Girls Who Refuse to Die

by Nalini Priyadarshni

It’s not about those who get flushed out surreptitiously

as a scarlet blob between thighs 

Neither is it about those who are scraped out of wombs

With rusty tools of quacks in back alley 

Nor those who are buried alive 

Or abandoned on dumpsters to be eaten by wild dogs

It’s about those who make it into the world amidst 

middle class moral compunctions 

no less despised or resented 

Guilt is not only for evildoers

It’s also the gift of our collective consciousness to the girls

who turn a deaf ear to laments that follow their birth

and refuse to die.

It finds roots in the softest hearts and feeds on affection

for disgruntled progenitrix, unfair tutelage

sucking out the last dregs of self-love 

until they are housebroken to be good girls

for the rest of their lives

A good girl is the one who can never do enough 

or be enough to assuage the trauma she caused

by simply being born 

So she carries a thousand deaths beneath her tongue

and swallows one every time she has to choose

between being happy and being good

yet falls short every single time 

It’s not about those missing girls

who turned into statistics in census registers

It’s about those who lead invisible lives

persona non grata in homes they dare not call their own

stuck within the gilded frames of happy family portraits

entirely dispensable if the honour of the clan so demands

sacrificial lambs to pander to the fragile male egos 

of those who think they own them

It’s not about those voiceless victims of patrimony

who were throttled before they could utter a sound

It’s about those who are treated as trophies  

wrapped in silks, dripping with diamonds

They do just fine as long as they know

when to smile coyly and when to retreat into shadows

God forbid if they ever acquire

a mind of their own or sprout a tongue

It’s about those who break through the cracks of concrete

like daisies on a busy sidewalk and court whirlwinds

the girls who refuse to die

Some turn into fire-spitters even if it singes their own feathers

Some turn into rainbows keepers refusing to be confined

within drab walls of conventions

Some turn into ocean cuddlers, spreading their arms wide

to embrace their destiny and all those who share it

Some turn into sword swallowers, gutting the barbed jibes 

in the pit of their stomach

Some turn into fragrance detectors, sniffing out 

the sore hearts to heal them as they heal themselves

Some turn into fake family fishers, smiling and posing 

For gilded frames as their innards melt 

Some turn into pecan pickers, harvesting, shelling, husking

and ginning their lives to make some sense of it

Some turn into silver unicorns, chasing elusive 

cotton candy clouds into the twilight of life

Some turn into everyday goddesses, balancing domesticity

with dream catchers and hang on to the silver lining

They survive, somehow, the girls who refuse to die

to maintain the semblance of normalcy 

So that we continue to take pride in the heritage

that persecutes them 

systematically

* * * * *

Author's note: "I belong to Punjab, India where the sex ration is 847 women per 1000 men. But this poem is not about those missing girls. It is about those who survive and become part of the patriarchal set up."  

Nalini Priyadarshni has been writing poetry and other stuff for almost a decade and has been published worldwide in literary magazines and journals. Her poems have been widely anthologized and collected in Doppelganger in My House and Lines Across Oceans, which she co-authored with the late D. Russel Micnhimer.  Her recent publications include Better Than Starbucks, Different Truths, Duane’s PoeTree, The Ugly Writers, Counter Currents and more.