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It requires a woman of some steel to be the other woman. You bury your dreams of having a family and children just to love a man, a married man.
Trigger Warning: This deals with infidelity and violence against women and may be triggering for survivors.
Before he leaves for home, he removes your lipstick stains from his neck and it feels like he casually erased a part of your existence.
Being the other woman is like being in the air. You are not single, you are not married, you are committed but you have to stay in a closet.
He has a wife, a kid and the societal stamp of marriage. You, you are the woman with questionable character, the mistress.
To be the other woman means to be a woman of steel, to see the love of your life return home to his wife, tell me, how would you feel?
He is not yours, but ‘he is also yours’. You live with this fact until he sees his family picture and realises that you can never secure a place in it.
When a married man demands your unquestionable loyalty, hypocrisy gets personified. Life becomes a piece of sarcasm, a joke, a lie.
You both are not friends, not families, not relatives. Your union becomes a secret, a guilt trip, a rebellion.
You dream of a wedding, a red saree and then you see his wedding ring shine on his finger. Something breaks inside you. You wonder if his conscience ever bites him. He just smiles.
Your unseen sacrifices die like your unborn dreams.
Being the other woman is like building a castle of stones on a riverbank. Is she more beautiful? Does he hold her waist like he holds yours? Does he call her jaan, like he does to you? You sleep on an empty bed with tear stained pillows.
Even if you don’t want to, you think about his wife and wonder whose fate is worse. Her husband in your arms, or your lover on her bed. He seems the luckiest of all.
There comes a day when your parents fix you up with a prospective groom. You go for a coffee date and he looks at you as if you are magic.
You freeze. You don’t know where to stare.
After all, none ever looked at you as if they want to be yours forever.
Image source: Unsplash
I am Janvi Sonaiya, native of Jam-Khambhalia in Saurashtra, currently based out Ahmedabad but a global citizen by choice. News steers me and I am intrigued by all that happens in the world we read more...
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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