I am told that once I was a bride.
They say I wore red — vermilion on my hairline, glass bangles laughing against my wrists, anklets whispering over stone floors. I try to remember the weight of that color, the music of those bangles, the tremble of my young hands, but memory is strange. It keeps what hurts, and erases what was gentle.
I remember instead the day they took it all away from me.
The day they called me vidhva.
Widow.
As if my name, my breath, my laugh, the girl I was, burned with his funeral fire and became ash.
Years have passed now. I am no longer that terrified sixteen-year-old, wrapped in white cloth like a ghost who is still alive. The world expected me to vanish quietly — into walls, into prayers, into silence.
But silence is a living thing.
It grows teeth if you feed it long enough.
I am writing these words for the girl I once was.
For the girls who are now being stripped of color while the world looks away.
For the widows who are told they are shadows of bad luck, walking omens, reminders of death.
I write for the woman who looked into the mirror and could not recognize herself beneath all that white.
Listen to me.
Your life did not end with his last breath.
You did not die when he did.
You are not cursed. You are not polluted. You are not less than the living.
They will say you are unlucky.
They will say you must not laugh too loud, eat too sweet, speak too boldly.
They will say you do not belong in temples, festivals, or love.
They are wrong.
One day, the river inside you will rise.
It will break banks.
It will flood quiet rooms where you were told to sit and shrink.
It will carry away the ashes of everything they forced upon you.
And when that day comes, you will no longer be just a widow.
You will be what I finally learned to be —
A woman who refuses to disappear.
My name is Asha.
Once they called me The White Widow.
Now they call me something else.
They call me alive.