TURBINE | KAPOHAU

On my father’s side, we are fourteen female cousins.  

Or we were.  

One of us committed suicide after years of torture from her in-laws for dowry. She knew she wouldn’t be able to go back to her parents. There was no support to be found there. She killed her one-year-old daughter before killing herself.  

One of us died of health issues, way too young, leaving behind two daughters, one of whom committed suicide a couple of years later.  

Two of us are isolated from the others, partly because of their father’s unnecessarily alienating behaviour towards the rest of the family. The rest of us don’t even know the names of their children. 

One of us lost a child to an illness.  

One of us never demanded anything. Nobody knows what she would have wanted from life if she hadn’t followed her father’s orders to marry a divorced man and then moved away from the rest of the family to build her own life.  

One of us fought for her dream — no, her backup dream. Her father and brother didn’t want her to go overseas for higher education, but now she’s a government officer who owns the house where she lives with her father, her brother, and his family.  

One of us got divorced, then married a man who has been having an affair since before their 16-year-old daughter was born. She doesn’t complain to anyone about how violent her husband gets when he catches her talking to any other man. She does talk about how much he dotes on her and her daughter.  

One of us is known to speak her mind. She regularly scared boys away. Growing up, I used to think she was anger incarnate.  

Three of us got married right after high school. Seven of us didn’t get a say in who we married.  

Four of us have master’s degrees.  

Two of us are primary school teachers, two of us do sewing work from home, two of us work for banks, one of us is a civil engineer, one of us is a software developer/writer, and five of us are housewives. 

Two of us live outside India, one lives in Surat, and the other nine live within a fifty-kilometre radius of where we were all born.  

 

On my father’s side, I have four male cousins.  

One of them is struggling to sustain a living by driving cabs. He probably drinks more alcohol than water. Sometimes his family doesn’t know where he is for weeks. 

One of them drinks, but not to the point of self-destruction. He mainly continues to fight with his meddling father. 

One of them lives with his sister. I couldn’t tell you what he has done for a living.  

One of them drives a cab part-time and is the primary caregiver of their daughter, while his wife is a full-time professor. He’s the only man in my family I wouldn’t mind introducing my friends to.  

 

All these lives began within their own gravitational fields, from which some of us managed to escape, and some didn’t.  

Some don’t want to.  

 

I often wonder how easily I could have been one of them. One of them could have been me.