Chapter 1
Chapter One
The Unwanted Girl
She was a pretty little baby girl.
Tiny hands. Tiny feet. Soft cheeks. A little face that knew nothing about the world she had just entered.
But the world had been waiting for someone else.
A boy.
She wasn’t the first daughter. There was already a little girl before her. This time, everyone wanted a son.
And then she was born.
Another girl.
She had no idea that she was not the child everyone had been hoping for.
She didn’t know what disappointment was.
She didn’t know that being born a girl could somehow make her less wanted.
She only knew how to be a baby.
To cry when she was hungry.
To sleep.
To laugh.
To reach for someone’s hand.
She was innocent.
She had done nothing wrong.
She had simply been born a girl.
And then, only three months after she was born, a little boy came into the family.
He was the first boy on that side of the family.
Everyone came to see him.
Everyone talked about him.
Everyone celebrated him.
He was loved, spoiled, carried around, and given a kind of attention that she never really understood.
She was too little to know why.
She only grew up watching it.
And maybe that was how she first learned that some children were simply more important than others.
But she wasn’t a sad child.
Not at all.
She was actually very much alive.
She was loud.
Very loud.
She talked all the time.
She ran everywhere.
She made mischief.
She laughed.
She shouted.
She asked questions.
She did whatever came into her mind without thinking too much about whether someone would like it.
She was the kind of child who filled a room without even trying.
Her sister, on the other hand, was very quiet.
She was calm.
She didn’t demand much.
She didn’t make much noise.
And perhaps naturally, their mother noticed her more.
Their mother would later say that she had loved her older daughter the most since childhood.
She would say it herself.
And strangely, she never hated her sister for it.
Not once.
She was happy for her.
She never looked at her sister and thought, Why her and not me?
If anything, she loved her.
She understood, even as a child, that her sister had her own struggles.
She would grow up and suffer in ways the little girl didn’t yet understand.
There were expectations placed on the older daughter.
Things were expected from her.
Everything had to be done right.
She carried things quietly.
And the little girl watched all of it.
She noticed more than people thought she did.
She just didn’t say much about what she noticed.
Maybe that was one of the first things she learned:
Watch. Understand. Ignore it. Keep going.
She didn’t have many things that felt completely hers.
She doesn’t remember having a favourite toy.
She doesn’t remember having a favourite dress.
Maybe she had them.
Maybe she didn’t.
She simply doesn’t remember.
Sometimes she thinks she probably wore her sister’s things.
There wasn’t much that belonged only to her.
But she didn’t know enough to call it unfair.
It was simply life.
A joint family.
Many children.
Many people.
Many expectations.
And somehow, she was always somewhere in the middle of it.
Then came one of the first memories she still remembers clearly.
A memory of pain.
Her sister liked trying new things.
One day, they were playing outside.
Her sister somehow got hold of a matchbox.
She knew how to light a match.
There was a thread hanging from one side of a curtain nearby.
She lit it.
And suddenly, the curtain caught fire.
She wasn’t even there when it happened.
She was sitting somewhere else, playing with her own little game.
But when everyone saw what had happened, she was beaten badly too.
Her sister was punished as well.
But she remembers her own punishment.
She remembers the pain.
She remembers thinking nothing about the curtain, nothing about the fire.
Only that she had been hit.
It was probably one of the first times she felt something she couldn’t name.
She didn’t know the word trauma.
She didn’t know the word unfair.
She only knew:
That hurt.
And she remembered it.
There were other things too.
She had a temper.
At least, that’s what everyone told her.
Maybe she still did.
She was one of three siblings who were often together, while she somehow always felt like the odd one out.
They would come and annoy her while she was doing something.
She would tell them to stop.
Again.
And again.
And again.
But they wouldn’t.
And she hated being disturbed when she was working.
If she was doing something, she wanted to finish it.
She didn’t like people interfering.
Eventually, she would lose her temper and hit them.
And then, somehow, she became the bad one.
She was the angry one.
She was the difficult one.
She was the one who had done wrong.
She never really understood why the story always ended that way.
One day, she was doing her homework.
Her sister kept disturbing her.
Taking her pencil.
Touching her things.
Doing something again and again even after being told to stop.
She warned her.
More than once.
Eventually, her sister picked up a clipboard and started hitting her with it.
She told her to stop.
Again.
And again.
But she didn’t.
So she picked up the clipboard too.
She hit her.
She didn’t even hit her hard.
At least, she didn’t mean to.
But it landed badly.
Her sister’s head was injured.
There was blood.
And suddenly, everything changed.
What had started as a child asking another child to stop became a disaster.
She was punished.
Badly.
She doesn’t remember the exact words anymore.
Maybe she remembers the fear more than the words.
Maybe she remembers the feeling of knowing that something had gone terribly wrong.
For everyone else, perhaps it became one of those childhood incidents people eventually laugh about.
For her, it became another memory she carried quietly.
Another little wound.
Another moment when she learned that her anger could make her the villain even when she had been asking someone to stop.
She was a child.
She didn’t know how to regulate anger.
She didn’t know how to explain herself.
She didn’t know how to say,
“I told her to stop so many times.”
She only knew that nobody seemed to care about the part that came before her reaction.
And slowly, she began to understand something without anyone teaching her.
When her siblings were sick, they were actually sick.
When they cried, something was wrong.
When they were hurting, people believed them.
But when she was sick—
it was an excuse.
When she was hurting—
it was drama.
When she cried—
there was always a reason not to believe her.
She didn’t have the words for how deeply that hurt.
She was still too young.
She simply learned to swallow it.
Maybe that’s why she doesn’t remember many childhood memories.
Maybe there weren’t that many.
Or maybe there were too many feelings and too few words to keep them all.
She remembers being loud.
She remembers running.
She remembers talking.
She remembers being mischievous.
She remembers being angry.
She remembers being punished.
She remembers watching everyone else.
And somewhere underneath all of that was a little girl who didn’t understand why she never seemed to matter in quite the same way.
She wasn’t jealous of her sister.
She wasn’t angry that someone else was loved.
She wasn’t asking for the whole world.
She probably didn’t even know what she wanted.
Maybe she only wanted someone to look at her sometimes and think:
There she is.
Our little girl.
Look at her.
But she was already learning that some people were noticed more easily than others.
And she was learning to live with it.
She didn’t know the word compromise yet.
She didn’t know neglect.
She didn’t know loneliness.
She didn’t know what it meant to feel invisible while standing in the middle of a family.
She was just a little girl.
A very loud, very alive, very mischievous little girl.
And perhaps no one realized that beneath all that noise, she was quietly learning how to disappear.
