Yes, this is my last night here. I’m going home now. I’m leaving everything behind.

But before I leave, I want you to know something. You should think I am a timid creature who has been forced to sell her skin. Yes, the latter part is a bitter truth, but I do not acknowledge the former accusation. I am not weak. Were I weak, I would not have endured stranger eyes, leave alone their frisky hands and dreary desires ripping off my clothes and soul, every single day. Were I weak, I could have never looked into my mother’s eyes again.

I am strong, much stronger than you think—or else I wouldn’t have made the call.

It was indeed a brutal decision to make—to lose, worse, to sell my pride. Sometimes, I get pangs of guilt that leaves me feeling like a corpse—choked and empty. I get spasms that leave me with limp legs. It’s probably the closest I get to death, but it’s also the only time I don’t feel my flesh being devoured. 

Poverty crushes a person in many ways. The man who led me to this life was a victim himself. He was not a strong human being. A person of strength does not even begin to consider trading his seventeen-year-old daughter for money. But, the man did, putting our chaste bond and everything else up for sale.

No, I have never hated him for his decision. He was a desperate man who acted on his empty stomach. It’s a different story that I have never forgiven him.

That night, he walked in with his head hung low with guilt and shame. His eyes pierced the ground underneath, and his lips quivered as words escaped his mouth. When he presented to us the “only” solution to be “less poor,” my mother bolted faster than the light at him, grabbed his collar and stared right into his shallow eyes. She wanted his eyes to lie, she wanted them to tell her that it was all a lie. But his eyes were brutally honest. 

She shrieked and wailed, before falling on her back with a thud on the ground. My little brother, rushed out of his hideout at the corner of our kitchen to my mother. That day he turned into an adult-who knew how not to panic while soaking in a torrid truth. He kept his calm even as his mother broke down, his father drowned in the ocean of guilt and his sister stood stifled by shame and disgrace.

His composure spoke volumes about the calm before the storm that was about to change everybody’s life in that tiny hut. We had faced many dark nights before, but that was the blackest night of them all. 

How could the father who carried me on his shoulders, held my hands as I learned to walk, and woke up through my feverish nights, possibly take such a decision. What had become of him and why?

I knew it was not easy for the man. I imagined that he had fought ceaselessly with the ‘father,’ before the hungry man in him won the battle. If it was the only way out of lethal poverty—I had to play my part in saving the family.

That night, I made the call. I did myself and the man a favour. Instead of getting sold into the business, I decided to pursue it myself, with my rules.

“Go and sleep peacefully for you will have to stand in front of my mother tomorrow and hold her in your arms when I will be in someone else’s. You’ll have to wipe her tears while somebody brings tears into my eyes. You’ll have to soak in my brother’s revulsion while I crave love. Go and sleep peacefully. Leave the rest to me.”

I just looked into the man’s eyes, and somehow he understood. I felt like a warrior who had won the fiercest battle and yet lost everything she ever had.

Years have passed by since the darkest night of our lives. I have paid every last rupee to every person that the man was ever indebted to. I have paid for my brother’s education. I have paid for my mother’s medicines. I have paid it off—everything.

It’s time to go home now. My mother is waiting for me. She couldn’t save me, but she wants to provide her shoulders and lap where I can break down. My mother wants to be by my side, as I unmask the vulnerable young woman who went on to save the family when she needed saving herself.

Yes, I’m going home