Twenty years after I had left the town of C, I found myself looking at it again on a map. I had no idea until then that the town was so very small, and it remained so, even after I had magnified it on Google Maps. A sliver of land caught between two rivers, and located two hours away from the sea, I had known the town in a very different manner while I had lived there. To me, it consisted of the roads I took every morning and afternoon in a rickshaw, travelling to school and back, as it did for my other schoolmates who attended the only girls’ school in the town offering English-medium instruction.

For a few minutes of my journey, I would pass government bungalows with their gravel driveways, impressive porticos, and beautiful gardens. But, otherwise, it was a route lined with terror, marked by spots that were particularly tormenting. These were areas claimed by the “eve-teasing” gangs of my early adolescence—rickshaw pullers, college students, idling men, and schoolboys bunking school—all out looking for some “fun.”