I was born into a house where daughters were called a weight.
My father said he would pay only for my wedding and my sister’s, because in his mind, a daughter was an expense, not a life worth caring for.

When my sister was born, my grandmother cried because there was no khaandan ka chiraag.
My father’s relatives pitied him, saying his freedom had ended because he had 2 daughters.

He had married my mother not for love, but because her brothers had promised him money. When that promise didn’t meet his greed, she became his target.
He took her earnings, humiliated her, and built another family with a woman my mother had once adopted and raised like her own child.

When my mother confronted him about the affair, his own mother defended him, calling it an act of “charity,” saying he was only trying to bring her grandsons into the world.
His four brothers and two sisters stood beside him, normalizing his betrayal and calling it “religious duty.”
It was open cheating, wrapped in piety , another way to make my mother small, to make injustice look sacred.

And when my mother asked him to build a house for us — a simple roof of our own — one of his brothers shouted,
“You make your own money. You don’t need him. Go live like a widow!”
That’s how they spoke to a woman still married, still holding her family together.
Instead of building a house, my mother built our education. She turned every rupee they denied her into opportunity for us.
And today, we use our educated voices — the very voices they tried to silence — to speak our truth.

“Why don’t you divorce him, Mom?” we asked, with our childlike certainty that justice should be simple.
But I remember the laughter of his sisters-in-law echoing through the years —
“You don’t know how to keep a man tied down, you educated woman. You’re too serious, too nerdy. You’re not young anymore. He needs someone who can keep him entertained.”
That was the chorus my mother heard every day — a chorus that told her the abuse was her fault, that intelligence and age were punishments, not strengths.

The gold medal she was awarded in the university convocation for being the top in her master’s degree became her curse , a constant reminder used to mock her, proof that she was “too clever for her own good.”
And slowly, she believed it. She carried the guilt of his betrayal as if it were her sin.

Through it all, my mother stood tall. She worked, fed us, clothed us, and educated us while the world around her justified his abuse.
She was both father and mother — wall and roof, earth and sky.

Now, decades later, I see history repeating itself.
The same men in my father’s family follow his path — dismissing daughters, chasing dowries, measuring women in gold and obedience.
Some women, too, feed this cycle — bringing enormous dowries, teaching their daughters to survive by silence, not by strength.
And so the abuse continues, disguised as tradition, wrapped in respectability.

But silence is what lets it live.

And every act of cruelty was justified with vague religious sayings—that a woman must “serve her husband,” that “religious duty” demands her patience, that “family honor” is above her pain.

These distortions of faith turned compassion into control.
While the scriptures speak of balance, they used them to build cages.

Yet outside these homes, a new generation is awakening—young men and women turning to spirituality that values equality, kindness, and truth. They seek peace without patriarchy, misogyny, belief without bondage.

But the past still haunts the present.
Economic abuse, dowry expectations, and spiritual manipulation continue in silence.

Even after 32 years of marriage, the cycle hasn’t ended.
Recently, my father abused my mother again — this time to force her into becoming the guarantor for a property he and his brothers and nephews want to buy.

He holds respected positions in local religious and civic circles — roles that allow him to appear honorable in public even while continuing emotional and financial abuse at home. The gap between who he pretends to be outside and who he truly is inside our family makes the pain even sharper.

He told her, “I married you because your brothers promised me money. They gave me nothing, and this is my right to take from you”
He used the same humiliation he once did — demanding wealth that was never owed to him, disguising greed as justice.

It became another way to reach me — pressuring me to leave my job and invest in a family business that serves his interests and those of the people around him, while erasing my own independence.

He claims he needs the property to “save money for our weddings” and for “inheritance,” twisting those words into tools of control.
Once again, the same justification: religion, duty, family name — all used to bend women’s will to serve his greed.
This time, my sister and I stood up. We refused to let our mother carry the weight alone.

And as I began earning, the cycle reached me too.
He tried to ask money from me — not out of need, but out of entitlement.
When I refused and set a boundary, he mocked me.
Every time my sister or I rest, take a break, or fall short of his impossible expectations, he calls us burdens — the same word he used when we were children.
He even mocks us for not marrying our cousins — the ones he praises and adores more than his own daughters — as if our worth lies only in pleasing the family he built his pride upon.
It’s as if our existence has always been an inconvenience to him — unless it serves his ego or tradition.

And now the same distortion extends even to inheritance.
After years of neglect, my father claims that giving us one-fourth of what he owns is our “religious share.”
He uses faith again to justify inequality — reducing daughters to fractions, using scripture to disguise financial abuse.

That is why I am asking the Ministry of Women and Child Development and the National Commission for Women, UN India to help create a national digital archive called "The Weight of Daughters" — a secure online space where women can share their stories of survival, faith, and renewal.

This archive will:

• Preserve real stories of resilience across generations.
• Expose how patriarchy hides behind misused tradition.
• Celebrate the new spiritual awakening that chooses empathy over control.

Every story told breaks a chain.

Sign this petition to support The Weight of Daughters — so no woman’s suffering can ever be disguised as sacred again.