CHENNAI: Sudha* is a topper. Her name won’t be in any of the lists of State toppers, but at her rescue home at Perambur, she reigns supreme on Thursday.
“I got 445 and that’s more than everybody else who wrote with me,” she told everyone at MCCSS proudly, after the Class X results were declared. The bouts of pride and happiness, usually rare for the 18-year-old, are a stark contrast to the trauma that she had undergone before she ended up there.
“When she was 15 or 16, her sister’s marriage was fixed and on the day of wedding, her sister eloped. To ensure their family’s pride was intact, her father coerced her to take her sister’s place on the pandal and she got married that night,” explained Isabel R, executive secretary of the NGO.
Before things got out of hand, the girl eloped and approached a private TV channel where she was featured on one of the reality shows that addressed social evils. When news got out, her father committed suicide and the rest of her family disowned her in horror. Broken in spirit and with nowhere to turn, she found succour in the home and the inmates with varied, but inevitably broken past.
“It took a lot of resilience to get her to back to her studies, because she is a bright child, but the experience had pushed her back a couple of years. But now that she has done so well, we have spoken to her husband and have asked him to agree for an annulment, so that she can pursue her dream of studying further,” she adds.
Looking at the resolute girl, who quickly packed her bags to go for a joyride to Puducherry with the rest of her home-mates, there is little doubt that her academic journey has a lot more steam left in it.