Her trembling hand reached for the telephone receiver. She called her daughter’s number. She was shaken – her heart was beating fast, her hands were cold, her wrinkled face seemed to have grown more wrinkles in just a few hours….

She managed to escape in the very early morning. She walked the 50 kilometres that separated the house she had been living in for the past seven years and her parents’ home. When she arrived, she saw her brothers and…

Zehra rolled onto her side, looking at Kiran as if she was a secret worth her weight in gold. Zehra always looked at Kiran like she was treasure, but only when nobody else was watching. Kiran had enjoyed the excitement at first; the thrill hadn’t felt like a…

Her name is Jamila. It means beautiful in Arabic. She liked to walk along the boardwalk overlooking the sea. It had been her birthday on that day, three years ago. She was turning 17 years old, and Ibrahim had promised…

It was a cold, dark night. All the girl could ever recall were some lost memories and broken images: images of her calm face, the sweetness in her voice and a real yet fake smile, soft touch of her hands…

I gazed from the roof terrace at the sprawling green village fields, full of okra, aubergines and chillies. The stream meandered through like a serpent, flanked intermittently with long, golden reeds. The kikar and peepal trees soaked the unrelenting heat…

I’ve talked about CII’s Women’s Protection Bill proposal with a lawyer, my mother, my aunt, and my friends. My friend wants to start a CII-themed cooking show, where ‘we’ll all wear burkas and lightly beat things, like eggs and batter.’…