School Days
My sister and I never walked to school. For a long time, I thought this was just one of the many indulgences my parents showered on daughters they loved. Somewhere in the fraying folds of my memory, I recollect a mother being chastised by the Mother Superior of the Catholic primary school we attended—for bringing her daughter dirty and unkempt to school. Better ugly and unattractive than clean and…my mind refuses to remember the rest of what the woman replied in clear words. Perhaps, it is because she spoke in my mother tongue. Or, perhaps, it is because of the raw and vulgar words she used to roughly etch the silhouette of an unthinkable brutality into my eavesdropping ears.