A Woman's Revenge

Love, dreams, and defiance. By Tasneem Sariya

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With bloodshot eyes and tears streaming in a frenzy, she screamed at her image. “You will pay for this. Do you understand? You will pay a heavy price for this!” The reflection stared back at her—helpless, trapped, and unable to shed that pathetic expression of hopelessness, heavily mixed with anger and suffocation.

Of course, revenge is the word.

These people cannot see you happy. They will avenge you for being light-spirited, for being sure of yourself, for pursuing a dream, for saying no, and for being you. These stoic, cool-as-ice people. These people who claim to be your well-wishers, your friends, your family. These very double-faced hypocrites who call themselves society. Damn the social structure, damn the family structure, and damn humanity! Oh no, damn you and damn me. These very people will hound and haunt you until they kill you, cut you into tiny pieces, and fling them away with a nonchalance that is so them.

Yes, they will either strangle you until you cannot breathe or bend you until you break. The question is, do you want to live or do you want to be alive?

And so, here I realise that when they grope me with their cold, ruthless hands—when my invisible, to-the-naked-eye blood trickles and makes me feel limp—only then will they feel avenged. Only then, when they see me unable to move, unable to think, and unable to take a single step outside their defined boundaries, will they assume that they have set the record straight.

What record? I am a woman!