The first thoughts of a nobody

No-one, including those who knew her, seemed to know her name. Born to a daily labourer's family in a distant nondescript village that was her whole world till she was thirteen, she used to be called someone's sixth daughter, for as long back as she could remember. All she had done till then was loiter around in the village streets. And farms. She couldn't have been more unimportant to the universe. She had had no identity. She had existed, that was all.

The youngest of the children, all daughters, her days consisted of a few tasks that were basic necessities for the survival of her father and herself. Filling drinking water from the local well, preparing food and washing up. When the sweet smelling clean cool breeze felt her face, she hardly noticed it, aimlessly spending the days sitting with the local girls and boys somewhere in the wide open wheat fields. Nights were soundless blissful sleep, on a bare wooden cot outside her father's small bare house under the starry skies. With nothing to look forward to, she had nothing to dream about.

One day, she had sat alone on the ground that was a narrow mud path for the farm labour to walk into the field. Looking around, she began to smile, everything around looked different from here.

The world was a big place and the sky was so high!, she couldn't see it all in one glance!

The birds flying above looked so small! And the worms crawling at her feet looked so big!

The people walking along the fields looked short! The bullock cart wheels looked almost as big as the bullocks!

Dogs had no other work apart from curling lazily in the shade of the big trees!

She had liked being alone.

Day after day, she sat in the same place, looking out at the freshly planted crops. Wide expanses of new shoots eagerly rising up towards the sky, for as far as she could see, all around her. Small yellowish green plants with tiny leaves, that seemed eager to grow out of the earth. The plants quickly grew to a foot in height, the ones near her tickling her elbows. For people looking at the fields from a distance, these were expanses of swaying golden fields, with one black bump sticking out in their midst. The bump was her head.

She was drawn to that spot in the midst of that field, like an ant to a piece of sweet. The seeds that the farmers had planted a few weeks ago, had come into the world. The were well watered and nourished. They were growing healthy and tall. And making their way towards the sun. They danced to the soothing flow and tunes of the breeze. They would provide grains that would feed thousands of people. Their good deed justifying their presence on earth.

Picking up and rolling pebbles with her fingers and then dropping them, and then doing it all over again, she was quite vacant in the head, when a thought hit her rather suddenly 'she had to escape from her numbered slot -  people had forgotten her name'. The thought , like the brownish mud stains on her clothes, that came from sitting in the fields, wouldn't go away.

Sitting there all day, every day, filled her with wonder and despair. Would she always just be someone's sixth daughter and nothing more?

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Originally published in 2016