As I decided to write on women issues, I found myself up the creek. It is, indeed, a daring job demanding spunk in you to produce such ‘real’ incidents. So here I am… writing my first such piece; not going far, I penned down my experiences so far.

MY GRANDPARENTS (predominantly the female one) wished for a grandson when I was in my mother’s womb. And all hell broke loose the day I was born. My first experience as a girl! Thanks to my parents (once again, predominantly the female one), they loved me.

“Your grandma refused to even cross the threshold of the hospital ward to take a look at you,” my mother gave me this depressing piece of information when I insisted on her for this. It only left me grief-stricken. “And the moment she saw you for the first time, all she said was, ‘She looks like my son and it would have been better if the god had sent her being a boy’.” Now you can ascertain why I can’t bear crossing my grandma’s threshold.

Is it really important to own a son/grandson that my grandma had forgotten while commenting on my gender that she herself belonged to the same group? I guess, yes! Else, she wouldn’t have ever been able to latch on the difference between these two sexes; now, when she is old enough to use a stick while walking, she is not looked after by her so-called sons (three, she has!), but is given regular visits by her daughters and daughters-in-law to enquire after her health! And she knows what she has lost – my love (and respect, to some extent) for her.

Anyway, let’s come back to my experiences part. A pungent treatment at the very first day of my life was an indicator for such impending episodes awaiting me at almost every stage. From the parts that are fixed in my mind, I shall sally forth with the time when I was in class III. As far as I can commit to my memory, I rubbed eyeballs with the very first occasion of harassment in my life when a boy from my class itself wrote my name with an ‘I love you’ message on the girls’ washroom door. It only left me in tears, as I didn’t know what else to do when I was the object of everybody’s gazes in my class. This boy was given a tight slap each by my mother and my class-teacher the very next day.

The next year followed, so did such affairs. I can never overpass one incident that rolled in when I was in class VII. Every morning I used to enter my class, I would find one letter placed on my desk – an anonymous love letter! Its content (that asked me “not to discuss it with anyone or I’ll defame you”) terrorised me to the extent that I feared every boy present in my class. I don’t know why I got so scared of the word ‘defame’, albeit I had no real idea what it actually meant! But the kind of milieu created by that single word had left me vulnerable. And so is the state of many females’ minds that keep their dumps and blues uncurtained.

Well, in due course, I was informed by one of my classmates (a boy, to be precise) about the person behind all this. A boy I thought was a very good friend of mine was the culprit! And I was standing with my class teacher with all those letters the very next moment; that offender was penalised severely – a week’s suspension from the school! And this time, I did it all by myself, without calling my mother to school the next day.

I have lost the count of such episodes I chanced upon when I was in school. Thanks to my mother, she never let me resign myself to the so-called fate of a girl in this society. But what about those deprived girls with no mothers bracing them up at such hours of need? They end up loosing their confidence levels much before bricking it up. Parents are our maiden teachers; if they don’t endow us with buoyancy, then who would? And when it comes to building up a girl’s mental state in a country like India, it becomes even more imperative.

If institutions like schools and colleges are not considered safe for women, then why to blame open roads? One fine morning (sometime in 2007), I left home for office only to stumble on yet another bad trip to add to my kitty. This time, it was an obnoxious bus journey! I boarded the vehicle and within a few minutes, I discovered that a jam-packed bus could be a nightmare, especially for girls, for then those frightened-in-the-open hands don devil-may-care spirit. And that day was no exception! But the only difference was that I turned and gave that hideous fiend a tight slap in the face. And believe you me, he felt really humiliated and got off the bus as soon as it stopped at the next stop. Once again the question goes to those countless females who remain tight-lipped in such situations, which only provoke the wrongdoers to move one step ahead followed by turning into rapists at times – aren’t you yourselves behind your miseries related to molestation issues to some extent?

These are a few incidences I could recount due to the shortage of space. But the two messages I wanted to put across are, I guess, clear. One, to the parents (especially mothers) – girls are not meant to be dominated. Instill loads of confidence in them to face the world and fight all their battles themselves. Two, to the females – you are not the weaker of the two sexes. Take an immediate action at the very first sign of any sort of abuse and put an end to further chances.