The Power of Grief

(in memory of Asifa)

By David Davidar 

(A Mother Cries at Her Daughter’s Wedding)

Oh my beautiful, beautiful Rachel, Charity thought, and the emotion that she had wound tightly within came undone, and overwhelmed her. She held her daughter close and cried as she had seldom cried before. She wept to release the tension and the pain of the past days, she wept at the prospect of losing her daughter…she wept for herself. She thought about the thali she had pawned to pay the wedding expenses, and how beautiful it would have looked around her daughter’s neck, and she wept all the more. Her grief grew to include mothers and daughters everywhere, but most especially in her part of the world, where a girl child was a necessary evil, suitable only for producing sons. She felt the pain of the village women who fed their infant daughters poison or drowned them, she agonized with young brides rejected or raped or tortured… She held her daughter and prayed that she would bear a dozen sons so that she would be spared some of the pain of being born a woman. The force of Charity’s sorrow fed into Rachel’s own, and their grief grew immense. It blew out of that small room, and wrapped itself around the guests at the wedding. Every woman present felt its power. They tried to hold back their tears, some not so successfully, while the men shuffled about uneasily, dimly sensing an enormous passion that, if unleashed, would consume them all. 

- Extracted and slightly adapted from The House of Blue Mangoes

David Davidar