I am fourteen and I am sleeping in a truck. It is a little after midnight. I do not remember what has made me so angry tonight except a word hurled at me: slut. My heart is not the log that is burning to warm homes; it is the wildfire erupting from judgements teenagers don’t take well. In the clutches of this apocalypse, I keep remembering just one word: slut. Amma [1], calling me a “slut” would hurt, you know. But so much that I will never recover from it, you do not know.

***

Meeting boys after school was a sin in small-town Patna. Girls would be married off to strangers, but to have friends from the other sex was evil. To meet them alone, after school, was not part of the good-girl-from-decent-homes description. I was not allowed this adventure even in my dreams. If I wrote it down in a diary, all the pages of my diary would be burnt. If anyone heard its faint murmurs, I would be the shame no family wanted in its fold. I knew how utterly stupid the lies were, thrown at me the very first day I bled in my skirt - ‘a kiss can get you pregnant now!’ ‘do not mingle with boys’ ‘do not let them touch you.’ But I let them believe that they were true, just so I could breathe and do what my heart desired. I did not have to tell anyone. I just had to follow my heart. The magazines I sneak into my bed at night scream this to teenagers like me, don’t they? I steal a glance at my brother’s Debonair and all the divas seem to be provoking us: ‘Show up for yourself!’ When you are born in the badlands where showing up alone anywhere could be fatal for any girl, I do not quite know how to do that. But life is in taking little steps towards that, I thought. That day, I took one small step when the opportunity presented itself.

Amma, like she would always do, had asked Belu, my younger sibling, to accompany me to the school’s debating club meeting that morning, scheduled on a weekend when the school was closed. Belu was all of nine but sharp at gathering details for mother whenever she needed. She would eavesdrop on neighbourhood aunties, or relatives in family congregations, or father on phone calls with his lady colleagues, and troop down straight to Amma who would hear the juicy details before chastising Belu into guilt: ‘You little devil, you don’t have to hear everything!’ Belu knew that was just pretence, Amma wanted all the details, so she continued anyway. Once, she spied on me and my best friend Antara attempting to write a love letter and rushed to tell mother. Antara was immediately banned from visiting the house henceforth and I was reprimanded and threatened with withdrawal from school.

My presence at the debating society meeting was mandatory as I was elected the president of the club! All my friends walked to the venue alone. I was embarrassed that I had turned up with Belu. After the debating society meeting, one of the boys in my class had asked me if I wanted to go on a drive. He was driving his father’s sparkly red Maruti 800 that day and I agreed, leaving Belu with one of my friends at the class. I was gone for an hour, and we were both late at home. Ma asked Belu for all the details from the meeting, not me, as if it was not my club but hers! Belu mentioned my outing without telling Amma the number of cakes she had savoured from my friend’s tiffin while I was away. Halfway through Belu’s narration of events, I had lost the moral right to tell my story. I was the sinner who had gone out with a boy.

I remember how Amma pulled me to a room and shut us in. She asked where I was, and what did I do in those sixty minutes. I remember bursting into a river of remorse over my intransigence of the unwritten moral code. I had stayed, I had given wings to myself, I had enjoyed a drive. Amma refused to believe I was there just for the drive. This was an interrogation I was failing. I kept crying and repeating the same answers. My vocabulary was limited. I had only apologies and feeble denials to meet her vociferous accusations. Exasperated, Amma yelled at me: ‘Slut!’

***

I am only beginning to grasp the monumental hold of the word hurled at me this afternoon, a word I have been told is used to describe other women who, everyone tells me, I should never talk about. My understanding of the term is basic: a slut is a woman who solicits sex for money; someone who is a social outcast, a fallen woman who must not be let near man, woman, child. In a matter of hours, I am them. I need to reorient my vocabulary to make the word less insidious than it sounds, but I cannot. My heart has absorbed it like the earth’s dark core where molten lava waits to erupt into a volcano. I stumble out on the veranda like an orphan and look around.

The present at this moment is laid out like a rebellious road, like the dreams of teenagers forever flowering in the driest of earth they can find. The sky is the constellation of hope, and I must get out of my colourless barn to experience its fullness. I choose the backdoor in the courtyard which opens into a litter-infested alley people use for household waste. I climb on the iron grill in the door, my rubber slippers holding my slight frame tight as I lift one leg after the other, reaching the cemented arch of the gate from where I jump, down on the muddied earth. It must have hurt but today is not the day my mind is experiencing physical pain.

This is a summer night, hot as the burnt dung cakes in the chulha [2] of the roadside tea stall which have not turned to ashes yet. Somewhere in Patna [3], this feared neighbourhood of armed street-smart gangs and petty criminals exists like a world beyond the arms of law and the government, as real as the Gangs of Wasseypur [4] – no one flinches an eye when these happen, just like the silence over bicycle thefts, as if killing and stealing didn’t mean much except the change in sections in the criminal procedure code. These are the badlands of a state capital but who cares if the police do not arrive. No one ventures out in the evenings, even the police know the safety mechanism of living with the devils, but I am the lady Robin Hood of the night, in the line of fire, all for my own cause. Freedom that I love, anger that I do not control, sorrow that consumes me, accusations that pummel me, the rebel in me that I don’t understand but I pamper, like a mother indulging a child. At this hour, a dozen fireflies exchange sparks in my head; the irritating chorus of the frogs deafens my ears; every house on the street appears dim or dark; every streetlight flickers like someone napping from a mutton-bhaat [5] overdose. I am on this road where women and children do not tread at night. But I am running away. I am leaving home. I walk fast, looking back with a sinking heart, then break into a sprint. I have no destination, only the resolve to storm out, get away, disappear.

I hit the highway that is coming from the city’s lawless suburbs towards the only cremation ground I know in the city, just opposite a temple I visit on weekends. The road is flat, takes you somewhere but I do not want somewhere. My listlessness dawns on me. I realise how directionless I am in this unfriendly universe. Fear is now gripping me. I am looking around for a safe corner to hide, enclosed with boundaries that cover me the way my grandmother’s shawls do, and let me look at the open sky without being spotted for a kill. Just last night, a barrage of gunshots was exchanged at this very place by people the police called ‘’thugs’’, but in my rebellious impulse, I had forgotten the crucial detail. My mind is telling me, ‘’I do not want to be maimed, I don’t want to be shot, I don’t want to be discovered.’’

I run into a long row of trucks parked on the sides of the road. I jump into one and I lie down, my face facing the sky. I do not know where I can go from here but for a moment, I feel safe. On the roof of the driver’s cabin, I see a couple of men lying. I hold my breath, but none of them stirs for a good twenty minutes. They are sleeping but they can wake up. My body is suddenly shivering, sweating. I am worried sick.

***

Papa wants me to read the newspapers every morning, so I know. I remember what I read. There are six newspapers at the door every morning and I am the one who brings them to papa’s study. I scan them before he does. Few headlines remain in the head forever. Tonight, huddled in a strange truck with a handful of strangers, the news stories are blazing in my memory like stadium headlights:

December 2012: India 'gang-rape': Student, friend attacked on Delhi bus

May 2017: Man shot dead; four women allegedly raped in highway robbery

September 2020: Woman Dies in Delhi After Gang Rape

May 20, 2021: Dalit woman allegedly raped at gunpoint

August 2021: Nine-year-old girl raped and murdered

February 2022: Outrage as woman allegedly gang-raped, paraded in India’s capital

Feb 2022: Some people in a cheering crowd called for her to be raped. Many were women

***

Dying is an adventure; being violated for seeking freedom is not. I am beginning to get a hold of this scene: a dark night, someone could have seen me walking. If they come and grab me here, I am no more the Robin Hood I terribly want to be. I am the powerless teenager who is realising the grave consequences of a misadventure. At the break of dawn, I jump out of the truck and run back to my house where Amma is waiting with great fury. But her fury is not speaking today; her shame is.

***

You are in the veranda darkened with your shame of having to see your teenage girl escape. My escape was my protest interrupted by fear, but you won’t understand. You lean closer to check my clothes; your fingers on my t-shirt as you try to twitch your nose trying to catch a smell. The night, however, badly we want it to be kind, swallows every rebellious act, however innocent, and transforms it into an unforgivable act of illicit impropriety. I will always remember how you throw your arms in air and point to the floor above us, in the direction of the flat where a middle-aged man with two children survives life with great patience – work, home and occasional salutations thrown at you in respect of father’s social position. You tell me, almost hissing if sex was on my mind, even that man would do. Who, I kept thinking. I barely had noticed that man, but you have now made his presence indelible with your words.

I have moved cities over the years, but your cruel words keep resurrecting the man in my memory, like a stab wound refusing to heal.

***

Freedom is a bird, but she fails to fly often. A moment of peddled shame, a moment of rebellion - that is all it takes to leave the nest. The bird wants to fly. It keeps looking for the sky because what is home but a prison?  

[1] Hindi word for ‘mother’ in India.

[2] Fire gas.

[3] A town in east India.

[4] Hindi cult movie popular for its depiction of gang wars and small-town criminals.

[5] Lamb curry and rice.