In the morning, Rajjo was blue and black in most places, dried and curdled blood marked her entire body. Vicious bite marks marred her satiny skin. She was barely in a state to walk. Her mouth was swollen parched and dry. Her desperate thirst was killing her more than the wounds. A loud blaring siren in her would suddenly go quiet and blare again. She could feel her blood stuck to the sheets – she could smell last night all around her. A thick sticky liquid oozed and swirled in her right ear.

She had an urgent need to get out of the bed. The first thing she did as she collected her clothes and painfully dressed, was to hunt for the Goddess who was supposed to be sitting in the room looking over her. She could not move without wincing, she could not feel her legs. Her fingers seemed crushed. A voice was streaming into her ear. Someone was calling out her name. It was her mother perhaps. She had come to take her away from it all. It was a bad dream. No… it was her husband.

Seth-ji was knocking at the door. ‘Durgaaa!’ his voice came from a distance. The minister snored and slept next to her. At some point he must have locked the door from the inside.

Rajjo slowly and painfully found the Goddess and walked towards the bathroom like her feet were chained with a thick metal rope, half scared that the monster would get up and attack her. She wanted to reach the door and lock it from inside. As soon as she reached the washroom and locked the door behind her she opened the window.

Another dull grey and cold morning greeted her, the beginning of a new year. Her mother used to encourage the family to pray at the temple first thing in the morning to bring them happiness through the year. Rajjo looked at the deity and threw it as far away as she could with disgust, using up all the strength she had in her bruised body. She fell into a heap. The knocking had stopped. The tap water trickled behind her, the sound came from a distance yet again. Her world did not sound right. The whistle of an engine and a long howl of a shrieking train were the last things she registered before she passed out in a deep sleep.

She could hear the thundering again. Was it raining outside? She felt the hard cold floor. The images returned. She was in the bathroom. Someone was knocking on the door gently. She took the metal blade carefully from the sink cabinet where she’d hidden it and sat staring at it. Her right ear seemed numb as the knock could be only heard in her left. She turned her right ear towards the noise. There was only a deadly silence.

She could smell freshly cut wheat. She could smell the fodder. She could smell the rain, the old man preparing fresh balls of jaggery and laying them out to dry back home. Strains of prayers blaring from the loudspeakers jutting out from the gurdwara bordering their village every morning and evening.