Nothing introduces you to patriarchy like marriage. Even if it is too late, once you see it, you just can't unsee it again. When it comes to biology, the only thing that is unrevervisble is a man and a woman's reproductive system, the ability to bring a child into the world and the ability to feed him/her.
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The rest of it... I don't get it anymore. Don't you think it is strange, women are worshipped for fertility yet discriminated for the blood that bears its symbol. The worst of the marriage victims find themselves in ashes, with bruises or at times a penetrating uterus, so I guess an identity conflict is far too trivial to comprehend.
Any time a woman raises an eyebrow, it is not necessarily a sign of troubled family or failed marriage. Maybe it is just a student, a story-teller or a wallflower observing from the hinges. While my own conflicts seem too first-world, I don't yet have the creative licence to share many of the stories that I hear. It is unbelievable how cliche, yet inhumane and heartbreaking, things remain.
Yet, keeping menstruating women away from temples remains a bigger priority for society than bringing abusive men and women to justice. I am more likely to lose my unborn for violating the so called rules of a local deity than a man who punched and kicked the mother of his child. Even when my heart went out to my mom, there was a time I thought feminism was over hyped.
But today, even when I am the happiest, there are so many questions that I can't help but explore. I simply don't get why I should be seated at a lower pedestal just because I lack a Y chromosome. And honestly this journey of understanding and exploration itself feels isolating.
By the time I became a young woman, I finally identified my stakes in the fight for empowerment, every adult that I had admired for their "modern" outlook, women-centric thoughts had already switched sides. Even when we don't wish to accept, bowing down to patriarchy is the easiest way to become a model woman.
Even though I don't dismiss the presence of a supernatural or spiritual power, I doubt if the whole meaning of a woman's existence is to ensure her family's well-being. Why the society accepts absent father, drunken husbands and cheating mates more openly than a woman who questions.
I have no idea how scholars don't find contradictions in the teachings of Geeta and the rules of all powerful deities. It is anything but absurd. How do you love yet retain your identity? Do I risk my unborn who is yet to be conceived or bow down to a stone that itself brings me a negative aura?
Even if it is all true, it simply feels alien. Falling in love with my kind of man in a town that feels foreign is a crossroad where I lost my faith. Even though Arjun's friend vowed for the path of devotion, maybe path of knowledge is actually the one for me. Hopefully if nothing else, this will someday shape my calling.
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