The sulfur dawn hasn’t cracked the sky yet,
but my knuckles are already bleeding into the grit.
This glue-vat steams poison,
and my lungs feel like wet paper tearing.
I’m twelve years old and my back knots like old rope,
but I don’t dream of rest—I dream of letters.
Not the ones Maa scrawled before the fever took her—
her bones moldered in the debt-pit before I could spell “justice”—
but thick books fat as brickwork.
Books with pages that smell of dust and dignity,
not this acid air that chews my throat raw.
I dream of chalk shrieking truths across a board.
Of a desk where my elbows don’t bump against dripping vats.
Of a teacher calling my name—Aasia, Aasia Gul —
not the overlooker’s bark: “jaldi kar, larki”
What if my hands held a pen?
What if I became a woman with clean shoes?
They say it’s delusion.
That my dreams are too big.
Babushka hawks rotten turnips by the gate, her voice rusted shut:
“School is for coffins now. The dead don’t need alphabets.”
But I steal ledger scraps—smear them with charcoal.
Sketch the shell. Then letters:
A for Aasia. B for books. F for freedom.
Below, I draw a woman.
Back straight. Hair knotted neat.
Eyes sharp as teacher-glass.
Her shoes shine.
I want to be like her.
But I’m invisible.
I’m factory smoke.
A cheap glove tossed in slush.
A sigh lost in the hiss-hiss-hiss of matches birthed from my bleeding fingers.
Now my hunger isn’t for bread alone—
It’s for verbs.
For theorems.
For the weight of a book in my raw, red hands.
The dark here is a cellar swallowing stars.
My candle’s a stolen nub,
guttering as saif wheezes my name—”Aasia aapa…. read to me?”
And I do. From a tattered pamphlet:
“There are 8 planets in the solar system”
His eyes glaze. Mine blaze.
All I ask is a spark, Lord.
Not fire—
Light.
Enough to read by.
Enough to learn how to burn this place down
with nothing but my mind.
(Aasia is one of 12 million children trapped in labour across Pakistan. Their dreams dissolve in factory fumes and field dust. Her hunger for books is a birthright, not delusion. Justice isn’t a word to spell, it’s a world to build. For her. For them. Until no child bleeds for the weight of a pencil they cannot hold)
(Eman Fatima Bajwa)
