Every little girl knows how the story ends. The prince finds Cinderella. The glass slipper fits.
The wedding bells ring.The castle gates open.
And then, mercifully, the story stops.
Because fairy tales have always known where to end.
They end before the difficult questions begin. They end before Cinderella learns that
belonging often comes with conditions. Before she discovers that every kingdom has rules.
Before she realises that acceptance is sometimes offered in exchange for pieces of herself.
No one asks whether she missed the girl who once danced barefoot in the ashes.
No one asks whether the castle loved Cinderella, or merely the version of Cinderella it found
acceptable. Perhaps that is why fairy tales end at the wedding. Because if they continued,
they would have to tell a different story.
A story about women who spend years learning how to belong.
A story about women who mistake self-erasure for love.
A story about women who become so skilled at adjusting that they wake up one day unable
to remember where they end and everyone else’s expectations begin.
This is not Cinderella’s story.
This is ours.
Every little girl grows up hearing stories about houses. The house she will build. The house
she will belong to.The house she will one day call home.
The version of herself she slowly edits until she becomes acceptable to the people already
living there. No one notices because it happens gradually.
The house does not devour her all at once. It eats her in pieces.
A little confidence here. A little freedom there. A boundary. A voice. A self. It teaches her
new codes. At first, the changes seem harmless.
Those taunts gradually become your inner voice.
Soon, Cinderella becomes fluent in a language she never chose to learn.
Scholars call it code switching – the practice of altering one’s language, behaviour,
personality or identity to fit a particular social environment.
We, women know it all to well. We call it adjustment.
The daughter who once spoke without hesitation, learns to measure every sentence. The
tragedy is that the gatekeepers of this kingdom are often women themselves-women whoknow the ache of shrinking, yet ask the next generation to shrink a little more. Women who
inherited the architecture of patriarchy and became its most devoted caretakers.
Perhaps this is why women across centuries have written so passionately about freedom.
Virginia Woolf wrote that women need a room of their own. We misunderstood her. We
thought she was talking about walls and doors.
She was talking about psychological space.
The freedom to exist without constantly negotiating permission.
The freedom to think a thought before wondering who it might offend.
The freedom to feel without first calculating its consequences.
But how many women truly possess such a room?
How many wake up every day measuring their words, their tone, their emotions, their
desires?
How many spend years becoming acceptable versions of themselves?
We tell women that marriage is about finding a home.
Yet countless women spend decades searching for themselves within it.
Sylvia Plath wrote of suffocation long before we learned the language of emotional labour.
The women who compromise their bodies in the name of survival, are celebrated and
glorified for their sacrifice to keep the castle spotless to the outsiders.
Kabir questioned the value of rituals that lacked compassion. Rituals that drains ones moral
beliefs and principles, how can they please the divine.
Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi reminds us that the deepest violence is often the attempt to
strip a person of their dignity and identity. The dignity that strips off every moment we
suppress our voice, every second we succumb ourselves and act against our personal beliefs.
Until one day we don’t that voice from within, also becomes silent.
The relentless pressure to become.
Not who you are.
But who others need you to be.
The daughter-in-law.
The wife.
The caretaker.
The peacemaker.
The absorber of pain.
The keeper of family honour.
The one who forgives.
The one who understands.
The one who remains silent.
“Ignore. Ignore. Ignore.”
Until one day she looks at her own life and wonders:
Who am I ignoring? The perpetrator? Or myself that is screaming and crying to break free.
When did I stop belonging to myself? Am I so flawed?Perhaps that is why so many women cry in private. Also because the tears invite judgement
of being “too sensitive” or “over reacting”.
The tears are not always about a single insult.
Or a single argument.
Or a single disappointment.
They are grieving a thousand abandonments of self.
The dream they postponed.
The opinion they swallowed.
The boundary they ignored.
The disrespect they rationalised.
The apology they never received.
The version of themselves they buried in exchange for acceptance.
And the cruelest irony?
Even after all of that, belonging is never guaranteed. Instead we are expected to act grateful.
A woman can spend years sacrificing herself for a family and still be made to feel like an
outsider when conflict arrives.
The transaction was never real.
Because true belonging cannot be purchased through self-erasure.
That is not belonging.
That is occupation.
Across centuries, across languages, across cultures, these writers were asking the same
question:
What does it cost a human being to become acceptable?
We know the answer.
We have been paying for belonging with pieces of ourselves for generations.
Homi Bhabha called it mimicry.
The colonized subject was encouraged to become almost the same, but never quite.
How familiar this feels to us.
The daughter-in-law is welcomed as a daughter, in theory, yet quietly reminded of the
difference.
She is invited to belong, but only through adaptation.
She learns new customs, new codes, new loyalties, new silences.
The kingdom applauds her transformation. Or do they ever? Even a mere
acknowledgement?The promise of even partial acceptance remains forever just out of reach.
What struck me most in Bhabha’s work was the idea that colonisation is not merely about
controlling land. It is about controlling narratives and identities. It is about deciding whose
version of reality matters.
How many women have been told:
“That’s just how this family is.”
“You need to adjust.”
“Don’t make a big issue out of it.”
With every such statement, our interpretation of own experience is slowly questioned. Our
reality becomes negotiable. Our feelings become secondary. Our voice becomes something
that requires permission.
And yet, like every colonised people in history, we resist.
Sometimes resistance is loud. Sometimes it is quiet.
Sometimes it is refusing to accept humiliation as normal.
Sometimes it is pursuing education after marriage.
Sometimes it is earning an income.
Sometimes it is setting boundaries.
Sometimes it is simply saying, “This hurts me,” when everyone else expects silence.
The irony is that we live in an independent nation. political colonisation ended decades ago.
Yet many women continue to experience forms of emotional and cultural colonisation within
the walls of their own homes.
They are expected to leave behind parts of themselves in exchange for acceptance.
They are expected to prove loyalty through self-erasure.
They are expected to maintain peace even when that peace comes at the cost of dignity.
The struggle for freedom is not always fought in parliaments, courts, or battlefields.
Sometimes it is fought at dining tables. Sometimes it is fought in kitchens. Sometimes it is
fought in the quiet moments when a woman decides that her self-respect is not negotiable.
The goal is not rebellion for its own sake. The goal is not conflict. The goal is belonging
without surrendering identity.
Perhaps that is the freedom many women are still searching for.
Not freedom from family.
Not freedom from marriage.
But freedom to remain fully themselves within it.
If colonisation is the demand that one identity must dominate another, then true
independence begins when a woman no longer has to choose between belonging and being
herself.
The fight is about power. The battle was never between genders. The power play to subdue
one is pure schadenfreude that seems incomprehensible, especially in domestic circuits. A
fight for a throne that doesn’t exist.
The biggest act of rebellion that a woman can commit, which is feared, is to own her self and
her identity. To not allow anyone to erase or subdue her.
Perhaps the question was never whether Cinderella belonged in the castle.Perhaps the real question is this:
If belonging demands transformation, silence, performance, and self-erasure, was it ever
belonging at all?
Akshara Sharma 
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