Vasudha sat in the Starbucks café in Connaught place, sipping her coffee and staring out of the window. The bloodstained knife lay next to her handbag, covered with her blue silk scarf. The knife has the blood of her father. She wanted to begin the most awaited journey of her life with the memory of her father by keeping the blood of his father close to her by keeping the knife, which has taken his life. 

She suddenly remembered something which she wished had not been true.

There exist two different worlds in the life of Vasudha. The one which she loves and adores and another she despised as it has a lust for her beauty and shining flesh. She is 23 now and spent the first ten years of her life, fighting silently to save her grace as a woman—the grace which always remains the vulnerable target of assault in her village Bia. Bia is a small place in Varanasi. In Bia, there lived a dominant caste Thakurs and the handful of shepherds in their ignored and derelict houses. There also lives the only family of Brahmin. People of Bia say Brahmins are wise, and their presence in the village will keep Bia away from the curse of evil. Brahmins were also the need of the village to perform the holy rituals, and that made the Thakurs to shelter them. However, the holiness of Brahmins couldn't change the Thakurs. Bia was infamous for the cruelty and anarchism of Thakurs. Thakurs were also notorious for their uncontrolled letch who insolently looks above the belt and hunt below the belt stuff in women. In Bia, when a boy was born in the family of Thakurs, they would proudly say 'see a husband is born for the girls of shepherds.' Shepherds of Bia lives by feeding the taunts and torments of Thakurs.

There seems some divine curse working on the shepherds as they born ugly and asinine. This ugly and asinine society would follow the profession of their parents without exception. They would feed the cattle and work in the field of Thakurs to eke out their livings. But sometimes something happens which changes the entire discourse of society. In the incorrigibly cursed society, there born a girl Vasudha to become the epitome of beauty and grace. When Vasudha was born in 1978, the entire village was flocked to see her beauty. The small world of Bia stretched out its lecherous eyes in a palpable shock to admire her beauty.

Vasudha’s father has no limit of joy. He runs up to 10 km to reach his sister's house to give her news about her newborn daughter. Breathlessly he says, "she is not ugly like me.'' There sparkle a twinkle of hope in the corner of his eyes, which could see Vasudha growing up as an extraordinarily intelligent and beautiful girl. His sister, who was married in a well-off family, would see the girl's beauty in the bubbles of happiness her brother brought there and felt happy for him.

For Bia, the time had passed quickly, and Vasudha has turned 10. She has crossed her caterpillar age and now was looking like a half-grown sylph. Her beauty has blown in the wind like the aroma of the morning jasmine only to make people of Bia breathless and hungry for her beauty. Soon celestial charm of Vasudha became the reason a malicious rumor was born in the debauched society of Thakurs that she is a breed of the upper class. Entire Bia burst into an insensitive debate that how a girl with such exceptional beauty would ever be born from such ugly parents when in decades, there was no one born such beautiful in entire Bia? 

Her mother must have committed some adultery to produce her. She must have slept with some handsome man. Said one of the custodians of the culture of Bia.

Her father was humiliated, her mother was assaulted for bringing shame to Bia by letting beautiful Vasudha born in this cruel world. The beauty of Vasudha separates her from her ugly father, who loves her more than anything in the world. Even his own life was nothing before his precious darling. 

At the age of 10, Vasudha was able to read the meaning of hybrid, and adultery people have used to defame and abuse her innocent mother. She wanted her mother to be protected from being harassed and abused; she wanted an iota of dignity granted to her mother to live with her chin up. She wanted justice to be dispensed and a lesson to be taught to the debauched soul. However, with such extreme internal agitation, she found her tongue weak to speak for justice, her nails were pruned regrettably short not to be thrust in their debased blood, her hands were delicate and lacked the strength to beat the self-proclaimed goons of Bia. A dread of her parents being beaten up always whooshed up in her tender ears and frighten her mauled soul. She was dismayed of the eyes of those goons who always wanted something unspoken from her. She found the eyes of men intense on her. Though she was uncomfortable with those steady gaze, then she was too young to understand what that steady gaze wants from her. When she had come back home from the school, she would watch her face into the mirror to check whether something unwanted is there on her face. However, she would be more befuddled to see her clean and beautiful face. Heckled with the unsolicited gaze, she would fail to recognize how charming and mature she has become.

Vasudha was groped lecherously when she was 8. She was groped many times before by almost every man sometimes on the pretext of playing with her and sometimes lured inside the closed doors and groped, but the groping by her own cousin who was five years older to her was brutal to remember. Does being a woman such a curse upon her? Does being beautiful is such a sin? Her tender brain puzzled with a question that was inappropriate and unreasonable to her delicate age. When being beautiful was an honorable thing for the girls of Thakur's, beauty has become the inflammatory curse for Vasudha.

One night when Vasudha went to defecate in the field, her life changed. A change happened which she was not prepared to face at any stage of her life. Her cousin dragged her by hairs in the dense bushes and raped her. Her protest failed to stop an insatiable hunger of his brother for her flesh. Her beauty fell prey to a shameful and disgusting beast who was her cousin. She felt ruined and dismayed. Something in her was dead that day. Her dignity was torn and flung into pieces, and she was left feeling bereaved and ashamed. Her beauty, which her father was proud of, had given her immeasurable pain. When his brother was gone, she dragged her raped body to a trench that harvests the rainwater. She washed the shit of her cousin and the blood which her torn genitals have bled. She cried and rubbed her face with the mud to get rid of the touch of his bloody lips on her cheeks; she vomits to throw back the saliva her brother has drivel while kissing deep into her tongue. Her genitals burn with the touch of water. Reaching home, Vasudha thought to tell her mother about the shocking cruelty of her cousin. However, she feared the consequence. In her tender age, she thought to give a graceful veil to the outrageous act of his cousin. She protected a beast who ravaged her grace and substance as a woman. This incidence rendered a dread inside her tender heart. The luminous on her face was blackened with some mystic helplessness. She has no friend to confide her torment and demonstrate the wound she has received while freeing herself from the desperate nails and teeth which her cousin had used on her. Her being beautiful has made her black siblings abandon her company. She was beginning to feel insecure between her men. She started to skip school and stopped going to neighboring houses and mostly remain homebound. Her mother failed to notice the abnormal change in her behavior, but her father couldn't. He observed that something was bothering his darling.

One night after dinner, her father came to Vasudha when she was preparing to sleep. He gently caressed her forehead and took her hand in his.

What is bothering you, my darling? What is the matter which keeps you unhappy? He said affectionately.

I am fine. ''I am just a little sick these days,'' She replied in a faltering tone.''

What has happened to you? Let me take you to a dr. He said worriedly.

No, I am fine. This was just stomach pain, and now it is over. Can't you see this? She smiled and sat on the bed to make her father believe in her.

''Now you are like my baby,'' he said elatedly and planted an affectionate kiss on her cheeks.'' Never be sick like that. I want you to be a doctor someday and heal the pain of the people. As he spoke, she nodded, and that gave him the confidence that someday his daughter will make his dream come true. When he was gone to sleep, her heart filled with the tumult of regret for being the reason of worry for her loving father. She decided she will not be crestfallen again; she will forget the incidence, which has given the irreverent pain to her soul.

Charming and beautiful Vasudha was back again in the streets of Bia. She has resumed her school, which was some 1 km away from her house. Ten-year-old Vasudha studied in class IV then.

One day when she was returning home from the school, a man from the Thakur clan abducted her. He took her to a secluded place of the village to rape her. However, this time Vasudha was prepared. She managed to escape his grip and hit the man with a stone. She fled from there and told her father the entire story. Her father got angry and decided to teach the man a lesson. Scared Vasudha wanted him not to go. But her angry father was inconsolable and went to confront the man. Vasudha and her mother also went behind him. In the altercation, the man thrust a knife in his stomach, and he died. Vasudha cried, her mother cried, but no one came to help them.

The man who loves Vasudha most in her life was lying dead in the pool of blood. This was the last time Vasudha wept and shed tears in her life. She remembered her father saying you are my blood, my darling. If you shed a tear, my blood will be shed. Vasudha wanted to report a case against the murderer, but her bereaved mother denied. She said poor or less likely to get justice in Bia. She left the village and went to live with her sister in law.

Vasudha’s aunt has treated her like her daughter. The emptiness in the life of Vasudha was filled with a decent luxury. However, her heart remains empty and charred with the absence of the love of her father. After completing her schooling when she reached to Delhi University, the same lust followed her there. She felt low seeing how women are being objectified in the capital of the country where law and order live strongest. She thought if that is the way women are insecure in Delhi, then her rape in Bia is justified; the murder of her father is also justified. She found no difference in illiterate Bia and educated Delhi. However, this Grownup Vasudha knows how to handle the lecherous goons.

She got admission in St. Stephen College, Delhi. Her ambition in life was bigger than Bia. She was prepared to fight to give women the right to education, the right to equality, the power of being safe and unhurt. St. Stephen taught her the path, and her father showed her the courage to fight for the right of women. She thought she must tell her story to the world to make them believe that women are not born to be raped, to be strangled. They deserve to live their life with dignity and grace.

For Vasudha, the stage was set, she has catapulted the dream of millions of women who face the ogre of letch and insecurity within their houses and in the world.

Harsh has sipped his coffee and was looking at Vasudha, who seems engrossed in the reverie. He knows she is in Bia and should not be disturbed.

The lips of Vasudha spread as she smiled, remembering how her father would fondly say she is as soft as the wool of the sheep, her skin even shinier than the white wool. When her father would cuddle her affectionately, she would say in her innocent tone that he smells like mildewed furniture. Her father would merely smile and say, "oh, I must stay away from my princess and come again to love her washed and scented."

Away from Bia, she still misses the earthy smell of her house; she still misses the mildewed smell her father would emanate. She always longed to be compared with the shining white and soft wool of sheep. The bygone era gave her the paralytic urge to crumble in the arm of Harsh and cry till the last drop of tear is dropped.

Sometimes god fulfills our unspoken wishes immediately. Harsh stood and sat by her side. He took her head in his arm and caressed her face. Vasudha found an electrifying revival in her seeming carcass body, which has brain and mobility but no life. After his father, it was only Harsh whose touch has comforted Vasudha. She clung passionately with him like a grapevine with the solid trunk of a tree. Something long frozen in her was beginning to melt.

She saw a glimpse of her father in Harsh. The soul was the same only the body was different. Unlike her father, Harsh was tall, fair, and of course, handsome.

I want you to stand against the sordid system and fight the bad. Harsh encouraged Vasudha.

She blinked and nodded. She stood separating from him.

Harsh stood too and kissed her on the lips. The beauty has savored the lips of the aristocracy.

They came out from the Starbucks café to join the fervent and hopeful crowd who was waiting to cheer up their star, Vasudha. When Vasudha reached on the stage set in the inner circle garden area of Connaught Place, the crowd began to hoist the placard that read 'let our dignity and grace be unhurt.' The chant of the crowd goes up to sear the heart of the sky.