Meena feels the first trickle of panic slide down her back. Her good friend Chutki is plastered to a side, both of them pushed to the corner as a hefty man plonks one more of their friends on the floor of the truck.
They are only going for a ride. isn’t it?
She and all her friends.
Ma doesn’t seem to think so. She is howling now, digging her nails in the dirt of the kuchcha road, refusing to go away, even as one of the hefty men hollers after her.
Ma charges at the truck. She is trying to get on it, and the hefty man running after her hurls his staff at her.
“MAAAA!”
The staff misses her, hitting Rani on the head instead. She begins to screech too. Where is her mother?
Ma is now thrashing herself against the side of the truck, it is too high for her to climb. And the men pull her away. They jostle as Ma hits herself repeatedly, with vehemence, with urgency. The man shoves the last of them in, even as the truck moves.
Ma continues screaming. Involuntarily, Meena screams back. If Ma is not getting on the truck, Meena is not going either. She needs to get down, she calls out to the man. Rani wails. A couple of others join her.
The truck gathers speed. Ma is chasing them; Meena has never seen her run that fast. Come to think of it, she has never seen her run at all. She had always been placid, stoic , smiling sometimes when she asked really foolish questions.
But wait, she is losing the race!
MAAAA!
The truck is too fast for her. Meena can see a cloud of dust rising up, and Ma fading out. She is not going to wait anymore. She is going to jump out, if need be, hefty, nasty man!
She tries to push her way out, and realises she is trapped. There are just too many of them, like a wall full of clammy bodies, all of them wailing now.
Meena kicks at whoever is ahead of her.
”Let me out!”
They push back, they’d fall over otherwise. Fall over then! I don’t mind tumbling out! The others don’t seem to think so though. Their mothers are not running after our truck. They have no idea.
“Leave my daughter be!” Ma screeches. She has bitten the man who was raining blows on her. Meena has never seen Ma do that. She will never see Ma again.
She is now only a ball of dust, rolling towards, now away from them. Meena can hear men swearing, Ma yelling out in pain. They seem to have hit her again!
“Maaa!” Meena cries, before her throat closes in.
“Are you able to breathe? There is no air in here.” Chutki prods Meena.
She is sobbing as well.
~~~~~~~~~
Meena does not know this yet, but she will spend the next 36 hours on the truck. Her limbs locked joint to joint. Without food. With barely any air to breathe. Lying in a pool of mixed excreta. Only to be plucked out, battered, fractured, both in bone and spirit.
She will be jabbed with a cocktail of drugs. A body racing ahead of her mind. Ahead of time. A life racing into darkness, as if death is only a hurdle to be crossed if mercifully encountered.
At some point, she will be violated. And then again. Several times, over several years. She will bear children, at an age when she is a child herself. Always bruised, always scared.
Don't you wax eloquent about her rights! If you have ever been a feminist, you have entirely missed the point. If you have ever believed in equal rights, your reference level of equality is grossly low.
Pink little fledglings that will be taken away from her before she could suckle them once. And before she knows it, there will be a new baby to make.
And gallons of milk to yield, a milch cow that she is.
She will transform into a tigress. She will not let her daughters lead the life she did. She will not let her sons be taken away, to be hacked to death, before they learn to take their first wobbly steps.
She will kick, bite and roar.
And they will defang her, whatever it takes. Because more calves must be made. And more milk yielded. Because this is a time of excesses. We don’t just have our glass half full, we have a fridge full of cartons. And packets. Dollops and ‘tub-fulls’.
Her Ma knew.
Meena will make the trip her mother made only a couple of years back. With others of her kind. Old and useless. Their udders dried up, their flabby uteruses dangling under their bellies. On another truck, smuggled to a slaughterhouse in the dead of the night. To the man with bulging, bloodshot eyes, blood on his hands and a hole where his soul should have been. The one who will slice them open and leave them to die while he purges the intestines he plucked from them.
She will watch all this while she is next in line. She will shiver like she did as a little one. Perhaps shed a lone tear. Perhaps run amok, mad like the bull her father was. In which case, she will have her head smashed to pulp, her whipped brain fizzing out from her cracked skull, while she throws her arms and legs up in the air in one final convulsion.
Death a relief for her, whenever it comes.
Raped repeatedly.
That a tub of ice cream will mean milk stolen from several calves, who would not have been born had this humongous ‘thirst’ for milk not existed.
That the global cattle population is over 1 billion. The global human population is 8.2 billion.
Worldwide, approximately 300 million cattle are slaughtered annually, averaging about 821,917 cattle per day. About 60 cows/buffaloes are slaughtered every second. 3 billion in the past decade.
That the total number of deaths of Jews in the Holocaust is estimated to be 6.5 Million.
That the number of deaths due to Covid-19 worldwide, as of April 2024 is 7 million.
That you taking a cheesy dip off the menu on one occasion of having guests over could matter to more than one cow.
That whatever you do, will only be a spark in the dark. But the spark is the only difference between life and death, for one finite minute. That greed is a bottomless dark pit, and your spark is all that she needs.
That nobody owned her. Like nobody owns your daughter.
Not even you.
Reference:*FAO Food and Agriculture Organisation, United Nations.
Dr Khushboo Shah is an eye surgeon, an author and a spoken word artist, living her dream of changing the world, one story at a time. Her latest book, The Mildly Chaotic World of Chi Kenny is available on Amazon. Click here to get a copy.
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