The street was dark and her tears were not helping. She used her cell phone light to guide her to the bus stop. When she reached the stop and was beyond the reach of the falling rain, she withdrew the slip of paper from her bag. And drops fell on it, not rain but her tears. She wiped her eyes and laughed incredulously. She had done it. She had managed to rough it out and here in her hand was her trophy, the job offer which said that she had been deemed good enough to work for the huge multi-million dollar company.

The bus came, it headlights illuminating the street ahead and behind for miles. She thought of the bus as she boarded it. She could see the past few years of her life in its light and could see the next few years in front of her.

She was suddenly alive. She could feel the raindrops clinging onto her skin and the bus vibrating through her feet. She could feel every breeze which was cooling her face and every strand of hair which was dancing free of her plait. She was conscious of every particle in her body as if she had suddenly woken up from a deep sleep. She felt light and she held on her seat, lest she flew right out of the window with the breeze.

The conductor approached her for the fare, she handed him the money, delightfully aware that in the near future she would have enough money for every bus ride and would not have to walk for lack of it. She looked at her sandals, carefully painted to hide the repair jobs of the past and thought of the brand new shoes she would be able to afford once she started to work. She looked at her only pair of formal wear, the shirt donated by a dorm-mate, after she had tired of it and the pants purchased using borrowed money. She had paid off the debt in six months. Her bank loan was stretched to its limits. The rent for her dormitory, the expenses for food, for books, for unexpected emergencies were precariously managed using the hardly sufficient amount allowed to her by the bank.

Then there were her parents who were of the opinion that in spite of having the money, she would not give them some to help them out. She could not ever convince them that she was struggling to make ends meet. She had defied them right from her birth. She had come after her brother, was unwanted. Her mother had tried to kill her in her womb but failed because the doctor threatened her with death as a consequence. She had starved, done everything possible to kill the child before it came out but it was a fighter. Tired of being assaulted the foetus appeared in the world two months before it was expected. Its parents then hoped that the inches long thing would die and would not let the authorities put it in an incubator. There again they failed, the foetus survived and in spite of all the spite, all the prayers for it to perish it survived childhood, and was now a beautiful adult.

She had struggled to study, her parents could not afford to send them to school. Her brother hardly cared, he was happy enough to be the vagabond ever since he had stood up on his two feet. She had gone to school by doing dishes at her classmates’ houses, by washing and cleaning for them, by being a servant ever since she her father had told her that he would not give her the money to go to school which was before she could write her name.

She had finished school studying from books donated or discarded by the people she worked for. She studied after work in the backyards of those houses because she would not dare to take her school books home lest her father or brother destroy them in a drunken rage.

She had survived school room discrimination, she had survived teachers’ and students’ looking down on her poverty, she had survived hours of house work after and before class, she had survived hostility at home to go to college on a bank loan granted grudgingly. She had survived college and more snobbery on the campus. She had continued working, this time as a teacher at tuition centers, missing classes to teach and then burning the night oil to make up for the missed lectures. It was the only life she had known, 22 hour waking days. Surviving on minimal food to stretch her money. Survival, she was the master of that game.

Today was the end of that life, she had made it to the end. She had lost her childhood, her girlhood, her virginity but she had survived.