Dust clung to her feet, but fire blazed in her heart.

“Champa, finish sweeping the floor before the master returns!”
She was only thirteen. But her hands knew work like a woman thrice her age.

That night, under the neem tree, Anay placed a guava in her hand.
“You work all day, and they treat you like you're invisible and untouchable.”
“I am invisible,” she whispered.
He looked into her eyes. “Not to me.”

But the world didn’t care for tenderness between classes and castes
By 13, her chachu arranged her marriage to a man three times her age.
“It's fate,” they said.
“No,” her mother whispered, clutching her hands, eyes brimming with pain.
“Your fate will not be mine. Run, Champa… Go. Break what broke me.”

She boarded the train barefoot, ticketless, nameless.
Collapsing from hunger in the city, her last thought was:
Will anyone ever see me?

They did.

“She’s just a child,” the woman said, lifting her from the roadside.
“She has no one,” her husband added.
“We do,” she replied. “Let’s be her ‘family’.”

In the hospital bed, Durga awoke to voices outside the curtain.
“Parenthood isn’t about blood. It’s about belief… and love.”
She smiled faintly, for the first time in years.

“What's your name?” , asked the couple
“Durga is my name, but people call me champa in my village ” ,she replied
“Can we call you Durga?” they asked.
“Why?” she murmured.
“Because you fought. And survived.”
“…Then yes,” she nodded. “Call me Durga.”

Years passed. Books replaced brooms.
Uniforms replaced her torn and dirty clothes.
And in her heart? A name she'd never forget.

One day, in an IAS interview, someone asked,
“What made you want to serve the country?”

She smiled.
“I was once told that my voice didn’t matter. That my dreams were too loud for a girl. I’m here to prove they were wrong.”

But when she returns to the village as an officer, the past collides with the present.

“Pari?” Anay whispers, now grown, now stunned.
“I’m Durga now,” she says, holding her head high.
“And I didn’t come back for revenge. I came to rewrite the story,of every single girl in this village. ”

Durga – Breaking Societal Stigmas is a tale of courage born from pain, of bonds stronger than blood, and of love ,both lost and found - amid the ashes of injustice.

"I did not rise because they let me.
I rose because I had to."
          ~ Durga