Skip to main content

Shahina lets her hair down

Fiction

Shahina experienced a strange sense of oppression whenever she put on the hijab.  No other girl in her class had to cover her head and look like a blinkered horse.  Moreover, she was not a little girl anymore.  She was sixteen and was mature enough to make some personal choices at least. 

“It is our religious duty, my girl,” Bapa told her in his usual affectionate way.

“But there are other Muslim girls in the school who don’t wear such a thing.  There’s even a Muslim lady teacher who never wears it.”

“Well, we live in a particular community and we have to follow the rules of that community.”

How absurd, thought Shahina.  We call ourselves Muslims and then we divide ourselves into a hundred factions.  Shias, Sunnis, Salafis, and what not.  And then each faction makes rules for itself.  Then fight for the sake of those rules.  Absurd.  Absurd.

Standing in front of the mirror, she looked at herself.  “Blinkered horse,” she smiled to herself in spite of the oppression that weighed her heart down.

She couldn’t blame Bapa.  He chose to send her to a secular public school instead of a Muslim school because he wanted her to grow up like a normal human being as much as possible.  Even Bapa cannot ignore the community.  Even he wears a hijab.  It is invisible, that’s all.  We are all blinkered horses trotting along the line drawn by the community.  Minor aberrations were tolerated.  Like her going to a secular school.

Looking at the beautiful hairs of her companions in the class, Shahina felt the oppression return to her heart. She longed to get away from the classroom. 

“To let your hair down means to behave without inhibitions, to be yourself, to be free from unnecessary restrictions,” the English teacher was explaining.

Shahina left the school building during the lunch break.  She went to the far end of the playground and crossed over to the private estate.  She walked on until she reached a rock.  She climbed the rock and standing at the topmost point she pulled out her hijab, untied her hair and let it float in the breeze.

She screamed to the trees and the breeze and the butterflies, “I am not a horse.  I don’t need blinkers.”

She screamed again.  And again.  And she felt her heart becoming lighter. 

The lightness sifted through the leaves that murmured secrets to the breeze.  The breeze filtered into Shahina’s heart.  She sat down on the rock and smiled at herself. 

And then she sighed.  The warning bell rang in the school.  The lunch break would soon be over.  She picked up the hijab from the ground and started putting it back on her head. 


Indian Bloggers

Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 22, 2016 at 10:13 AM

    I loved reading this. My wife is a teacher at school teaching class 10 - 11- 12 and many girls like Shahina do not want to wear Hijab. Some dont wear it at school but the moment they step out of the school they put it on...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 22, 2016 at 7:02 PM

      I too am a witness to certain real life longings. The story is an outcome of such witnessing.

      Delete
  2. sunaina sharmaSeptember 22, 2016 at 6:30 PM

    He wore a hijab that was invisible....minor aberrations......Wow.....so subtle and right on target...the warning bell and her going back to the fold reflect beautifully the inability to free oneself from the tyranny of the community.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 22, 2016 at 7:03 PM

      Thanks Sunaina for making occasional visits here. You enrich me in certain ways.

      Delete
    2. sunaina sharmaSeptember 27, 2016 at 3:19 AM

      My occasional visits hurt me more than you can imagine...Wish I could become a regular here...And how could I in the whole world enrich you? I seek light here....:)

      Delete
  3. Purba chakrabortySeptember 22, 2016 at 9:58 PM

    This is so beautifully written. Loved reading it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. जितेन्द्र माथुरSeptember 23, 2016 at 6:12 AM

    Touching as well as thought-provoking story. An invaluable piece of writing from you Sir.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 23, 2016 at 6:54 AM

      One simple incident triggered this story. I'm glad you found it touching.

      Delete
  5. Prasanna RaghavanSeptember 24, 2016 at 10:01 PM

    Well done! My first time reading your fiction. However, you allowed the teacher to touch a raw nerve. There is certainly truth in it, though. But, it brings into mind a question, should the teacher have shoot the girl down with such a statement in a 'multiracial class', knowing well it would offend one in her class. When you showed her standing atop the rock, I thought she was planning to jump down. For a fifteen year old, you cannot rule out the possibility of a suicide. Anyway, you had other plans. But the wound remains deep inside, haunting her.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
122 comments
Read more

Goodbye, Little Ones

They were born under my care, tiny throbs of life, eyes still shut to the world. They grew up under my constant care. I changed their bed and the sheets regularly making sure they were always warm and comfortable. When one of them didn’t open her eyes after a fortnight of her birth, I rang up my cousin who is a vet and got the appropriate prescription that gave her the light of day in just two days. I watched each one of them stumble through their first steps. Today they were adopted. I personally took them to their new home, a tiny house of a family that belongs to the class that India calls BPL [Below Poverty Line]. I didn’t know them at all until I stopped my car a little away from their small house, at the nearest spot my car could possibly reach. They lived in another village altogether, some 15 km from mine. Sometimes 15 km can make a world of difference. A man who looked as old as me had come to my house in the late afternoon. “I’d like to adopt your kittens,” he said. He...
6 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...
39 comments
Read more