The world often says that the birth of a daughter is the arrival of Goddess Lakshmi in a home. But in the narrow, suffocating corridors of our three-story village house, my birth was whispered about as a dark omen. My mother often tells me about the day I was born—a day that should have been filled with celebration, but was instead stained with insults that I would carry for years like a heavy chain.
When the news reached our extended family in the city, my *Badi Mummy* (eldest aunt) didn't offer a prayer or a single smile of welcome. Instead, she looked at my exhausted, pale mother and declared with cold finality, "A girl has been born. She is a *Kalank*—a curse. Ever since she was conceived, our family's wealth has been slipping away. She has brought the shadow of poverty with her."
It was a cruel, baseless lie, but the timing of my birth made it easy for her to poison everyone's mind. At that exact moment, my father was going through the hardest financial struggle of his life. Money was so scarce that on the day I was supposed to be discharged from the hospital, he didn't have a single rupee in his pocket. He couldn't pay the hospital fees, buy the required medicines, or even afford a rickshaw to take us back to the village.
To bring his newborn daughter and healing wife home, my father had to do the unthinkable. He took his most prized possession—his own father's old, rusted bicycle, which was his only means of transport—and pawned it to a local moneylender.
As my father walked silently beside the rickshaw that carried us home, sweating under the harsh sun and having lost his only asset just to clear my "entry fee" into the world, my *Badi Mummy* stood at the doorstep. Instead of a warm welcome, she sneered, "See? She has already started eating away at our assets. A girl who takes away her father's wheels before she can even crawl is nothing but a sign of destruction."
### The Unending Toil of a Mother
In any other family, a woman who has just given birth is given forty days of rest and nutritious food. But in our house, the rules were different for my mother. She was treated not as a recuperating mother, but as a servant who had failed by giving birth to a girl.
She was not even six days post-childbirth when the "vacationing" relatives demanded she return to her duties. As soon as her ritual bath was over, my mother was pushed back into the endless sea of chores. With a body that hadn't yet healed and stitches that still throbbed with pain, she was back on her knees, scrubbing the floors of the entire three-story house.
I grew up hearing stories of how she would hold her stomach in agony while lifting heavy buckets of water to clean the rooms of people who didn't even acknowledge her presence. One evening, when her health finally broke and she developed a high, shivering fever, she sat trembling in a corner of the kitchen, unable to stand. She gathered the courage to ask *Badi mummy
The reply was a cold, sharp blade that cut deeper than any physical wound: "What is the need for medicine? You are a village woman; you are made of stone. Get up and finish the rotis. The guests are hungry, and your 'illness' won't fill their stomachs."
My mother didn't argue. She never did. My maternal grandparents (*Nana-Nani*) were well-to-do and deeply kind people who lived in another town. They would often send messengers to our village, begging my mother to return to them. My *Nana* used to say, "Aarti, come back. I will take care of you. I will raise your children like royalty. I will get you the best doctors and the life you deserve."
But my mother would look at my father—a man caught between the bullying of his elder brother and his own poverty—and she would refuse. She chose to stay in that hell because she believed a wife's place was beside her husband, even if that place was a battlefield of silent insults. She believed that her silence was the only thing keeping the "family" together.
### The Stolen Heritage and the Name on the Glass
The cruelty extended to every corner of our lives, even to the objects we touched. My mother had arrived at this house after her wedding with beautiful jewelry and polished brass utensils given to her by her parents as her *Streedhan*. Slowly, under the guise of "safekeeping" or simply by force, *Badi Mummy* took everything. She locked my mother's gold in her own cupboards and claimed the best utensils as her personal property, forbidding us from using them.
One afternoon, a guest arrived from the city—my aunt's brother. I happened to walk into the guest room to deliver a glass of water. I saw him drinking from a beautiful, heavy brass glass that looked different from the cheap plastic ones we were allowed to use. I stared at the base of the glass as he tilted it. Right there, engraved clearly in the metal, was a name I knew by heart: **AARTI**.
"Mummy!" I ran to the kitchen, breathless with a child's sense of justice. "Badi Mummy is using your glasses! I saw your name on them! They are yours, aren't they? Why are they in her room while we use the broken ones?"
My mother's hands paused over the dough she was kneading. She looked at me with eyes full of a profound sadness. She whispered, "Hush, Shreya. It is just a vessel. A piece of metal is not worth a war in this house. We must respect our elders. If we want this family to stay under one roof, we must learn to swallow our pride and our tears."
### The Darkness and the Scream
The psychological warfare wasn't enough for them; they targeted us physically too. They wanted us to feel small, to feel like we didn't belong in the house our father helped maintain.
One day, my younger brother and I were playing near the veranda. My eldest cousin Aman, who was much older, called us into a small, windowless storage room under the stairs. The moment we stepped inside, the heavy wooden door slammed shut. The bolt clicked.
It was pitch black. The air smelled of damp earth and old dust. We were terrified. My little brother started shaking, and I began to scream, my voice echoing off the narrow walls. We banged our small, soft fists against the door until our knuckles were bruised and bleeding.
My mother was working in the far back of the house, and the city relatives deliberately turned up the volume of the television to drown out our cries. We were left in that suffocating darkness for hours, huddled together on the cold floor, sobbing in fear. It was only when my father returned from work and heard a faint, broken whimpering that he rushed to the door and broke it open.
That was the only time I saw my father's eyes turn red with a primal rage. He scolded Aman, but the "city family" just laughed it off as a joke. In our society, wealth acts as a shield for cruelty. Because they had money and we had nothing, their malice was labeled as a "prank," while our trauma was ignored.
### The Exile of my Grandmother
The darkest chapter of our family history was what they did to my *Dadi* (grandmother). She was elderly, frail, and battling the final stages of blood cancer. My uncle's family took her to Jharkhand, claiming they would provide better city doctors. Instead, they treated her like an unpaid servant.
My *Badi Mummy* would make that dying, trembling woman stand for hours over a hot stove making rotis for the guests. One day, in an act of pure evil, they forced my grandmother's hand onto a red-hot iron griddle (*Tawa*), burning her skin severely because she wasn't moving fast enough.
When *Dadi* finally managed to reach a phone, her voice was a mere ghost of its former self. "Son," she sobbed to my father, "have you sent me here for *Vanvas* (exile)? Have you sent your own mother away to be tortured in her final days?"
My father didn't hesitate. He borrowed money from neighbors and caught the first train to Jharkhand to rescue her. When he brought *Dadi* back, she was wearing a tattered, old sari that belonged to *Badi Mummy*. Even for that rag, my aunt didn't stop taunting her, claiming we were "stealing" her clothes.
Whenever they brought expensive sweets from the city, they would eat them in front of our hungry eyes. If they ever offered a small piece, it came with a sting: "Eat this carefully. It's very expensive. People of your status can't even dream of buying such things."
They didn't realize that every insult they threw was fueling a fire inside my father's heart. They didn't know that the "curse" they spoke of would one day become the source of their greatest envy. The girl who was brought home on a pawned bicycle was destined to build an empire of sweetness that they could never touch.
**To be continued...**
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