To a friend

The young mother had recently divorced her husband and now lived alone with her daughter in a barely furnished apartment.

She enrolled her three-year-old daughter in a Montessori, so that she could do small jobs to earn enough to buy bread. She had come to her country after all these years but she felt far from home.

There was no food in the kitchen cupboards of their two-bedroom apartment and there were no clothes in the closet. The bathrooms were stripped of every bar of soap and toilet paper rolls.

A desolate feeling hung around the house and the dust that had accumulated here for ten years refused to clear away. And no matter how hard the young mother would try to brush the dust away it would rise to the air momentarily and fall and settle down again on the old sofas and bed with a satisfied smirk.

The woman was twenty-two years of age and her qualifications hardly exceeded that of a high school graduate. She had no computer skills or any other technical expertise that could earn her a small income in the modern world. The only thing that she was familiar with was how to decorate a house and turn into a dream home. She could bake delicious cakes and make excellent meals; she knew how to change diapers and raise children, after all this was what she was expected to do with her life. Become the wife a rich and caring husband and take care of the house and kids.

All her life this young woman had seen wealth, gold and luxury. Attending school was a necessity of coarse, but it was not taken seriously. Shopping with the family, eating out, singing songs and visiting old and unreliable fortunetellers was the gist of life.

What more could one possibly ask for?

She remembered a few years ago when she was unmarried how simple her life had been, she would wear her sisters’ clothes without asking for permission and get a hearty scolding from them afterwards, she would watch movies for hours on end and read thick novels late into the night. She had never imagined that just a few years later her life would change beyond anything she could ever envision.

Now, faced with the hard-core reality and the bitter truth of marriage and divorce, the young mother had no idea how she was to begin her life and gather the shattered dreams that seemed to have fallen from the skies to the earth in an insurmountable multitude.

This was just the beginning of her troubles. The sheer beauty and the splendor of her physical person though had seemed a gift at first especially when she was unmarried now turned to her with bared teeth. Unprotected in every sense possible, with no money or relatives near, she had to endure tons of unwanted male attention, and now even the very word ‘men’ boiled her blood in a fiery pit of molten anger.

In a time when divorce was viewed with contempt and horror, this woman proved the world wrong and smacked their faces with her dignified resolution to stay put and fight against that basely rule. And she won; she found her way through the thicket of pungent smelling prejudice and climbed the stairs to an independent life, all by herself.

For some inexplicable reason all of the town’s people had come to know that she had left her husband and they did their utter best to punish her for that.

No one was ready to aid her and assist her in her time of need and she stood tall. They would whisper behind her back and would stare at her when she would walk through a department store or any public place.

The women gossiped endlessly about this ‘strong’ young lady, she was a phenomenon for them. And their men, their men could not have found a better reason to stare at this proud and exquisite queen, who refused to even glance in their direction.

She had to struggle for years to make these people judge her on the basis of her personality rather than judging her for the sole cause that she had no husband.

She did not need any man to make her feel safe or protected. She could very well do that herself.

Time passed by and the young lady had finally learned to survive in this river swarming with crocodiles.

A new life had begun for her.


It is amazing how one person can find the courage to fight against the world, its customs and its people, for their beliefs and for freedom. Sometimes the most ordinary things in life can conquer the world.

Imagine a caterpillar: its green, small, ugly and it crawls. Months later that very caterpillar transmutes into an amazingly beautiful creature, a creature that can fly towards the heavens.

Researchers say that there are some species of butterflies that can soar as high as to reach the top of a mountain.

That woman was such a butterfly.


Friend, I salute you.