SHWETRAKHT

Shwet-Rakht -------------- white blood, is a story of a 13 year old daily wage earner’s daughter, Guddi, her love for milk and her inability to come to terms with his patriarchal family’s hatred towards her.
It is the story of a helpless mother who wishes to keep her family happy to the extent of sacrificing her new born. It is the story of Birju, a landless laborer, who crumbles under the conservative and dated societal norms.
The story opens with Guddi yearning for a mouthful of milk and her typical patriarchal poverty ridden household where the birth of a girl child is supposed to be a curse. She is fast growing up to understand that if her pregnant mother delivers a baby boy, the family can think of spending on something called milk which probably she has never seen or tasted in her consciousness.
Her widowed grandmother leaves nothing to imagination about her scorn for Guddi for being a girl, and her daughter-in-law, for delivering a girl as a first born. She is the main cause of tension in the small household which has perpetrated between Birju and his wife to the extent that Birju has never loved Guddi and has stopped interacting with his wife too. Being the sole bread winner and the male head of the family, he has to take a tough decision under the society pressure.
Finally, after a full night of labour pain, Guddi’s mother delivers a baby girl in the wee hours of the morning.
Totally devastated Birju, his mother, and the mid-wife conspire to get rid of the baby before the news spread.
Ironically, the method used is to drown the new born baby in milk. The same milk for which little Guddi has been yearning for years. And the same milk which is supposed to nurture a new life. But somehow it has saved another Guddi from living the life of hatred and deprivations.
SHEWT RAKT ------------------- where the blood of a family turns as white as milk.