My father told me, and told me, “Good girls don’t behave like this.”
They keep their morals high, and their hemlines low.
They don’t talk back, they don’t put up a show.
They don’t have an opinion, unless it’s carefully dipped in molten honey; trimmed and speckled, until it’s an acknowledgement.
They don’t have a life – “Do it after your marriage”, “Want it after your marriage”, and likewise.
They don’t go out without filling a requisition form for how many hours, places, people, yards of cloth on them.
They live within their limits – “Sita had her lakshman rekha, you have the boundary of our house”.
They aren’t friends with boys, they don’t talk to men – because her character is the neighbourhood gossip and the family’s honour is in the parts of her body.
They don’t fall in love, they fall in arrangement; where they are shipped off early as a sacrificial lamb with other offerings to be devoured by customs and customers of life.
They don’t demand, they accept; they don’t complain, they forget – how they had to put up with decades of inequality and how they have to put up with more.
How this is the only way they can be saved from being abused, molested, raped, burnt and filmed; by not wanting more than what their fore-‘fathers’ had decided was enough for them.
For my father told me, and told me, “Good girls don’t behave like this.” but he didn’t tell his son, “Good boys don’t behave like this”.
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