By Mydhili R Varma
You bear tally marks in your soul. One for every night spent moving further away from home in the back of a van, in boxes stacked in trailer trucks. You lay the tallies end-to-end and hope they will stretch long enough and all the way back home.
Are 786 marks enough to cover the distance from Delhi to Dhaka? How many more until you are dispatched around the world, until you trace a circle back home?
You are a white in a color-coded scheme of plastic chairs. White chairs for virgins. A whole spectrum of colours for skinny, fat, passably virgin, tame, trouble. Lascivious eyes assessing the mélange.
The man, the shapeshifting demon of the night, old today, young tomorrow. Jarring, breath-holding moments that stretch all the way around the clock dial. Drugged and bruised in dungeons, chained in cages in farmhouse basements, nightclubs in blood-coloured lipstick, rich people parties as snacks carrying snacks. Auctioned into invisible non-lives or back to the cages as unsold goods.
Closing stock of Invisibles.
Stowaways, runaways, all packed like sardines alongside the kidnapped. Swapped like trading cards.
Visions of freedom through slivers in a van. Posters of Prime Minister’s girl child empowerment policies reel by. Dreams on paper, so close, yet so out of reach. Not for you, these dreams. You are not that girl child. When you went missing, you became invisible. No dreams for the invisible.
You will yourself to get back to working that hand pump in your village from where you were taken in the shapeshifter’s van, barely conscious. Even before you passed out in that cracked vinyl seat reeking of sweat, damp cloth and cigarettes, you sensed the fingertips of a wildfire peel your clothes and singe your skin.
You burnt for an eternity.
Now you are all burnt coal and cinder.
But you hope to get back. You swear you will beat the pump and get mother a full pot of water without cribbing or muttering curses this time. If only you could stack the tallies all the way back home.
By Mydhili R Varma