Save your poor daughter, mother. See how they have tormented her.

O my daughter, Maya, would that it had been me in your place, my daughter, my daughter, Maya.

Her name is no longer Maya, mother says. It is Malala. Look, she lives. They tried to kill her in the Swat Valley but kind-hearted souls saved her and brought her back to life for the good work she was destined to do for the sake of the feminine gender. The perfect daughter, a mother’s heart bursts with pride. Did you know that she has just won the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest laureate ever? Rejoice. It will look awesome on her college application.

Meena

Meena

1

IN THE MIDDLE of the journey of our life, having passed through the phases of studentship and householder, the first two of the four stages allotted to mortals on this earth according to the wisdom of the holy men of the East, I found myself in a black hole. Two more stages stretched ahead of me—renunciation and withdrawal—on the long road to liberation, but I felt myself unable to go on, craving death.

How I had arrived to this dark place I could barely say aloud, the memory was too bitter to form into words. But as I was falling into the abyss and succumbing at this halfway point, weary and lost, there appeared before me a holy man from my deepest beginnings, like an angel with white hair flowing down his back parted in the center into two flanks like sidelocks, long white beard, robed entirely in white linen, starched and flowing. He clutched me by the waist, reaching up with two mighty arms strengthened by years spinning the wheels of his throne taking him along his destined path, and he halted my descent. “Let me go, Rebbie-ji, have mercy,” I cried. “Stay,” he said. “Even in this place of death, my message to you is, choose life.” His voice was my blood voice, my brother’s voice calling to me as if from the ground. There was no place to hide.

For his sake, conditionally, I continued in life, but not by choice. Choice was his domain. He had chosen for his sins to be a fugitive and wanderer on the face of the earth, marked and set apart. I had rejected all that when I had chosen to no longer count myself among the chosen. But he needed me now, he had asked me to stay, he had asked me to do him a kindness, to say I am his sister, in this strange and dangerous place he had asked for my help, never an easy thing for him to do. I remembered his youthful sweetness. He had been such a dear boy, my soulmate. My innards ached for him. I pitied him and could not refuse.