Sri Lanka 16 Days Campaign Blog

Gadgetgirl (aka GG) contributes with a blogpost. 

She blogs at http://purplesocksisallmine.blogspot.com/ and tweets at https://twitter.com/ggpurple

Original post can be found at http://purplesocksisallmine.blogspot.com/2011/11/violence-against-women-16-days-of.html

Last year, someone known to me was flickering with ebullience and oomph that she was going to get married. She was gracious enough to let my eyes run through her gifts of velvet cased jewellery and other apple polished frilly elegance. She also told me the guy was 23, fluent in his English because she wasn’t and hadn’t asked anything in terms of dowry from her. I understood, she was happy at this prospect.

Then when she handed her invitation card, I took it. Read it. And splashed a smile in order to be nice. As I was holding the card, I shrunk in fear. Was she doing the right thing? Is she going to come through and get better without any sort of academic hand to surrogate if she fell? She was only 18 after all, stopped by 8^th grade but a brilliant student during those 7 years. She maybe in her magical thoughts, but what I knew was that she would only smile into her character and pat my back saying that I was thinking way too far like she had always done if I had brought these questions out to life.

A year later, something happened and her family had to move, save they ended up living at our vacant home downstairs for a few months until things had settled at their end. Dawn came and their final day to leave us breezed in. That day before, I heard a few rumpuses stewing through my room from the house below. I ran a silky thought in mind it must be her parents or some relative with a business collapse. In the mean time my mum was down attending to her plants and greenery when suddenly I heard loud sobs repine through pain. “Don’t hit me, please stop”, it moaned. I hurried closer to the window and it knocked me. The husband was beating her. What the heart of the drama saddened me was her own mother couldn’t stop him. Why being the question posed by my mum later after the man had gone, the girl had said because she has opinions and ‘a big mouth’. And then more spilled out, that his parents are encouraging his beastly seemliness that he never takes her out if she wanted or not and she has never been happy with him ever since she was sprayed off to slog as a maid in her new home. It shocked both my parents and me sharply. I wanted to run down, hold her hand and just lock her in a hug and allow a good cry on my shoulder never mind the dampness. But the same day, the family bid goodbye back to their home. I wasn’t in a position to even sit her down and ask her everything from scratch. The guilt stood by me on the nose. I thought I imagined it all.

When I had visited her months right after marriage all she did was shine with the same old zip of energy and liveliness just as she was known. She also revealed that she was trying for a baby to complete her ‘euphoria’. But coiled inside was a crestfallen, troubled, beaten soul limping her youth cast down. I was ashamed at myself for not trying to break through the mirror she was flashing at me. But what can I say? That everything will be alright if she keeps sticking tapes of patience to the wounds infused? How many women and young girls like her take this as their daily bread? How many are swept off with promises and pledge only to later doom them inflaming the fears and mediocrity? How many silence themselves even from their own parents because they wish not to trouble their gray heads.This, I believe is one of the worst fears young women are embroiled in. The ones tangled in marriage without any education or qualification to back them up are the ones dying and trying to get a grasp of what little liberation marriage they thought once would fix them. A dish of achievement and happiness from a man at least. But no, these girls and women remain beady in their eyes with a beast in their beds waking up to head to the kitchen to chop onions so that one’s mind would ‘clear’ trying to read of as what really, made them cry.