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Read the story of Reshma and Nida. Two different women, suffering from the same evil: domestic violence. This is their story.
It was another day at the busy beauty parlour. Reshma again sat on the massage table. Nida once again asked, “Ma’am should I do the special massage again?” Reshma nodded, closing her eyes.
Reshma was the wife of the richest man in the town. Every week she would come for a massage, at the same parlour. Nida was the one who did it for her, every time.
Nida would gently rub Reshma’s bruised body. The bruises that came over each night, when her husband thrashed her over food, sex or whatever he felt like. Nida would gently rub and massage those wounds until Reshma felt better. They never spoke to each other.
Suffering was their mutual language.
The only difference was that there was no one to massage Nida’s wounds from her husband, which she hid under her full-sleeved dresses.
Two years passed by.
One day, there was a huge hue and cry when Reshma just disappeared from the town. The beauty parlour also wondered why Nida did not come to work one fine day. They waited for 3 days, post that they appointed a new girl.
Reshma could not be found ever again. After some time, the town moved on to another death, birth and marriage.
Twenty years later when the Internet took over India, a piece of news went viral, how two women fled their homes and built a beauty parlour in a remote town. And from that, they built 50 others across India, which not only employed women who suffered domestic violence but also rehabilitated them. The name of the chain was R & N beauty clinics.
In another small town, few people looked at the pictures of the two women that flickered on their smartphones wondering if they saw them somewhere.
Image via Pixabay
Proud Indian. Senior Writer at Women's Web. Columnist. Book Reviewer. Street Theatre - Aatish. Dreamer. Workaholic. read more...
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As he stood in front of his door, Nishant prayed that his wife would be in a better mood. The baby thing was tearing them apart. When was the last time he had seen his wife smile?
Veena got into the lift. It was a festival day, and the space was crammed with little children dressed in bright yellow clothes, wearing fancy peacock feather crowns, and carrying flutes. Janmashtami gave her the jitters. She kept her face down, refusing to socialize with anyone.
They had moved to this new apartment three months ago. The whole point of shifting had been to get away from the ruthless questioning by ‘well-wishers’.
“You have been married for ten years! Why no child yet?”
I huffed, puffed and panted up the hill, taking many rest breaks along the way. My calf muscles pained, my heart protested, and my breathing became heavy at one stage.
“Let’s turn back,” my husband remarked. We stood at the foot of Shravanbelagola – one of the most revered Jain pilgrimage centres. “We will not climb the hill,” he continued.
My husband and I were vacationing in Karnataka. It was the month of May, and even at the early hour of 8 am in the morning, the sun scorched our backs. After visiting Bangalore and Mysore, we had made a planned stop at this holy site in the Southern part of the state en route to Hosur. Even while planning our vacation, my husband was very excited at the prospect of visiting this place and the 18 m high statue of Lord Gometeshwara, considered one of the world’s tallest free-standing monolithic statues.
What we hadn’t bargained for was there would be 1001 granite steps that needed to be climbed to have a close-up view of this colossal magic three thousand feet above sea level on a hilltop. It would be an understatement to term it as an arduous climb.
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