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Bitch 2 | ||||||||||
Sex
& Violence
Amrita Pritam
|
Didnt
either of you think of going to a doctor? Would she let everyone in the colony know that she was powerless before the bigger Evil One from behind Patpargunj Mother Dairy? There was blood everywhere inside her jhuggi. We saw, and rags soaked in blood... Disgusting... the new people who moved in had to burn everything inside and get a puja done for purification... Gauri wrings
out the mop and begins to swab the floor with deft strokes. Doctors,
Ma, are no use to the poor... what do they know about us? Eat well, they
all say, and give us prescriptions for expensive vitamin golis... If we
ate well, would we be sick? I had a terrible time with my last baby... Here it
comes. I begin
to laugh, Is that what a love potion is made of? Apologise?
A man? Next thing I knew he had run away with that niece of a jackal from
Seemapuri and I am told she is waddling around now with a belly as big
as a Yamuna watermelon... Next
I know my Sumitra goes and drinks tea with that good-for-nothing Pontu
and decides to leave her husband... No,
no, it was nothing like that. It was the Evil Ones love potion.
In our colonies, what good are children? If you do not have them, you
get beaten, if you have them you get beaten... and both ways you suffer
like hell... Then
Sumitra could have gone to a doctor, maybe she could have... Gauri smiles, as she departs with her implements, This child, her parents are right about the dog. The evil eye will get distracted now and they will all be better off. Who knows, some day a real man might marry the little girl. Meanwhile, she is better off than I am, for sure... p.
1 p.
2 |
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Mrinal Pande, television personality, journalist and author, wrote this for TLM in English. However, she continues to write fiction in Hindi, her first love. She lives in New Delhi | ||||||||||