By the time he came home Shobi had already made her way onto the national team. Women’s cricket was entirely ignored in a country obsessed with cricket, but that only made the flame that had always flickered inside Shobi grow into an inferno. The women on her team each came from struggle. They swallowed the neglect of their passion because it gave them power, even though no one bothered to acknowledge it.

Shoban learned their stories, the battles they fought to reject the expectations of their families. Expectations that they be demure and feminine in preassigned ways, that they might play their beloved sport only if they returned after to the kitchens and bedrooms, mothers and daughters-in-law and wives. The more Shoban encountered the stories of her teammates, the fiercer the monster inside her grew until a woman she barely recognized emerged from her.

Shining Shobi. It was the name her teammates gave her, because she never tired of pushing them to fight, to win, and to claim the power of their wins to fight on and off the field.

When the opening batsman (yes, that’s what she was called even though she was a woman) showed up at Shobi’s door one day, beaten by her father because she refused to comply with some directive of his, Shobi learned that the Raje name was the sharpest weapon she could wield. One phone call to the commissioner of police, and the dynamics of power shifted. Direct access to media, access to safe houses and charities the family ran, the ear of celebrities and influencers: it all rolled drop by drop into a wave of seismic force.

Suddenly, right at Shobi’s fingertips was the power to change things, to not bend, and it took root inside her, fast and strong. Or it simply watered the seed that had always been within her. Before she knew it, she became Shining Shobi, every iota of fear inside her burned away as though it had never existed, and one too many people looked to her for strength.

When Bram returned, with the belief that his short banishment had been sufficient penance, all Shobi could do was laugh. He was full of apologies, as though remorse were all it took to erase evil. A great reset switch that she would be complicit in flipping over her dead body. But she would not give up her new life either. They would have separate lives. The only thing shared between them would be Ashna, because the simple acts of hugging her and spinning her in the air had been enough for Bram to win their daughter’s love. Shobi had always sworn that Ashna would make her own choices no matter how young, that she would hone her own spirit as she wished.