Fearing she will be hit again, the child curls up tight. She seems smaller, as if shrunk by fear. Smita cannot breathe. She draws her daughter to her, holds her as tight as her frail limbs will allow, and begins to cry. The little girl buries her face in her mother’s neck; she has let go, they have made their peace. They stay like that for a long time, under Nagarajan’s bewildered gaze. He has never seen his wife cry before. In the face of all the trials life has sent her way, she has never flinched, never broken. She is a strong, determined woman. But not today. Clinging tight to her daughter’s hurt, humiliated body, she is a child once more, like Lalita, and she weeps for her dashed hopes, for the life she had so long dreamed of and which she cannot give her now, because there will always be Jatts and Brahmins to remind them who they are, and where they come from.

In the evening, when they have put Lalita to bed and lulled her to sleep at last, Smita unleashes her fury. Why did he do that? That schoolmaster, that Brahmin? He had agreed to take Lalita with the others, the Jatt children, he had taken their money and said ‘All right!’ Smita knows him, that man, and his family too. His house is in the centre of the village. She cleans their latrines every day. His wife gives her rice sometimes. So why?

Suddenly, she thinks of the five lakes that Vishnu filled with the blood of the Kshatriyas, while defending the Brahmin caste: the educated people, the priests, the enlightened ones, above all the other castes, the summit of all humanity. Why attack Lalita? Her daughter was no danger to them, no threat to their learning, nor their status, so why push her back down into the slime? Why not teach her to read and write, like the other children?

Sweeping the classroom means: you have no right to be here. You are a Dalit, a scavenger, and a scavenger you will remain, your whole life long. You will die in other people’s shit, like your mother and your grandmother before you. Like your children, and your grandchildren, and all your progeny. There will be nothing else for you, the untouchables, the rejects of humanity, nothing but that vile stench, for hundreds and hundreds of years, just other people’s shit. The shit of the entire human race.