Silenced Echoes

I call out to the silence. My voice wavers, diminishes, and fades away. I feel my heart sinking. There’s no one– no one at all out there, to lend me a hand.

No one who bothers for me, a small, young child working day and night for my life, for meagre earnings. Sleeping for hardly five hours every night. Earning slighted looks for thanks, for every job I do to sustain my family. People grudgingly hand me the owed sum, in return for my work.

What did I do? Why am I being treated like this? What have I ever done to deserve such a nightmarish life?

Ma is cooking lunch, our only proper meal, on the chulha. It wrings my heart to see her work so hard, dedicatedly, every day. Someday, I will earn enough to be able to go to a local government school and fulfil my dream of becoming a doctor. Although schooling is free, my parents took me out after third grade, unable to provide for us alone. Since then, I worked to support me and my family. My mother encourages me to pursue my dreams, but I have five younger siblings, and my old father to look after simultaneously; so, it’s hard to find time to attend school.

Since ages before, we’ve been a family who must make ends meet. Even before India’s independence, my great-grandfather was one of the poorer peasants, and the vicious cycle has passed down from one generation to the next.

“Divya, help me serve the food,” Ma calls me. I get up and start ladling out food from the old, worn-out utensils. Each of us gets three chapattis, and two servings of dal with some vegetables. This is all we get the whole day. In fact, today is one of the luckier days. There have been times when we have had to sustain ourselves on a single meal of one chapatti each, with one serving of whatever vegetable was affordable and in-season. If someone well-dressed and seemingly well-to-do happened to pass, we were sent out to beg and ask, “Give us something to eat, and God will shower His blessings on you, kind Sir.”

Since generations we have been miserable in our poverty, and while our parents are indeed eager to educate us, and lift us all out of these terrible circumstances, they are still bound by debt and need for basic amenities, besides money to repair holes in the roof, to buy clothes, salt, food, potable water, medicines, and much more.

So, I must work until I can educate myself and my siblings. Until I am independent and strong enough to stand on my own feet and know that I’m not going to fall.

Until I am able to silence the echoes of poverty, that have been ringing so long unheard, and rise above the dark caverns of ignorance to emerge in the awakening light of knowledge– until then, I will tirelessly strive and do my best.