Dear Mom and Dad, Am I Really Guilty ?
“Dear Dad, is it my fault if you drank yourself to death when I needed you most? Dear Mom, is it my fault if you are not like “other good mothers”? Is it my fault if my fees are not paid and I have to be shuffled from school to school? Is it my fault when I had to finally drop out of school as I couldn’t fit in anymore? Is it my fault if my teachers don’t understand the trauma that I was going through at home and scold me no end for being a bad girl, bad student? Home works not done, lessons not learnt, uniforms not tidy, fees not paid, useless girl.. Is it my fault when the school became a place of shame and disgrace for me, a constant reminder of me as a poor student, a misfit? Is it my fault if my friends made fun of me for being a daughter of such parents? Is it my fault if I lend up on the streets and the streets and footpath became my home? Is it my fault if shady corners of the street became my bed of initiation into adult life? Is it my fault if street goons and drug users become my friends and protectors and the “loose women/girls” become my sisters of comfort? Is it really my fault what I have become, what I am…? I really don’t know what I am, people say I am a bad girl, a bad daughter of a bad mother, perhaps I am, perhaps I am not, it is for them to decide and tell me if I am guilty of all the accusations…”
Looking at her from afar, she is just an ordinary Naga girl, in her early teens, but on the other hand, she is not an ordinary girl. She is special. She is different. She is a girl-woman. A lonely girl lost to the world around her. She has to act tough. She has to act like she doesn’t care, that she can take care of herself, that she is grown up. She tells you that the only two people who loved her has passed away early, leaving her behind, “They have gone up. What to do” she says and laughs mirthlessly. In her laughter is an echo of a desperate cry to be brave and strong perhaps, an irony of her life and the people around her who really don’t care what becomes of her….or perhaps some do care…
She has built up a wall of resistance around her, so strong, people see her from a distance and concludes, “ street smart” a kind of girl who is a “ bad influence” on other girls. Not a “nice girl”. Her mother failed her, father failed her,her other families failed her, or who has not failed her for that matter ? This daughter of a “ ruined mother”, she has seen violence too often in the home between two persons closest and dearest to her. Perhaps she has never seen or known what love means between parents, what love means between parents and children, what love mans from people around her. Father gets drunk like crazy, mother drinks herself senseless and shameless. She must have wondered why her parents are like this.Why cant her parents be like other parents who doesn’t drink, doesn’t fight, takes good care of their children? She must have cried and screamed in pain when as a little girl she had to go through this. Its like a sad movie that makes you cry but a sad movie you forget after its over, but for her it was not a movie, it was real. This was her real life.The fights were real, the pain was real, the tears were real. She has learnt to be tough, she has to shield herself. So she grows up, too fast, too hard.
Before she could even know what it is to be a child, a girl, she is burdened with the problems of her parents who are suppose to give her love,hold her in their arms and tell her they love her, that she is their little girl. Instead of hugs she gets torn and wounded between their fights and quarrels. Hungry for love, yearning for a touch of tenderness; she cheated, she lied, she pretended, she traded her innocence. So young, so innocent, so vulnerable, yet so tough, experienced and skeptical of the world and the people around her, so experienced in the ways of the world. But that’s how she has to learn to survive in a street that gives her a sleeping space, a street that’s waiting to pounce on her, take from her whatever she has! Good girls cannot survive in this kind of street. You have to be bad, you have to be tough, and you have to be street smart. You are already badly wounded; you don’t want to lose your life. Good Samaritans are scare in the streets of today. They are preached about, read about, heard about, and talked about in the confines of the churches. You cannot see many of them in the streets.
Somebody forcefully violates her young and vulnerable body. People around her ask, “ How has this happen? Where is your home? where are your parents? What do they do? Who are your parents? Where is your mother? What were you doing in the streets in the middle of the night? Why were you sleeping in the streets? So many questions, she hates to answer. She replies mechanically sans emotions, “ Father died, mother, I don’t know where she is” “ why don’t you know where your mother is? How can you not know where your mother is ? Silence. “Because she is also like this !” she speaks out with vengeance. “Like mother like daughter”, too often she heard that. She has come to accept what people tell her, what she will be, what she is. She doesn’t know where her mother is, where she stays, with whom she stays. She says her mother doesn’t have a home to call her own. She sleeps where/ how far her feet carry her, in the railway plateform, in the booze joint, anywhere and everywhere, except a place called home.
She said she and her mother lived very difficult lives after her father passed away after a long sickness. She tells them about her life because they asked her, they conclude, “ Oh ?! Daughter of a mother like that! No wonder she has landed up like this. She will also be like her mother! No hope with this kind of girl! They look at her and the look tells a thousand times, “Nothing can be done, she deserves it. With a mother like that, what can you expect from her daughter? Leave her be. She can be no good. Daughters of this kind of mothers are like this”.
When the chain of human love and compassion for its neglected children breaks down and there is not much love around for children starved of love and care, who is to be blamed when they go astray? Who is to be blamed when they end up with wrong crowd? Who is guilty? Tell me, who is guilty? Tell her, who is guilty? Ask yourself, who is guilty? Perhaps we won’t hesitate to say, mother is guilty, father is guilty, the daughter is guilty, family’s guilty of not taking care of their daughter, community’s guilty for not taking care of a neglected child of their community, the church is guilty for not going out in search of the lost sheep etc tc. Endless! Who is not guilty? We are all guilty in one way or the other. No one is blameless. Why point our defiled fingers at this poor innocent girl?
Now let us just ask ourselves this simple question and see what needs to be done by us and what best we can do? Who are WE to JUDGE? Have we being assigned to pass judgments? Let God, the Defender of the defenseless and the weak, the Protector of orphans and the widows decided/judge who is guilty. Why play God and pass judgments? Our task is to love and be compassionate to those who need our love and compassion. Let us just do what we can do best, and leave the rest to God.
K Ela
Prodigals’ Home
