In the suburbs of Kolkata is a small town called Charghat and ten miles from this small town is a small village called Chunsura.
This village is not the native land of any national celebrity nor has it produced any renowned political leader in the past years. It is non-extraordinary in every aspect one can think of. In this ordinary village lived this extraordinary woman whose name was Bhaswati.
Why was she extraordinary , we will get to kno in the due course of this post……
Bhaswati was an ordinary girl who was born in a poor farmer’s family. She had 3 younger sisters. When she was 10, her father was taken away as a victim of cholera, further pushing the family into dungeons of poverty. When she was eleven , she had to quit school to help her mother in housework and to look after her sisters when her mother was away at work .
Her mother used to work as a domestic help in the Zamindar’s household. By the time Bhaswati entered her teenage , she grew up into a skinny yet beautiful dusky village damsel. She joined her mother in her work with the hope to double her family’s income. But destiny had some other plans for her.
On the first day of her job, she was spotted by the Zamindar’s lecherous elder son. He started to tail her around th ehouse and one fine afternoon hell broke upon her when she was working alone in a room. The beast left no stone unturned in deflowering her feminity and pillaged her till she was only half alive as a shattered and trampled flower.
When the Zamindar came to know of this, Bhaswati was sent home with her mother with a sum of hundred rupees –as damage concession.
Vy God’s grace, she was successfully nursed back to normal health by her siblings. But after 2 months of this incident, her mother discovered Bhaswati’s pregnancy. When the Zamindar was informed about this, as things happen in our country , the Zamindar proposed Bhaswati’s marriage to his son. The son who had married three times before this, complied to his father’s request as he knew that the girl won’t last longer than six months under his customary tortuous physical activities and physical abuses.
Bhaswati’s mother, who was no more than an innocent poor lady, was more than flattered by this proposal as there was nothing she could do to save her family’s name from social abuses. Bhaswati on the other hand surprised everyone by straightway refusing to the marriage proposal.
On this refusal, she was not only taunted by her own mother but also by the community. The so-called NGO’s who were setting up Bhaswati as their brand-ambassadress for their campaign of violence against women, dumped her saying that she must have seduced the Zamindar’s innocent son into the sexual act.
Bhaswati’s life was further made difficult by the second decision she took. When she refused to marry the Zamindar’s son , the abortion of her child was demanded by the village Panchayat. When she refused to oblige, she was made the victim of a terrible outrage amongst village elders. Bhaswati, when she was in the 5th month of her pregnancy was bitten brutally by the village women folks saying that she is the bearer of sin and then kicked out of the village premises by the village elders.
Uncertain as to what to do next and where to go, she took refuge in a shanty that belonged to a leper. There also, in the darkness of night she was hunted down by the Zamindar’s son who came along with a group of goons and further defaced her by throwing acid on her bare skin.
Tolerating the acute pain and extreme mental agony, Bhaswati reacted in a completely unexpected manner. Any other woman in her situation would have decided of ending her life and hence the pain , but Bhaswati decided the contrary. Her willingness to give birth to the baby in her womb turned into a strong determination . Bearing the extreme pan she walked bare-footed for the next 25 kilometers where she was spotted by a mobile medical rescue team. She was taken to a hospital in the nearby town where she gave birth to a baby girl. Because of the physical tortures inflicted upon her, the baby was born with dysfunctional limbs.
Through fifteen long years, Bhaswati worked at different places, first as a rag picker, then as a domestic help, then as a baby sitter and many other odd jobs. Since she had a little formal education, she used to help people fill money order forms and savings forms outside a post office which used to fetch her a petty income. Through various means she and by tolerating her own hunger and thirst she saved enough so that her own daughter can go to school. She not only educated her daughter but also saw to it that she attend college.
Today Bhaswati is no more, as the hunger and thirst that she was tolerating finally gave into tuberculosis. Her daughter is a schoolteacher in the same village from where her mother was kicked out. She is the most respected person in the same village which had once labeled her mother as a sinner. This is an apt answer from an extraordinary woman to our society’s irrelevant norms which have led to many girl’s death.
