I still remember the first day that I cried. Just as my Dadi took me from my mother’s cradle and handed me off to my father, already holding his shovel.
I remember my father running through the thick green foliage. His eyes scouring the ground to find a place to dig my new cradle. Taking me away from my mother before she even had the chance to hold me, only to place me in the lap of Ma Dhara. I still remember thinking, was this why Sita was excavated as the farmer ploughed his land? If it were the case, would anyone even find me? Was Sita the norm then or the exception? And how many more had there been that had lain here before me: sent back to Mother Nature because no one wanted them.
I still remember the jolting sobs that had reverberated from my mother’s house once she was finally awake. How her screams had shaken the very earth that had lodged itself in my throat as my own father sealed my fate, with every shovel full of sand. The little unmarked grave of the baby girl, wrapped in an old piece of sari.
That was thousands of years ago, but I still remember it as if it were yesterday. Well, in a way, it was yesterday, and the day before and every day in those thousands of years as I saw one father after another come and bequeath their daughters to Dhara. I tried to help them, I told the flowers to turn their fruit into poison so the men who had taken so much wouldn’t dare to take any more. I made the bees sting the honey hunters till they ran away in screams. I made the tigers prowl the jungles till no one dared enter the forest. But none of that was enough. So now I’m going to rebirth myself, into the form of a girl, into the form of a goddess, of Bhairavi, Durga, of Kali and Chamunda. Into the form of Aranyani, the girl who was reborn as a tree, birthed a forest and now will vanquish those who bequeathed to her their little saraswatis, durgas and Lakshmis.
I still remember… and I will always remember the day they buried my cries in the earth alongside me.
~~~
AUTHOR BIO
Amity Batra started writing poetry at fourteen as a way to make sense of the world. She left a Computer Engineering degree at Thapar to follow what mattered more, and is now studying English at Amity University, Punjab. Her debut collection, Peeping Inside (Social Tape Publications), received the Rise Insight Literary Award 2024. Her short story The Boy with the Cocoon appears in Tell-A-Tale, published by Authorspress, New Delhi.
