My City From My Perspective by Sameeksha Singh (17, India)*

The small city houses with dusty floors and visible pipes and wirings are where children are told that their flesh and bone are borrowed. Where people sing “you are our blood” as a lullaby to their children and their simple, innocent minds imbibe these words. These houses are factories where every person moves with the emblem of their company engraved in their souls. The rats and ants and cats and birds are witnesses of the auction where someone’s daughter was packed and wrapped and was sold off to someone’s son, for twenty-five lakhs and a car and some land.

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You will blame her for being a coward, but remember ‘yes’ was all she was ever taught. Somewhere in the same city, under the faint light of a bulb, a child is making mistakes and erasing them. One day this child will be made to hold a pen and then there will only be ink stains. In the next lane, a washerman’s son is hitting the majestic walls of an aristocrat's house with a red leather ball, his friends watch in awe as he catches the ball every time it ricochets. When your senses will tear through the sound of cars honking and tires squealing you will hear the sound of broken families being taped and glued inside these tiny factories and somewhere in the corner of the same factory is a child beating the rough brick wall with its palm, chanting the name of its tenant, desperately waiting for birth in reverse. The streets and lanes running across the entire city are like the nerves of a paranoid woman walking on the foot-path after the melting of the sun. There is a spider web on the wall of a garage, and the dog chained to the hinge of the garage door saw all the nasty things those drunken wolves did at night. 
And the tenant? He was watching everything from the tiny holes in the night.

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