It was a cold winter day in February. I was studying in the living room of my old house in Delhi. The house didn’t just look old, but it smelled old too. It smelled exactly like those out-of-reach storage spaces that you open only before Diwali as part of your annual cleaning ritual. The walls were old and full of cracks. There was seepage almost everywhere, and electric wires hung loose in front of our balcony that was less than 2 metres apart from the balcony facing ours. The entire building looked like it was about to fall off any second. The negativity inside our tiny third-floor house wasn’t as much due to the absence of light and fresh air as it was because of the repressed emotions and constant family brawls over money.

My father was a frustrated man who had, for some reason, failed in every business that he had tried his hand at in the silver market in Chandni Chowk. He often took loans from relatives and personal moneylenders, and even sold off my mother’s jewellery. But he just wasn’t good at managing money, and his ego was his biggest enemy.

That afternoon, it was just me and my mom. My sister had already left for Australia with her new husband and my father was out.

A few goons suddenly showed up at our place. They barged into the house and started hurling abuses, first at my mother and then at me. They were there to recover the money my father had borrowed from the market. My mother was pleading and begging them to give my father more time when one of them started to beat the shit out of her. I froze. It felt like every bone in my body had collapsed. I started to shiver. My mouth went dry and I felt like I was about to faint. I was trying to make myself move and scream for help when another goon pulled me by my hair and then threw me on the floor. I hit my head hard against a sofa leg as I went down. They left after that, but promised to return again if the money wasn’t paid back in a couple of days.

I had seen many similar fights over money while growing up. Sometimes my relatives would beat up my father, and then my father would come back in a rage and beat up my mother. I had seen everything silently. But I never told anyone about what was happening in our house because I was old enough to know that nobody would ever understand my plight.