To Become a Woman by Amian Bent (India, 20)

My mother bred me
In the womb of an abyss
My nourishment,
A healthy diet
Of bits and pieces
She tore off of herself
And when I was birthed –
Another scar on her skin –
She raised me in the mandate
Of the ever-evolving People.
A girl, they called me,
The word rising
From their cold lips
Like a blight, a taint, -
Something to be ashamed –
A child, I never was
Always a girl, a girl
Left on the hospital bed
To unfurl
And to learn the ways
Of the world.

I learnt the lesson
Of silence
On my mother’s lap –
The self-same one
Where she keeps her dreams
Buried deep –
Under her favourite scar –
From even her own betraying gaze –
She carved it into my heart
And I carried it in my palms
Like a symbol of her love.

I kissed the sore lips of rebellion
At a very tender age
When I discovered
A pair of torn out wings
Concealed inside a dusty box
In the unused attic
And the scars on my back
Tingled, dripping tears of acid,
But those wings,
They no longer belonged to me –
The reminiscent of a life
I could never have –
I broke my vow of silence that night
And piled up accusations
On my mother’s already ailing hips
She gathered them all –
Sharpened into a whip –
And cut the oath – deeper –
Into my breast.

I discovered myself
Through the eyes of them –
The ones we call men –
Parts of me
That had hitherto existed
For the mere sake
Of effective functionality
Had now begun to define
The being that I called ‘me’
Groping fingers, muttering lips
Bound my body tightly
And plunged my head deep
Into the vortex of ‘femininity’ –
The mirror no longer looked the same –
My mother came to my bed that night
And whispered so sweetly,
“You are a woman now, my little.”

A woman, a woman
What does it mean?
Equal rights and laws
And yet to walk in fear –
A prey of the ones
She holds dear –
She was taught to disappear
Exist but as a shadow
Under trampling, persistent feet –
A husk of human
For even human is ‘man’kind –
And where does she belong?
Why, in the tip of that blade, -
Handed down through each generation –
That she drives through her breast everyday.





Amian Bent is a young writer from India, who's been writing fiction and poetry for five years now. Her writing journey started with the idea of a novel, one that's in the constant process of development. When not writing, she's usually reading books or listening to music. Apart from writing, her other passions include photo editing and nature photography.