Waterloo celebrates HeForShe writing contest winners

“Kiss a bird? 

Why, that’s absurd!” 

The student exclaimed, 

Her face aflame. 

“There’s no need to fuss 

About a little buss. 

Take a chance 

On our romance.” 

The goose beguiled, 

With avian wile. 

The student inhaled the icy air 

And replied with an answer fair. 

“All I want is my property. 

There’s no need to behave improperly.” 

“What will you lose 

If you kiss a goose?” 

The goose inquired. 

The student perspired. 

“My dignity and sanity 

And all my other faculties!” 

She quickly retorted. 

The goose snorted. 

“But I am a prince!” 

The goose evinced. 

“So there’s nothing to fear,” 

He persevered. 

Dear son, our family has not been very fortunate 

Famine, war, pain, we have seen the worst of it 

Though we were never rich, we always stay true 

To our principles, traditions, faith, and virtues 

Dear son, you must carry on our family name 

Or your ancestors would have died in vain 

You must live to bring honour to your family 

So one day your own son can live on happily 

Dear son, you will be our only chance 

For our quality of life to advance 

Raising you will be our life’s purpose 

One day, you will make our sacrifices worth it 

Dear son, I know this is wrong to say 

But when I saw you, my heart broke right away I knew that my legacy would be no longer 

Because that was the day I was handed a daughter 

I should clarify: the only acceptable doctoring is medically 

related doctoring. Doctorate degrees don’t count. My dad’s 

brother lives two hours away and has a PhD. in mathematics, 

his wife in economics, and their child is a computer engineer – 

all acceptable, STEM-related disciplines – and yet we only 

see them at community parties. My dad’s cousin, who lives 

five hours and two states away, is a dentist. We see her family 

every year for Labour Day, Diwali, and Thanksgiving. Also, 

psychology doesn’t count as a science. My cousin – okay she’s 

like my third cousin because we aren’t first cousins, and our 

parents aren’t first cousins, so the closest we can be related is 

third cousins, but we’re probably actually fifth but saying fifth 

cousins sounds weird, so I just call her my cousin – became a 

psychologist and the families never mentioned her since. She 

also dyed her hair blond, so that could be the reason for the 

moratorium on her name. 

But this is a pretty common rant if you’re Indian, heck, if you 

have strict parents in general. Your parents want you to follow 

a particular path, and few are lucky enough to want that too. 

You either suck it up and do what they want (usually after an 

argument in which they threaten to disenfranchise, disinherit, 

and disown you, with the whole my-money-my-rules-if-youdon’t- 

like-it-leave speech), find a way to compromise, or you 

call them on their bluff and end up a starving artist. To be 

fair, I don’t particularly like or dislike medicine. I just don’t 

want to go through eight years of gruelling academics, plus 

practical placements and residency, to reach 30 with a quarter 

million dollars in student debt, a 60-hour work week, and no 

life. At least, that’s how I perceive doctors after seeing what 

my brother and sister have gone through. How much of that 

bitterness is directed at my parents, I can’t say. 

The problem is that it’s my junior year, and all my parents’ 

hopes rest upon my test scores. The majority of my family, 

nuclear and extended, have attended reputable schools with 

top medicine programs: Yale, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Oxford, 

etc. I’m expected to do the same, but, you know, no pressure; 

I’ll just be an eternal source of shame to my family if I don’t 

get accepted to an Ivy League school. So, I’ve been dragged to 

the Saraswati Pooja to pray to the goddess of knowledge for 

the first steps of my charted future to be successfully fulfilled. 

The first time I opened the jewellery box myself was when 

I was eleven. I don’t remember the circumstances that led me 

to ask my mother whether I could or not, but I remember she 

had a deep smile on her face, one that touched her eyes and 

formed creases on her cheeks. We both washed our hands and 

sat on the bed. Once opened, I touched all the old newspaper 

wrappings. It smelt of anise and cardamom. I took the 

first piece of jewellery out, a pair of pearl earrings. My 

grandmother had these made the last day she ever spent in 

India, knowing she would never return. She never wore the 

earrings in her lifetime. She spent her last bit of wealth on 

having them made and then stored them away so that one 

day I could wear them. 

My grandmother suffered. Both of my grandmothers did. 

And they never talked about it. It’s hard for me to face their 

suffering. The part of me shaped by the western ideals I live 

in finds their suffering shameful because it is rooted in their 

oppression, even if in their ignorance they did not consider 

themselves oppressed. The part of me that, when thinking 

about “meaningful touch,” jumps to the thought of the 

jewellery box, is ashamed of myself. Perhaps it is the guilt of 

being the first woman in my family to suffer less than those 

before me. Perhaps it is the guilt of feeling superior in intellect 

and skill. Perhaps it’s the catharsis of understanding that my 

grandmothers chose to suffer because if they did not, I would 

not have the privilege to look down upon them today.