The Curse of Oblivion

A Story by Rohit Yadav

A story of a girl born with destiny written in the blackest ink.

A staunch smell of body fluids prevailed in the room. Empty condom packets and used condoms were thrown in the left corner of the tiny room, just below the pan stains on the wall. She saw the sturdy man snoring beside her as he lay there drained of all his energy. It wasn't her first time, nor was it the last. The dimly lit red light tried its best to hide the red patches of HPV on her thighs. The room was small 8’x10’ with just a bed and a cloth hanger. That room in the ramshackle building was her adobe for last five years, almost a fourth of her life. At a stage of life when other girls were enjoying their first love and first love-making, she was in this hell on earth being manhandled and mutilated by complete strangers.

She wasn’t born in this inferno, like most others, it was just the curse of the oblivion she was enduring. No one dreams of becoming a pedlar of their own body. How could she forget the darkest night of her life? Her only fault was her innocence to trust a man that night and take a lift from him. She struggled hard to free herself, but to no avail. The chloroform had already kicked in. The same chloroform that she was studying in her medical course, was the one deceiving her.

The next time she opened her eyes, her world was upside down. She couldn’t even recognize the place she was in. Her instincts were crying out loud to tell her what she already knew. The room wasn’t familiar to her back then. As she tried to stand up on her feet, she felt a strong burning sensation around her most private part. Checking down, she had found unclean strokes of a razor. Even after so many years, she winced at those cuts. Some scars never leave you, especially the deeper ones. She was raped brutally several times a night and they often said that it was just a preparatory phase and that she was being ‘opened’. She had been really busy since then and in that business, she forgot who she was, accepting her life on the dark side of the underground. The slightest memories of the horrifying nights were still powerful enough to send chills through her spine.

Throwing the man’s hand away from here naked belly, she took out her cheap liquor from beneath the bed. The colored liquid was the only thing in her life that never betrayed her. Enough experience was gained by her and to trust another grotesque form of humanity wasn’t really her call.

She slipped into her clothes and walked out through the narrow hallway into the washroom to wash her femininity, for a millionth time, may be. Gulping another sip from her hip flask, she went towards the stairs where few of her colleagues were sitting, discussing limp penises and contractile testes. Her courage for living another day of her over-exploited life was from the survival stories of girls, which were even darker than hers. She went up to the terrace and sat on the terrace railing, looking at the setting sun and the birds returning to their adobes. The birds were the same that she had studied in her classes but looking at them from this point of view was a completely different aspect. Envious of their freedom, she felt a part of herself slowly dying inside her. She could feel the helplessness of the sun, setting in front of her and a sinking feeling crept into her. Searching for fatuous patterns in the clouds, an idea struck her. She could have all the freedom that she needed and it was all right in front of her, she just had to shift her weight away from the railing, beyond the terrace. That was what she did…