A Bloodied, Broken Moon(Saket) She was a little five year old, as old as my own daughter. She had her father working on daily wages and did not change into pink pyjamas with Disney characters at night to snuggle into the protective arms of her father. He would come back late at the night with meagre vegetable which they would cook on the luckier days and then tired of back-breaking work and backbone breaking hostile world around them, would go to sleep.

She would sit on the dusty pavement and watch the cars pass by, throwing into the air poisonous smokes with hostile aggression. She would watch the school and kids her size walk in there every morning in uniforms, waving back to their parents who dropped them in their long cars. She would hear some sort of chants from outside the tall walls which guarded those schools and wonder what fairy world existed inside.

Her father would tell her, one day she will go to that school. He would be worried and apprehensive on the days when there was no work and hold her tiny hand. He knew in his heart it wasn't to comfort the child, rather to comfort his own nervous anticipation of workless days. He would wonder how this little girl whose hand he held would soothe his ruffled nerves and how her innocent smiles would fill his grown-up adult mind with irrationally buoyant optimism. She would feel comfort in his rugged and rough hands and he in her soft, little, mud laden hands. His heart would melt away at the look of her soft, tiny hands going rough with each passing day. Her face, which had a tinge of pink when she was borne, slowly gained the grey resembling the grey of his own life. The promise a cherished life was slowly losing it's expected splendour under the dust which gathered on the skin he loved and adored with each passing day, and he felt ashamed as a father at his helplessness which he could see slowly passing on to his progeny, his dusty, little princess.

He wanted her to be showered and cleaned and adorned with Pink clean clothes. He dreamt of some day when he would send her to the school which would somehow transform her life and those to come after her. He was scared at how quickly the last five years had passed, and how little things had changed. She grew up and learned to walk on the footpath. He would watch with some bitterness and some envy, fathers who would pick up their daughters in their arms when they crossed their slums, to ensure the dirt does not reach them. He felt embarrassed that in the same squalor his daughter will have to grow. The dirt those fathers so carefully avoided and admonished their daughters from wading into was the only playground his daughter had for herself.

He would sometimes walk in the small market and look with a touch of pain at all the colourful clothes for the kids which would adorn the shops. He thought of the dress, the green one, torn at the edges which his daughter would wear for a week, and then wear it again after it was washed. It was a hand me down his wife had got from the household where she worked as a maid. He would look at her and feel sorry that she was growing so fast. He first noticed when he saw some men at the cigarette shop staring at her legs, left open by the heartlessly receding hemlines of that old frock.
"These men are such lechers" He would mutter in his breath, with such softness that even he wouldn't hear himself saying it and with such bitterness that it poured inside his being and mixed into his blood as patient poison. He had no money to cover her and no courage to fight them. He would ask his wife to take her away. He was a pariah of the society at large, but he was a father. He would be furious and the violence would only move inwards, as every such stroke of a feral, cruel world around him would cut small pieces of his soul. He knew not what to do.

She, the five year old, will look at the polythene packet hanging in the small toy store, with small gas stove and utensils. The uncle who ran the shop told her it was a kitchen set. She did not know what a kitchen meant, they had one room in which her mother cooked. She wanted to cook like her mother. One day, on the footpath, she found a poster with a woman in strange white clothes. She asked her mother who she was, her mother did not know her. The Shopkeeper uncle told her, it was Suneeta Williams. She had never heard such a name. In fact, a name with two parts itself sounded amusing to her. She was always called only Gudiya. He also told her that she went to the moon.

Gudiya watched the moon with amusement since that day. She grew fonder of the moon. She thought and dreamt of a day when she would get that white jacket and fly to the moon. She felt there wouldn't be any dust or smoke there on the moon.

One day there was a marriage procession passing through the narrow lane next to her shack. She did not know what it was, but it sounded fun. She decided only two things she wanted to do in her life, fly off to the moon, or get married. In the evening as she sat with her father outside the room, she told this to her father, who looked at her face and then laughed off. She always loved when he laughed and held her close to him. She felt so safe and so well comforted. He was not very big or tall. He was thin and short, but he carried a sense of calm and security for her.

He loved sitting outside their home and watching cars pass by on the nights. When she spoke of her little dreams, her planned voyage to the moon and a colourful wedding she planned for herself, suddenly the ache in his back from lifting the luggage at the local vegetable wholesale market and carrying on an equally onerous life would fade away. He wanted to give her everything. He thought of the kitchen set. He wanted to get it for her. She had never had any toy in all her five years. He had seen Gudiya looking longingly at that. He had asked the price, it was not very expensive. But the choice between the food for the day and the toy was always difficult to make. He had retreated with a deep sense of sorrow and shame at his own inadequacy as a provider.

The moon would always watch the little girl with fondness and would get a little sad to look at the silent frustrations of the father. It would hang in sadness in a passive sky waiting for the sun next dawn to bring some sense of hope. One day, the father decided to make the choice which had been haunting him every evening at the close of the day. He bought the kitchen set and walked to the home that evening with a happiness which had eluded him for so long that he stopped believing that he had a capacity for bearing such a feeling of happiness. The moon was smiling and jubilant. He went in, asked his wife to stay silent and placed the kitchen set on the small rack. Then he whispered and asked where was Gudiya. She did not answer and as he looked up he could see worry writ on her tired, thin, near-impoverished face. She was not seen for the whole day, since afternoon. A teardrop which hung itself with sad helplessness, gave way to the sudden feeling of a shared sorrow. He held his wife to himself, as a hollow sense of known fear grew to his throat with sudden violence, which shook his thin body which shuddered in response. They sat for half an hour not speaking anything, hoping for that sweet, musical voice to cut through this heartless, black silence which hung in that small room. Their ears strained against the silence which overwhelmed the loud vehicular noise from the road which passed right next to that semblance of a house which they called their home.

They walked to the police station. The man there was a big man, he told them to get off. Shouted at them and cursed their type who created problems for the Police and their political masters with their stupid issues created by their hateful poverty. He fought the fear and persisted that a report be filed.

They wrote something, and the father came back home. They went looking in the neighbourhood. Towards the morning, someone came running and took them to the broken wall next to the school playground. They rushed, and saw what was left of Gudiya. Her father, with tears flowing from his eyes, picked her up and carried her to the police station. They carried the brutalised child to the police station. The big man, the officer, still imperious in his attitude, angry at this turmoil, came and gave them some money to go back and not create a scene.

The father, mad in disgust at the Big man and his own helplessness, threw the money back. He could not understand. He held the tiny pink hand tighter, and cried. Some people came and took the child to the hospital and the father to home. He looked at the unopened kitchen set and cried loud, a cry that carried the stench of death in it.

A crack, a blood red line, appeared in the moon and the broken, bloodied moon cried in blood. The Moon had lost a friend. A crime for which no justice is possible happened, and the Moon was as helpless as the poor father. The defeated father sat through the night in the shared grief of a loss of friend, a loss of hope. A silent wail extended from the weak, broken man sitting at the doorstep with his head leaning down in immense sorrow, right up to the moon which limply sailed through the sky on a sad trajectory, mourning the loss of it's little friend. The kitchen set rolled in the dust as it fell from the hand which will no longer be able to hold those tiny, little, pink hands of love, of hope.

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