Priyanka meena

Where is Justice?
“Let your life become the justice your past could never give you.”

Justice—a very delicate and intrinsic word, the essence of which remains a remarkable mystery, still beyond the complete reach of mankind. We leave it in the hands of courts, engulfed in the wraps of advocates clad in black, while the morality surrounding it sometimes seems to depend upon the currency they carry in their pockets.

There are millions who are not fortunate enough to receive justice. I often ponder: How do they survive? How do they continue to live?

Then my inner sense tells me that perhaps God, the Lord, the Almighty, has His own ways of providing justice.

Let me take you to the other side of the stream, where a Lord sits to provide justice to His children.

A woman is given the responsibility of bearing the pain of bringing a child into this world, while many women even lose their lives during childbirth. A man may experience pleasure and walk away, leaving the responsibility of carrying and giving birth to the child upon a woman.

And when a five-year-old child is raped, her life is destroyed before she can even begin to understand the psychology of the world.

When the Lord Himself could not create a world where justice is pure and equal, how can humanity approach it with certainty?

When we have electricity and spend our afternoons with a glass of chilled lemonade, surrounded by the comfort of air conditioning, an infant sleeping beneath a tin roof without a fan may lose his life to the heat.

Where is justice?

When we use unlimited buckets of water, take long showers, and never think twice before turning on a tap, there are pregnant women who walk miles to fetch a few limited buckets from a well—to be shared by an entire family. Pregnancy already makes it difficult to carry one’s own body. Imagine walking miles beneath the scorching sun and then carrying heavy buckets home in both hands.

Where is justice?

When we eat three healthy meals a day, a child on the street may beg for a piece of bread simply to survive until tomorrow.

Where is justice?

When we dream of becoming civil servants, pilots, actors, teachers, doctors, and writers, a girl child somewhere is forced into an early marriage and made to rear children while she herself is still a child. Or she spends half her life beside a chulha or working on a farm when her tender years were meant to be spent with books, dreams, and the freedom to discover who she could become.

Where is justice?

Let me take you to another turn in the road.

A young woman who dreamed of becoming a doctor was brutally raped in a moving bus on a dark Delhi night. Her injuries were so horrific that she eventually lost her life. One of the accused, being a juvenile at the time of the crime, was dealt with under the juvenile justice framework and was released after serving the period permitted under that law.

Where is justice?

How does a mother sleep at night knowing that her daughter is gone forever, while someone responsible for that horror may one day breathe freely somewhere in the same world?

And then there are children who never even get the chance to ask what justice means.

A missile strikes a school. Children—some barely old enough to have learned their first alphabets—are killed. They had only just begun decoding the world, taking their first steps toward understanding life. Their parents are left to look at the bodies of children they had imagined growing into adults.

And somewhere, far away, those responsible may speak of victory.

Where is justice?

There was also a teenage girl whose life was destroyed after she was sexually harassed by a powerful police officer. Her family faced years of harassment and intimidation. Her younger brother was subjected to brutal treatment. Eventually, unable to bear what had happened to her and the suffering that followed, she took her own life. Her case dragged on for years before the perpetrator was convicted and sentenced.

Did Ruchika ever receive her justice?

Ruchika had dreams of building a future around sports.

She died in her early teens.

Where is justice?

I have never truly understood the essence of justice.

Perhaps no human being ever will.

Because sometimes justice does not arrive in the form we spend our lives waiting for. Sometimes there is no verdict that can return a child to her mother. No punishment that can restore the life that was taken. No sentence that can erase a memory from someone’s mind. No amount of compensation that can return the years stolen from a life.

And yet, life continues.

People wake up the next morning. The sun rises. Seasons change. Children grow. New dreams are made.

Perhaps there comes a time when some chapters have to be closed—not because what happened was insignificant, not because the pain was undeserved, and certainly not because justice was achieved, but because the past cannot be allowed to become the entire book of one’s life.

You may never receive the justice you deserved.

You may never see the person who hurt you receive the punishment you imagined.

You may carry questions for which the world has no answer.

But perhaps you can still reach a day when the past no longer feels like a thorn lodged inside you.

Perhaps one day, you will look back and see not only the wound, but the turn your life took because of it.

And perhaps the life you build after that turn—beautiful, meaningful, peaceful, and entirely your own—can become a different kind of justice.

A justice designed by your own soul.