without using my voice.
I thought it would be okay, even when sold the buyer did not have to be the cruellest master. I thought I would be okay with bowing in front of a master, because anything was better than an isolated room where my fire was left without any fuel, anything was better than letting the walls stare at you and cave in until you are enclosed in a box of suffocation and breathlessness. So I held his hand, did not look back once, I held his hand and stepped on your earth and my fire danced.
Never once did I think I would hear a woman saying, 'share her. When you threw me into a fire, told me to take birth, I choked on my screams until I couldn't recognise my own voice. I walked until my feet bled to become the perfect doll you wanted to create. I saw the sun each day, saw people deifying its beauty, its burning, its heat, but never once I questioned why my burning was caged, my heat crowned shame and my fire left to watch its own ashes fly away.
I am being told to become panchali, the wife of five husbands. My voice is not allowed to surface once again. Tell me creator, why have I not been given the grace of Sita, for your earth to open up and swallow my entirety? Why when I barely conceded to having one master you chain my neck to five owners? Tell me creator, why have you not slashed my arms for two husbands, my legs for the other two, my torso for the fifth, and if given a choice I would willingly present my head to the mother, the woman who wanted me shared. I would ask her to stare in my eyes everyday and watch the fire that is still burning, stare at it until her heart burns with me.
I was never wanted for my fire, all they needed was my womb, I was never a body with a soul, but a house that will raise bodies that will demolish it after they become men. I was not made of blood, sweat and tears, I was made of stone, mortar and straw to use when needed and to discard when the use is completed.
Tell me creator there are twenty cracks on my breasts, a spider has crafted a web on my arms, my abdomen bears scars of a war that makes me a woman and my palms carry a cut for every sacrifice I have made. Yet you brand me a slut, a whore, unfilial and unfeeling, a mother who should not have been born.
You have changed the way I walk, stitched my mouth so I cannot speak a language that is not yours, you have drowned my body until my skin cannot touch and feel, you have tied my arms and chained my legs in a museum of inanimates where you display me as a rare tribute.
When you erase my 'I' and transform me into a machine that works on a cassette of your likes, how do you then critique a beauty that is not mine, but a creation of your own greed? how do you define one body perfect and another defected when every model is a product of your parent company? Is your beauty not faulty then, dear creator, because your 'her' belonged to you and never to me.
Still remember, even if you throw me into an ocean that knows no end, you cannot extinguish my fire, because it is not in my steps alone, it is what makes me Draupadi, it is what has given birth to me, it is the parent that has fathered and mothered me and it is the child that will continue my legacy.
- Priya Jain, Vivekananda College
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