The afternoon sun was harsher than usual today its fierce warmth pricking my tender skin, burning quietly through the surface of my body. One could not expect anything more of Bhopal, after all, a city in which the sun always appears determined to burn the flesh to ashes? I was not waiting very long in the bus stop when my eyes were roving to the full chowk. I beheld there a long, coiling trail of people standing heavily in the expectant and weary air before the ration shop awaiting their turns. Some individuals were located at the traffic light of the main chowk selling flowers and little stationery to the stalled cars and others were soliciting alms.
Some little way near, a boy with his shirt unbuttoned everywhere was carrying water in a pot much bigger than his little body. He emptied it slowly across a parked auto rickshaw scrubbing the metal devoutly. Maybe it was the auto belonging to his father. I ask myself how these children can be left unchanged by the extremes of the temperature--how sun or frost can be so much of little consequence to their bodies. I recall how I used to be when I was a child: how during the bitter winters of January I would spend hours in our yard, with no avail attempting to make a snowman, using the little frost that lay on the ground. I never felt too cold then. Yet winter always carried its cruel aftermath a sharp fever or a stubborn cold that would follow like shadow.
As I waited for my bus, my gaze fell on my phone screen. It was almost time for Friday prayer. I cover a distance of about eight kilometres every week to get to the grand mosque to attend the Jummah.
The road which led to the mosque was cramped up in a series of narrow lanes that were so narrow that the sides appeared to be closing in upon each other with each turn of the path. In those same narrow lanes, I saw a mother holding the hand of a young man, dressing him tenderly in new clothes and preparing him for the Friday prayer. She was leading him towards the mosque the young man seemed to be mentally challenged.
The main road to the Jamia Masjid was indeed wide but none of the worshippers took it. There was never much time, and everybody was fond of making his way through these narrow streets, the unpretentious shortcut that got one more quickly to prayer.
In that little street was a small colony crowded with people, and the voices were heard murmuring well into the distance. On my way to the meeting all the eyes were turned on a little, dilapidated hut there an old fellow in rags I saw in front of him a body wrapped in a shroud and he was hammering his hands on the body in dismay. I could not help myself, and I said: Ya Allah, what has happened here?
My mind went numb, but somehow, I gathered a little courage and stood among the crowd, approaching someone my own age. I quietly asked, “Brother, what happened here?” He replied with a heavy heart, “What can I even say? The old man is the father of the girl in the shroud. The family was composed of the two only. He sold their house a few weeks ago to pay the dowry when he married off his daughter and constructed this tent hut in which he is living himself now. But this morning, her burnt body arrived from her in-laws’ house.”
According to Neighbours, she had been constantly tormented her in-laws taunting her for bringing too little dowry, saying that their ‘princely’ son could have had suitors lining up with riches from the Gulf.
A violent jolt ripped through me; every breath felt like a needle pricking from the inside, each inhale a sting pressed against the ribs. I keep saying: if the One above were to endow all of us with the same share in this deceitful world, what poverty would touch His treasuries? In a world so false, sly, and venomous of snakes and mongrels perhaps it is kinder that the oppressed, the orphaned, the destitute are spared by death; at least in that realm there is only one Judge, and there, these poor souls would finally know rest. The blisters on that father’s feet have now become the wounds on my own heart. What is left for this father to live for now? He had a delicate, blossoming daughter, for whom he sold his nest egg, his house his everything and now, what remains with this wronged, helpless father but an empty pair of hands and a heart scraped hollow. He gave his daughter everything he had everything but the shroud.
Why do we look at ordinary beggars with contempt, assuming they are merely asking for alms, when it seems to me that the worst beggars are those who feed on dowry? Of all who plead and take, a beggar sitting on a mosque step is a thousand times more worthy, more dignified, than a dowry-hungry supplicant.
Even in this so called new era, who knows how many wronged daughters swallow taunts in their in laws’ homes, pulling their hearts out through their ribs each day and still forcing a smile onto their faces; they endure it all for their parents, whose muffled sobs no one hears, and whose pleas and petitions no one is willing to accept.

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