In Search of Heer

by Manjul Bajaj

I realised the most bitter, unpalatable truth of my life. That I had always been a prisoner of my gender. My father had created for me an illusion of freedom and independence, and like any child I had thought my father was invincible, his word was decree. Yet, as soon as he was away, I was just another girl locked inside a room being compelled to marry someone she had never seen. I and my womb were being packed off to the highest bidder to produce heirs. My father was a good man, a thinking man, a well-meaning man but that morning I realised he was not a very powerful man. He had barely left town and the age-old restrictions and society’s strictures came rushing in to clamp down on me from all sides, as if the freedom he had given me to believe was mine had never been. Even more unpalatable than the realisation of my father’s fallibility was the coming to terms with my own frailty. I was a trained warrior. I was not unarmed. I could even ask my girls to rescue me from imprisonment. But what good is physical strength when you possess no other home to go to, no land or income to keep your body and soul together? I could escape my prison chamber but I could not escape the fact of being a woman.