Geetanjali Krishna: Grace under pressure

People like them can never rise above their circumstances! If they try, their own kind pulls them down!" exclaimed my friend, looking at the children of slum dwellers near our house going to school.

"What use is this education to them?" she asked, "none of these girls would ever be able to rise above their circumstances, however hard they try!" I was taken aback by her cynicism, and said so.

She said, "Let me tell you about Grace, the girl who worked for us till a few months back, and then you'll understand my viewpoint."

Grace was from a very poor family of subsistence farmers in Chattisgarh. Though most in her family had not even seen the railhead near their village, she was consumed with thoughts of working and earning in a big city.

In the village school where she studied till class nine, she was one of the brightest students. She had told us that there were some proposals for her hand in marriage from families nearby, but she never considered them. Instead, when her brother moved to Delhi with his family, she insisted on going with him. Her family, severely cash-strapped, let her go.

In Delhi, her brother put her in touch with a Christian agency, and in no time, she found herself working in my friend's home. "There was a certain air of discipline about her, and she was wonderful with our children," recalled my friend, "and she never lost sight of her goal, which was to pass school and get a better job."

So Grace enrolled in Class 10 through open school. "One would always find her immersed in her books whenever she was free, and soon the entire household got involved with her exams. I used to try and help her with history and civics, and made sure she got enough time to study when her boards were round the corner," she said.

The exams were soon upon her, and Grace turned into a frail shadow of herself. She'd study the night through before a paper, and fret over her errors in the previous one. "I really want to pass this exam," she'd say, "or else I'll be washing dishes forever!"

After her exams, she said that she needed a break and please could she go home for a month?

More than the stipulated month went by, but there was no news of Grace. Her brother in Delhi also hadn't a clue. "Our village has no telephones, so unless someone there calls us (which happens only if they walk three kilometers to the nearest booth) we don't get news from there," he said.

It was very unlike the responsible girl they knew, to not call. And that made my friend certain that something was amiss with Grace's life.

When they eventually heard her sorry story, it was too late to help. When she got off the train near her village, a boy whose proposal she'd earlier rejected, kidnapped her. He forcibly kept her in his house for two weeks, after which she escaped.

"But her family refused to accept her, instead they forced her to marry her abductor," my friend recounted bitterly. Her brother said, "she'd rejected his proposal earlier because he was a drunkard. But this time, she'd no option." Apparently, Grace wept all through her wedding. Her brother said his parents wept too: "after all, they didn't want her to marry that wastrel!

Grace sent them her entire salary every month "" she really was a good girl." The irony was that when the exam results were declared, it turned out that she'd passed "" too late for her to realise her dreams though.