Three teen girls, Junkiri Tamang, Parbati Magar and Ishwory Lama, were in the corner of the upstairs kitchen. This was office kitchen as well as a housemother also used this. They were looking for something to eat and whispering in audible voice to each other. It was an unauthorized area, for the girls who stay in that particular row of rooms in Bal Mandir. They were unknown to the fact, that somebody from nearby was watching them very carefully and they were clueless about it.
When they came out of the kitchen, the lady, office manager called them towards her office but stopped them on the corridor and asked them, “what were you doing their ?”
Trying to be innocent, they replied, with some kind of intimidation “nothing.” She checked their hands but could not find any thing to fetch from these girls, so she had no option but to believe what they were saying.
But when she was about to let them go, she saw an yellow color Chinese clip flaunted by Junkiri. “She gestured me with her left forefinger saying, one minute you come here !” she recalls now. After, thirty plus years later, she still remembers the entire episode as if it happened just yesterday.
“My class mate had given me that clip a couple of days before only. I was also wearing yellow color kurta sulwar that day” she recounted showing us how good her memory power is. “When I went timidly in front of her, she pulled my clips with her left hands - her right hand was bent on her bust permanently - and while she did this she not only messed my hair but pulled me towards her also.” “Can you believe what she did next ?” she asked me, as if I know the answer or I was watching it, when all this was happening, then she replied the answer herself, “she crushed my clips under her feet.”
This incident may not have been worth remembering, to the manager, Mrs. Rawal, when she did such an act but to the girls aging below fourteen years and the other teenage girls watching it from a distance, hiding themselves behind the big doors, was an act unforgettable and unforgivable. No, not because the clip was expensive and had high market value, but because the way, she had made them feel by crushing the clip under her feet. “Why, are we not supposed to wear clips ? her daughter was wearing it, when she last visited here with her mother”, they questioned ? “Should not we wear anything, just because we cant afford one, which is as beautiful as her daughters ?” she raised some serious questions; but there was no one to answer them which could have consoled the hurt teenagers.
The young girls could never ever understand, why she was so cruel and ruthless to such small issue, like Chinese flowery clip.
There are certain things like, a crown may make any sense to grown ups but to a small children, a toy or some other small things like Chinese clip holds more value and importance in their life than a crown.
Did not that manager knew this small thing ? How come she was the manager of the orphanage, without knowing such small thing ?
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