God maybe unfair but this girl still dreams
…After a while, Ashwini, one of the girls I usually interact with every week, came. I was seeing her after a long time, so I generally asked her how she had been and what she had been up to. She was telling me about how she had to go to a wedding that evening and about school. When school came up she told me how her mother wanted her to stop going to school so she could do domestic work and earn some money. Ashwini’s pretty determined to go to school though, so she told me that she had found a way to work in the mornings and after school as well, so that she could continue working. She didn’t seem to mind being at home, and she had a lot of affection for her mother. She was even saying that she didn’t want to ever get married or leave her house for any reason because she wanted to be with her mother all the time. She said that she was having trouble with learning English because hers was a Kannada medium school. At this point she got a little sad and said that I was there, talking to her because I was able to afford a good education and knew English well. She wanted to be that way too, but she didn’t know if that possible or not. She said that sometimes she felt like God was unfair. I didn’t know how to respond to that, but I told her not to lose heart and that as long as she remained in school she could always finish her education and become whatever she wanted to in life. She said that she wanted to be a doctor, but her mother always tells her that being a doctor is a useless profession. Her tone didn’t imply that she grudged her mother for saying any of this, but it definitely made her unsure of her chances in the world. I asked her about her father, and she said that he was not around, that he was in her village. Then she told me about what it was like in her village. Girls were married off as soon as they reached maturity and people there were very conservative. She lived there until she was 5 years old, and then they moved to Bangalore. She was very glad that she could move away from such a society because she did not want to live that kind of a life.
— Trisha Singh