A chirping bird who ran like a deer

was how her mother described the eight-year-old

whose broken body was found in the bushes.

The day she went missing, the horses returned

without her, giddy with scanning the horizon —

no one heard their screams.

For every girl cracked open like a coconut

in homes, temples, palaces or public spaces, 

hundreds more lie buried in basements and attics, 

unmarked graves in gardens, forests and fields —

their souls crying out for justice. 

Can you hear their screams?

When daughters disappear into earth, water, fire —

discarded at birth with the afterbirth, 

flushed into toilets, poured into sewers, 

disposed in more ways than you can imagine —

frozen in islands haunted by nightmares,

their prayers turn into screams.

No record exists of how many are kidnapped,

raped, enslaved, starved, burnt, mutilated,  

left in bin bags, recycled with the refuse —

not in the national statistics, in gold-plated genealogies,

pages of misogyny in the archives of history.

Can you hear their screams?

The world may be moving closer to the edge

of reckoning as women keep marching 

to the roar of injustices trapped in their limbs,

erupting like volcanoes that will no longer

lie dormant or become extinct.

Can you hear our screams?

Note: On January 10, 2018, an eight year old girl, Asifa Bano, went missing in Indian-administered Kashmir. She belonged to a community of Muslim nomadic shepherds called Gujjars who crisscross the Himalayas with their herds of goats, buffaloes, horses. On June 10, 2019, the men involved in Asifa’s rape and murder were convicted for life. Her brutal rape and murder, the discovery of her body a week later, brought into focus not just the fault lines between Hindu-majority Jammu and the Muslim-majority Kashmir, but also the culture of sexual violence against females in India and other parts of the world. Preference for boys in India and China resulted in a massive programme of abortion of girls. In several African countries, female genital mutilation is common. Girls are consistently the victims of infanticide, sexual violence, honour killings; poorer access to nutrition, education, medical care, etc. is widely prevalent. Even in developed countries, violence against women is endemic. No data exists to indicate the kinds of abuse that girls/women experience on a daily basis, globally.