The first time Rhea felt small was not when she sat in the back of the class, too shy to raise her hand. It wasn’t when she watched her father scan past her achievements like they were footnotes in the family’s story. It was the day she was told she was now a woman.
She was twelve.
The morning had started like any other. Hastily buttoned uniform, the scent of ink on her fingertips from last night’s unfinished homework, a half-eaten breakfast on the table. She had one foot out the door when she felt the strange dampness between her legs. When she checked, there it was. A red stain blooming on her skirt like a secret she wasn’t ready to keep yet. Not just yet.
Heart pounding, she rushed to the bathroom and called for her mother. The response came from just outside the door, a foot away but impossibly distant. A sanitary pad was slipped through the gap. Instructions followed in a voice that was unfamiliar, clinical, and detached. And then, her mother’s final words were, “Don’t come near me. I’ve already taken a bath.”
Rhea hesitated. Something about it felt off, but she obeyed.
She wasn’t going to school today. Her mother decided that for her. A horn blared outside as the school van left without her, the sound stretching longer than usual in the silence of the house.
Then came the phone calls.
“Yes, it happened. It’s her first time,” her mother announced, breaking the news like an event worth celebrating. It felt strange, how easily her body had been turned into public knowledge. How a moment she hadn’t even processed yet was now being narrated, shared, and passed around like a story that belonged to everyone but her.
By noon, the guests started arriving. Relatives she barely knew, neighbors who never really spoke to her before. They came with sweets she didn’t like, questions she didn’t want to answer, and rules she didn’t understand.
“Sit here,” her mother said, placing a thin mat in the corner of the room. “Just for a little while.”
But it was never just a little while.
Rhea sat, legs folded, back straight, feeling smaller than ever. People walked past her, speaking over her, about her, never to her.
“She has to be careful now.”
“She’s not a child anymore.”
“She should stop playing with the boys.”
She lowered her head, pressing her nails into her palm, hoping if she stayed quiet long enough, they would stop looking at her like she was something fragile. Like she was something that had changed overnight, when she felt exactly the same.
She curled up with a book, hoping to lose herself in another world, but the words blurred. Her mind kept drifting. To the school she was missing. To the lunch break she should’ve been having with her friends. To her dream. One no one ever asked about. It wasn’t about winning trophies or moving to a big city. It was something simpler.
To speak freely. To move without restrictions. To just… exist.
But then, her father’s voice cut through the room.
“You’re still acting like a child? You’ve grown up now, but your habits haven’t changed.”
Laughter followed. Her fingers curled around the edge of the book, pressing into the pages. She swallowed something heavy, something that sat at the base of her throat and refused to leave.
By evening, she had stopped asking questions. Stopped resisting.
Until four days later, at the prayer ceremony, when she asked her grandfather to return the gift money she had handed him earlier to keep safe.
The room went still. The shift was almost invisible at first. Like a pause in conversation, an exchange of glances, and then voices rising.
“Shameless.”
“Girls shouldn’t talk like that.”
And then, her mother’s hand struck her face. Once. Twice. Again.
She didn’t cry. Not then. Not even when her cheek burned or when her ears rang from the force of it. She sat still, absorbing the weight of it all, as if this too was part of growing up.
That night, she lay on the mat in the corner of the room, staring at the ceiling. The fan whirred above her, the sound filling the silence that had settled over the house.
Tomorrow, she would get up, follow the rules, and learn to shrink herself a little more. But a part of her still held on. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But one day, she would take up space. She would speak, move and exist. Without permission.
When we think of an underdog chasing a dream, we think of something big, don’t we? But some dreams are quieter, tucked away in the spaces where no one’s looking.
Like the freedom to sit where we want in our own home.
To walk into a room without waiting for permission.
To speak without fear of a voice cutting through, silencing us before we even begin.
To laugh without someone deciding it’s too loud, too bold, too much.
To exist without shrinking, without apologizing for taking up space.
To just be… in the only place that was ever meant to be ours.
React
