In their room, she scrambles on to the bed and lies down next to her mummy and her sisters. Her heart is thudding, she feels like crying but everyone is sleeping in their room. She does not wake up mummy, mummy has not been smiling like she used to as a teacher, everyone has been shouting at her for not giving birth to boys.

When her mummy gets up, she asks her to get the books and school bag from that room.

How much is there to run in, run from? It is only three rooms and she feels like she is running, running. He waits for her to come from school, clad only in a towel so that he can expose himself better. The bathroom door’s top glass-rectangle is shattered by her alcoholic uncle who threw his bottle through it. The other uncle now stares from it as she bathes, she cowers near the bucket.

He tries showing her pornographic pictures, big albums filled with huge coloured pictures of naked white women with their legs parted, holding up their breasts. In wedding-like albums. Why does no one else notice them? Why don’t they know what is happening to her? Why cannot they see? Why do they leave her alone with him? How does he know when her mummy will not be at home? How does he know she will not tell her daddy? Where is everyone when he sets upon her?

Where is everyone?

Why is there so much silence in the three rooms when there is just him and her? Him making her stand in front of him, his fingers digging into her arm, hurting her, as he strokes himself, faster, faster, and then something white comes out?

Click. Click, click go her dadi’s prayer beads in the other room. She is praying for her daughter who is married but unhappy elsewhere; she is praying for her husband, dada, who drinks; she is praying for her son who drinks and wreaks havoc; she is praying for her son who is schizophrenic and with his wife in another country; she is praying for her son who has only daughters to beget a son; she is praying for the son who is the apple of her eye.

She tells her dadi. She blurts it out because she cannot run, and hide, and duck, and dive, and scrape through, anymore.

Her dadi looks at her as if she cannot really see her. Her prayer beads rotate in her right hand, click, click, click.

She stands there, looking at the profusion of tiny white hair growing out of her dadi’s chin in and around the big and black mole, trying hard not to listen when her dadi lapses into her mother tongue, ‘Hoye, it happens, aam thaay, these things happen, kyarek ghar ma pan thay jaaye, some times it can happen in families, bhulee javanoo, forget it, tya nai jati, you stay away from him. And do not tell your mother, you will upset her. See how happy she looks now that she has gone to college to learn new things so that she can start teaching all over again? Remember how sick she used to be when she could not go out of the house? If you tell her anything she will stop going out of the house again and then she will not keep well again. That will be your fault.’