Sheela Mishra, a middle-class girl, who lives in Patna, is going to school. She is a happy-go-lucky girl. Today her face betrays an expression of grief.
Sheela’s story mirrors the tales of thousands of Indian girls. Sheela is the topper of her class. One of her brothers has repeated a year. The other barely manages to pass. Sheela has been among the top ten in her Class 10 Board Examinations. Yet such an achievement on her part has hardly got the attention it deserves from her family.
Sheela is a spontaneous dancer and is also very good at painting. But these diverse talents do not make any difference to her image in her family. Her father and grandparents have always looked upon her as a burden to her family. Nobody has ever conceived of a future for her. Sheela’s teacher has repeatedly requested her parents to take her career more seriously but these appeals have fallen on deaf ears. ‘The girl/her’ father says, ‘shall bring nothing to the house. Instead I will have to spend a fortune for her dowry. It is the son who will ultimately bring money to my house.’ Her father’s ludicrous logic is something that she has learnt to live with.
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As Sheela walks towards her school today, she is painfully conscious of another of her dreams remaining unfulfilled. She has always dreamt of studying engineering. Her father has made it clear that she can at the most expect to complete her graduation from a city college. That too is doubtful because marriage is on the cards. After marriage, the prospect of future education and a career shall depend on her husband and his family.
Sheela is actually lucky to the extent that her father did not get her killed while she was in her mother’s womb or get her drowned in a tub of milk when she was born. Whether she would be burnt by her in-laws because of the lack of dowry is dependent on the secret will of destiny. If this is the future of girls, then one can only wait in dread for a time when women would become ‘endangered species’. This is indeed ironic in the context of a society that has worshipped the concept of a woman as Kali or Durga for centuries.