Shackled by ‘protection’

No one lit a lamp the day I was born.

I was born in a village in Rajasthan called Ghoomna — a word that means “to roam” — into a family where a daughter was counted not as a person but as a debt. There were no sweets, no drum, no one stepping out to thank the sky. Just a flat, cool silence, and inside it a sentence worn smooth from being said about so many girls before me: better a boy.

For years, the most dangerous thing I could do was want something out loud. Could I walk to the shop? Could I wear this and not that? Could I stay in school one more year? None of these were conversations. They were applications for permission — and I learned to file them before I even allowed myself to feel the wish.

It took me a long time to understand that the corner I sat in was not in Rajasthan. It was everywhere.

What looks, up close, like the private misfortune of one family or one village is, from a distance, a single machine — old, patient, and nearly universal — running everywhere, only in different clothing. The economist Amartya Sen once counted more than a hundred million women “missing” from the world’s population, lost to sex-selective neglect and abortion; the figure today is over 140 million, and the skewed ratios appear not only in South Asia but also in East Asia and the Caucasus. The veil, the dowry, the locked door, the constant tracking of a girl “for her safety” — these are not one country’s customs. They are one system’s uniforms.

And the system is not only the East’s. The West wrote some of its most complete versions: the doctrine of coverture, which erased a married woman’s legal existence; the witch hunts that killed tens of thousands of women; wealthy, democratic Switzerland, which did not give its women the national vote until 1971. Half the world lives by permission. The other half inherits the sky by default.

I want to offer one test, because it cuts through every debate about culture and tradition, and it never fails: can she refuse it?

Protection a woman is free to decline is a gift. Protection she is forbidden to put down is a cage wearing a kinder name. So much of what governs a woman’s life is handed to her as love — the watching, the curfew, the arranged life narrowed one permission at a time — and love is exactly the disguise that keeps it in place. But the opposite of love is not always hate. Sometimes it is ownership, and ownership has simply learned to call itself love so fluently that even the women inside it often cannot tell the difference.

None of this, I want to insist, is destiny — and India of all places proves it. This country has driven down child marriage by roughly a third in a single decade, more than almost anywhere on earth, not by luck but by keeping girls in school and giving families a reason to wait. In countless homes, a woman’ s earning and judgment are now the backbone that holds everything up. South Korea, once as skewed as any of its neighbours, brought its birth ratios back to normal within a generation. What human hands built, in every country that built it, human hands can take apart.

I did not write my way out of that childhood corner alone, and I will not pretend otherwise. Two people set me free, and both were men — my father, who stood in a doorway for years and refused to let the world take me before I was ready, and my husband, who treats my freedom not as something he grants but as something he guards. This was never a war between women and men. It is a quarrel with a system — one that diminishes women and binds men into the role of jailer, when many of them would rather not hold the key at all.

So when people ask what freedom would really look like, I no longer point to a grand escape. The most radical thing many women will ever do is quieter than that. It is to want one small thing out loud, and not ask permission first.

I still think about the girl sitting in a corner tonight — in a village, a high-rise, a suburb on the far side of the earth — asking the only question she is allowed. She is not a debt. She was never a cost that would leave. And the sky she has been taught to fear was only ever a sky.

A society cannot call itself free while half its people live by permission and the other half by choice. That is the whole argument. Everything else is just the long work of proving it.

kailashjyoti1993@gmail.com