Sukumar's page

It’s a familiar story, probably too familiar to some. A father living in a patriarchal society, women and children are second class citizens at best, and nuisances to be tolerated at worst. His own wife and children were subject to his fits of rage daily. Bruises, welts, even broken bones were all too common to Sukumar in his youth. As a young boy he still loved his father, still looked up to him, still wanted to be like him. His father was strong, respected, a provider. It wasn’t until Sukumar’s youngest sibling, his sister Ahnsulea, turned five that Sukumar finally realized that his father was also belligerent, insecure, a worrier, weak, and pathetic. His anger came not because they needed to be taught lessons, but because their weakness made his father worry, it made him fear he wouldn’t be able to provide. When Tajarad, his father, struck his sister so hard she was knocked unconscious for little more than asking him to play with her and her stuffed dolls, something snapped in Sukumar. As he watched her bleed, and watched his mother gather her up to heal her, as she so often did, and watched his father stand in careless, merciless, haughty arrogance, his heart twisted. Sukumar looked about his father’s work bench, the tools of his trade, a tinkerer he was called, a bender of metal, he shaped and fashioned metal to his suiting, he fixed other people’s broken bits and pieces, but the broken pieces of his own heart seemed beyond repair. Sukumar took up his father’s biggest hammer, it took both his hands and all his strength to wield it, but wield it he did. In one giant, fell, sweeping arc he swung the hammer down on the crown of his father’s head. And the crunch and blood that followed should have scared him, should have made him weak in the knees, and made him feel remorse, but it didn’t. He stood over his father’s inert corpse, and gently set the hammer back on the workbench. He looked to his mother, she stared at him in disbelief, and hesitated, looking like she might kneel down and try to save Tajarad. Tend to Ahnsulea. Sukumar said, and pointed toward the house. So began Sukumar’s life as a fighter. His first fight was for freedom, and so are all those that follow. Sukumar fights to earn the money to support his family, and to one day start a family of his own. He defends those that need a shield against the world’s anger. When Sukumar crushes something with his hammer, and watches the life-blood drip from that which would hurt for its own pleasure, he still looks down on the corpse of his father, and just as he did that day, after his mother had taken Ahnsulea in the house, he smiles.