Chapter 1
How do you extinguish your most significant pain without abolishing your sweetest joy?
“A bite of food? A rupee?” I beg. Damyanti, my four-year-old daughter, crawls over my lap and lies beside my thigh.
I run my hands through her long black hair when I hear, “Beautiful daughter.” I steal a glance of the stranger without lifting my head. A black tunic shrines the man. His thick dreadlocks fall into his frizzy beard, which looks home to the same vermin that feast in my hair and body. A dark cloud and the smell of garam masala come from the Tantrik.
“Food,” I barely whisper. His ominous presence locks my muscles. I don’t trust a deliverer of Indian black magic, yet Damyanti is starving.
“I have better than food for you.”
What could be better? A home? A job?
I lift my eyes slightly, and when our eyes meet, I feel his power shake me. I quickly look away and squeeze Damyanti tightly.
The Tantrik brings his rich brown hands out and seizes Damyanti from me. What can I do?
“You were in your first year of university, were you not?” He says as he strokes Damyanti’s hair. My hands spasm, anxious to hold my daughter again.
I nod.
“When your professor stole your virtue, you lost everything, didn’t you?”
Tears spill down my cheeks, carving a pathway in my filth.
I had a great life until the professor had called me in for instruction.
They cast me to the street when my belly swelled. My whole future terminated. My life ended.
I had never known misery as I did on the street.
Abandoned.
Abused.
Starvation.
Humiliation.
-An untouchable.
To add to it, I watched my daughter suffer as no child should.
The Tantrik puts a ripped piece of a tapestry in my hand.
“Read the mantra twenty times, and all will change,” he says. “Out loud and in this position.”
He sits in front of me, with Damyanti still in his lap. She reaches for me and cries as she attempts to wiggle from his control.
“What happens if I do?” I ask, anxious to get my daughter back.
“Then,” he slowly says in a low tone. “Then, you find yourself back at university. Professor Kapoor will not have been born. You will graduate and have respect. All restored as should be.”
If I say the mantra, I will have lived the life I should have—my heart dances in my chest. I see the eyes of Damyanti.
“But, what of Damyanti?”
“No Professor Kapoor. No violation. No Damyanti.”
If I erase the life of a nasty man, I will get mine back.
Damyanti’s rich brown eyes look at me. She expects me to keep her safe. Hers has been a hard life. What tragedies of an untouchable child wait in her future?
I can make all better if I purge it all.
But can I erase Damyanti, the child of my loins?
