Why were you a mute spectator to your own devastation?

If you do not shout, you have no business to feel violated.

You should just clamp on your lip hard to taste blood, to not feel the pain.

Intensely tearing pain, searing your insides.

A few minutes before she can get into the car to be dropped to the examination hall, he pulls her from the main house to the east wing.

‘Look,’ he says, pointing. On and around the divan, with the table lamps on either side of it still switched on, scattered books and sheets, rolled away pencils and ball points and fountain pens, a bottle of royal blue ink after emptying itself on the divan.

‘Look,’ he says, pointing to the royal blue stain.

‘Look,’ he says laughing, pointing to that ink stain.

‘You were a virgin all right! But you didn’t bleed red, you bled royal blue. I got myself a royal virgin, with blue blood!’

And he laughs, and he laughs, he slaps his thigh in merriment.

She tries to find another sound to shut out his laughter. Above the house, her head, a plane flies, its drone deepening. Until there is an epicenter of silence in her ears.

The plane has taken off from Hyderabad airport, it semi-circles over the city, dipping a wing gracefully, giving her a view of the city she has come to care for. Somewhere down there, he is leading his own life, without knowing how much he has done for hers.

The sound of the engine, from inside its sleekly gleaming metal body, is steady; restful pulsing under steel skin; no dark, angry, punishing silence.

Ma was right; if she had not got herself professionally qualified, started working and known another life with its different identities, she would have wound up marrying that fat pig for all the wrong reasons.

Today is her fortieth birthday. She is with her friends in Khandala, celebrating what is supposed to be the beginning of a momentous period in a woman’s life. Right now she is at the nearby Lonavla market, inhaling the heady scent of chocolate and walnut fudge at Coopers as the next fresh batch is packed into boxes for the hordes of tourists thronging the tiny store. She looks around the marketplace and sees her abuser.

It’s not like that she has not been seeing him on and off when she goes to their shop, it’s not like she has not been speaking with him when she phones the shop for her father and he picks up the receiver. Is that mockery creasing his voice?

Once she had even tried to confront him on the phone.

‘You don’t know what you have done?’ she stammered.

‘I do,’ he had replied, with cold, calm and complete contempt. ‘I have looked after all of you, so many of you. I have worked in this shop to pay your mother’s hospital bills. I have tolerated a lot of nonsense from all of you. Go to hell, take your father with you.’ He had put down the phone. He did not bang down the phone, he put it down gently.