Zohra and the Cages

Tortured and left to die in a hospital for releasing pet parrots. It’s the impetuous and emblematic image of the instinct of freedom, in a world that begins to definitively lock down itself and make a sense of its cages. To love and respect its imprisonment, and defend it by any means from anything or anyone who just dare to threaten it through their way of being or ideas. Even a child.

Zohra was an 8-year-old girl illegally employed as a maid in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. On Sunday, she has been killed by her employers for letting their pet parrots escape. She opened the cage to feed the birds but they flew away, according to Rawalpindi police superintendent Zia Uddin. As punishment, Zohra’s employers, who run a business buying and selling animals, beat her unconscious before abandoning her at a local hospital, where she died on Monday.

According to an initial police investigation, when Zohra was brought to the hospital she was still alive. “She had injuries on her face, hands, below her rib cage and legs. She also had wounds on her thighs, which suggested that she might have been sexually assaulted.”

After George Floyd and the pregnant elephant died after eating a pineapple-bomb, this is just another story which perhaps should make us reflect on the fate of this planet — in case our cages have not become too narrow to allow us to do so.

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