Sewing Together a Torn World: A Story of Change
Bengaluru, India
2020, Senior, Creative Writing
Rizwan stepped onto the balcony. As a gentle sea breeze brushed past his cheek, the little girl in his arms gave a sniff and stopped crying. “That’s a good girl,” he muttered to her, relieved. He sank down into a chair and settled her onto his lap, breathing in the cool, misty air, and watching little specks of birds fly off into the distance…
“Da!” His daughter squealed, leaning forwards. “Da!” She pointed at the coffee table. Rizwan stiffled a groan. “Oh, you don’t want that. Look—” “DA-A-A!” With a gasp of helplessness, Rizwan bent forwards and picked up his sketchbook off the table.
He opened it to the first page, wincing a little as she placed a sticky hand on it. Her drool left a stripe across the first design in the book—a dress with a raspberry-purple bodice flaring into a white ruffled skirt…
It was the same colour the water had been that day, raspberry-purple washing up as white foam. Not the ordinary foam that disappeared with the wave’s wash, but foam like cotton balls, if cotton balls could stink of dye and disease and death. If they could catch fire from time to time, clouds of smoke and ash curling off the water’s surface, plunging the blue afternoon sky into a heavy, gray shroud of smog, smog that countless letters to the municipality had failed to penetrate. As for the raspberry purple…
“There was a joke, you know,” Rizwan told his daughter. “A joke that you could tell what the fashion people’s ‘colour of the season’ was just by looking at the colour of the lagoon.”
He turned the page, and father and daughter looked at his next sketch—a white kurtha*, draped with a shimmering, dark blue net. “That,” Rizwan said aloud, as his daughter slid her fingers into her mouth “is a tribute to Asha. Asha was the reason things changed.”
Or was she? Would things have changed with or without the teenage girl in the white kurtha, who—in front of a dozen open-mouthed onlookers—scaled the fence on That Day? Who stood knee-deep in toxic foam, holding a sign up over head; whose tears streamed down her cheeks as purple filth trickled down her legs, long, long after the people around her had given up? If not trying in the first place meant giving up.
Lightly, he tapped the tip of his daughter’s nose. “I think we would have tried, only by the time we did, it might have been too late.”
The children, mouths covered with masks, who watched the waves throw up foam and dead fish. The girls in the sweatshops, who spent 13 hours sewing buttons and sequins and thread on clothes they could never afford. The parents, looking out over the lagoon, who’d been left with coughing, miserable children and dreams turned to whirring, spinning nightmares. They’d shouted at her to come out, had muttered to each other behind their mobile-phone cameras: “She’s mad.” “Her parents are mad.” “How long is she going to stand there?”
And, more than once, “Why is she doing this?”
“They—” Rizwan began, caught himself. “We knew the answer already. We knew it long before we saw it written on her sign. This was what it said…” He bent down, to whisper in his little girl’s ear. “…These factories are killing us.”
The little girl gurgled. She gave him a gummy smile before turning the page, revealing a penciled outline of a knee-length dress, newspaper pieces glued inside it. Rizwan breathed in. “Ah.”
Asha stood in the water for a day. Then another. And another, stepping out only once the sun had set. Three weeks later, the journalists arrived, their white trucks winding their way down the road, dodging cotton trucks coming to and clothes trucks going from the town. They’d wrinkled their noses at the stench coming from the water, had pushed past one another as they scrambled to reach Asha. The townspeople watched as photographs of the sweatshops and lagoons appeared on the TV, in the papers.
Maybe it was admiration, admiration of Asha’s strength, her refusal to accept the unacceptable. Maybe it was trust, trust in the force of Asha’s will, the will that had forced TV journalists to show up at their little town. Or maybe it was just desperation, a desperation that had filled the hearts of the people, ready to burst like blood from an artery. Slowly, whatever their reasons, the townspeople joined Asha.
The girls at the sweatshops were the first. They broke the fence down and joined Asha in the lagoon, holding each other’s gloved hands, speaking, to each other and the reporters.
“…paid a cent an hour.”
“…coughing, choking, couldn’t breathe.”
“…nobody cared, until now.”
“The last time I tried complaining,” one woman said, “the manager called me a monkey, a donkey, and said he’d break all my bones.” She’d smiled a yellow-toothed smile. “Let’s see him do that with everyone. Let’s see him.”
The families who ran the town’s restaurants set up stalls near the spot the fence used to be, serving free food to protesters, and 10 housewives got together and started a daycare for their children. Girls and boys wrote letters to their minister, and carved messages in six-foot-tall letters along the dye-streaked bay.
People in white coats arrived at the town, in a huge white van with a sliding door. One of Rizwan’s friends said he’d gotten a glimpse inside it—it was filled with beeping machines, shiny tubes, and bottles of strange things. Researchers. They’d spent two days kneeling by the side of the lake, filling little plastic bags with water and foam. Then they disappeared into their white van, emerging only for meals. After talking to the contractors, they’d left.
A week later, there was a public announcement: the government had declared the lagoon’s water severely polluted. Factories were prohibited from dumping waste into it and were required to pay their workers a minimum wage.
Rizwan closed his eyes, as the celebrations came back to him—flashes of light, stomping feet, sloshing soda, bursts of laughter. He opened them.
His daughter yawned at him, rubbed at her eyes with tiny wrists. She leaned against his stomach and was asleep in minutes. Rizwan put a hand on her back, smiled. He turned to the next page of his scrapbook.
The page was empty.
Rizwan looked out, past the railings, over the lagoon. And, although they were barely specks in the distance, Rizwan knew that there were people on its shores. People who still pulled on shiny, plastic wetsuits and dove for plastic in the lagoon’s waters, who rode out in sleek boats that claimed to suck dyes and oils out of it, before too much of the contaminated water reached the open oceans.
The women working in the sweatshops had formed a union for their rights. Now they could afford to send their children to school, without worrying about putting food on the table. Although they still worked long hours hunched over their sewing, they were no longer exposed to toxic chemicals—the colour in real-life versions of Rizwan’s sketches came from organic dyes rather than mercury and lead. The trucks carrying material to the workshops no longer brought in just cotton and synthetic fibre, but also banana, bamboo, and hemp, all of which used less water and fewer pesticides. The little frock Rizwan’s daughter was dressed in was made of lotus fibre, which in addition to being soft and light, repelled water and stains. Not to mention the algae, which could actually grow with a person…
Rizwan closed the sketchbook and stood up. There were still problems in the world, he knew, sadness and hunger and pain. Heck, there were still problems in their little town. But none of them were unsolvable; none of them immune to bravery, innovation and, of course, the force of sheer will…
Gently, Rizwan walked inside and laid his daughter in her crib. “Good night, Asha,” he whispered as the trees sighed, the birds flew home, and the waves shimmered with glimpses of a brighter morning.
*kurtha: a loose, collarless shirt worn by people from South Asia
**The word “Asha: in Hindi means “hope”
Works Cited
Ted-Ed: The Life Cycle of a T-Shirt, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiSYoeqb_VY&vl=en
The Story of Stuff project: The Story of Solutions, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpkRvc-sOKk
Teen Vogue: The Problem with Fast Fashion, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq0–DfC2Xk
The Guardian: The Guardian View on Fast Fashion – It Can’t Cost the Earth
The New York Times: Made for Next to Nothing, Worn by You?
Fibre2Fashion.com: 4 Sustainable Cotton Alternatives
Reflection
Reflection
One of my favourite things to do in my free time is watch Ted-Ed videos. A few weeks ago, I hit upon one that really shocked me: "The Life Cycle of a T-shirt." I’d known about oil spills, crop incineration, and disposable plastic wrecking havoc on our planet, but cotton t-shirts and jeans? The stuff I wear every day? Through Ted- Ed, Teen Vogue, the Guardian, The Story of Stuff project, and many other online articles, I learned that a single cotton T-shirt can take up to 2,700 litres of water to produce, and that many of the dyes and pesticides used in its production are carcinogenic, taking heavy tolls on the people involved in its production. To make matters worse, the dyes, along with a slew of other chemicals, are often released into rivers, lakes, and oceans, making fast-fashion the second largest freshwater polluter in the world! I also learned that many of my favourite brands relied on sweatshop labour to produce my clothes. It horrified me to learn that the sequins and buttons on my dresses were probably sewn on by a girl younger than I am, forced to toil for up to 13 hours a day in sweltering hot conditions, for as little as a cent per hour. Now that I knew about these problems, what I needed to know was how to fix them, on a bigger scale instead of stopping at "I’ll just be a more responsible consumer." Going through my history books, I realized that true change involves people coming together and creating it. I hope my story inspires people to act, and to act now, to come together and create a better, cleaner, fairer world for ourselves and our children.