She begins her rounds at about seven o’clock in the morning. Smita takes her basket lined with ashes, her scoop and her stiff reed brush. She has twenty houses to empty, every day, no time to lose. She walks along the side of the road, eyes lowered, her face hidden in her scarf. In some villages, Dalits are forced to wear crows’ feathers as a mark of their status. Elsewhere, they must walk barefoot. Everyone knows the story of the Dalit who was stoned merely for wearing sandals. Smita enters the houses by the door reserved for her kind, at the back. She mustn’t cross the path of the people living there, let alone speak to them. She is not only untouchable: she must be invisible, too. By way of a salary, she receives leftover food, sometimes old clothes tossed onto the floor for her to pick up. No touching, no looking. And sometimes a few rupees. Sometimes she gets nothing at all. One family of Jatts has given her nothing for months. Smita wanted to stop, she said so one night to Nagarajan. She wouldn’t go back there, they could clean their own shit. But Nagarajan had been afraid. If Smita stopped going there, they would be chased out: they have no piece of land to call their own. The Jatts would come and burn their hut. Smita knew what they were capable of. ‘We’ll cut off both your legs,’ they had said to one of her kind. The man had been found in a nearby field, dismembered and burned with acid.

Yes, Smita knew what the Jatts were capable of. And so she went back to the house the next day.

But this morning is not like every other day. Smita has made a decision. The obvious choice, the only one possible: her daughter will go to school. She had trouble persuading Nagarajan. What would be the point? he said. She might learn how to read and write, but no one will give her work. You are born to empty latrines, and you do it until you die. It’s your heritage, a circle no one can break. Karma.

Smita didn’t give in. She brought it up again the next day, the day after, and every day after that. She refused to take Lalita with her on her rounds: she would not show her how to clear toilets, she would not watch while her daughter vomited into the ditch, as her mother had watched before her. No, Smita could not do that. Lalita must go to school. In the face of her determination, Nagarajan had relented. He knew his wife; Smita had a will of iron. The small, dark-skinned Dalit woman he had married ten years ago was stronger than him, he knew that. And so he gave in. This is how it would be: he would go to the village school. He would speak to the Brahmin.