Each evening, before stepping over the threshold of her house, Smita rubs her body all over three times with soap. She refuses to bring that vile stench home, she doesn’t want her husband and daughter to associate her with the filthy smell. That smell, the smell of other people’s shit, is not her, she will not allow herself to be reduced to that. And so she scrubs her hands, her feet, her body, her face with all her strength, she scrubs fit to rub away her skin, behind the piece of cloth that serves as a screen at the far end of the yard on the edge of the village in Badlapur, in a far-flung corner of Uttar Pradesh.

Smita dries herself and puts on clean clothes before entering the hut. Lalita is sitting in a corner, her knees folded tight against her chest. She is staring at the ground. An expression flickers over her face, one that her mother has never seen before, an indefinable mixture of anger and sadness. She moves closer.

‘What is the matter?’

The child says nothing. Her jaw is clenched tight.

‘Tell me.’

‘How was your day?’

‘Say something!’

Lalita says nothing, and stares into space, as if fixing her gaze upon an imaginary point that only she can see, an inaccessible place, far from the hut, far from the village, where no one can reach her, not even her mother. Smita is angry now.

‘Speak!’

Lalita curls tighter into herself, like a frightened snail retreating inside its shell. It would be so easy to shake her, to shout, to force her to speak. But Smita knows her daughter: she will get nothing out of her that way. The butterflies in her stomach are a crab, now. She is gripped by a feeling of anguish. What happened at school? She knew nothing of that world, and yet she sent her daughter there, her treasure. Had she been wrong? What had they done to her?

‘What have you done?’

‘You’ve got yourself dirty!’

‘Wherever have you been?!’

Smita catches hold of Lalita’s hand and pulls her daughter towards her, peeling her from the wall. The new sari, the sari she had stitched, night after night, for hours, losing sleep so that it would be ready in time, the sari that was her pride and joy, is ripped, and ruined, and filthy!

‘You’ve torn it! Look!’

Smita begins to shout. She is furious. And then she stops dead. A terrible thought has struck her. She takes Lalita outside into the yard, into the light – the interior of the hut is dark, hardly any daylight enters. She sets about undressing her, pulling roughly at the sari. Lalita shows no resistance. The fabric comes away easily. Smita stops. She can see Lalita’s back: it is streaked with red lines. The marks of the cane. Her skin has split in places, raw and red. Scarlet, like her bindi.