There was a little solace that evening amidst the tears she was shedding for the cats.

Her mother felt guilt to the core, “I have separated a mother from the children. It would come upon me.”

The owner was not staying within the campus.

There was another family on the first floor. A shop stood on the front of the house as we occupied the rear end. The next door neighbour were a newly wed couple and they had a child, a very bright and cute child.

We would often hear him talk in the night. He would get up in the middle of the night and start talking, all child talks.

One day as we were awake, he woke up in the middle of the night and asked his mother,

“How many are coming?” Their bedroom was close to their bedroom, so close that the snores of the man disturbed us whenever we were awake at night.

The next day they were supposed to be having some guests. She had a good time hearing his words and looking at him over the window whenever we were sad.

She tried again to forget it all, what happened in the home, to remember her purpose in that city.

She used to return at eleven in the night and sometimes she would be alone at home. The houses were closely built and the attraction of this place was a small mound on which stood a temple close by.

The temple had four doors and was built in Dravidian architecture, indeed beautiful a place to be in, the wind could blow you away anytime, if you were not cautious, it would seem to be so.

In the month of May, her sister expressed a desire to come to the city to complete her education, a masters degree.

Her mother and she searched colleges and organisations for a feasible price. The donations were often huge for several organisations. She could not afford so much. Her salary wasn’t enough to support all of them more than their daily maintenance.

It is in this home, that she was attacked by the men, while she headed to the temple on the mound. No one could confirm the attack, but for the first time, I was scared for her. Such an attack, on a woman without physical desires seemed improbable in a developing nation like India. The so called Kudos population was trying every bit to run away from the evils of yesteryears. The burden on the present generation was immense, it had little resources left, it was thickly populated, it had to know to maintain the lands.

New Kumar was tapped on the phone again by us. He was innocent fortunately and I was happy for the first time that Shrum had made a rightful assessment towards a human. Whatever she said about him, came true as we knew him better passively. The guy had although no knowledge that he could have been on the focal point with all the lights turned on him. We understood his pain, and yet Shrum was angry on him for his words and for making her a focus. It was tough handling so much.

Meanwhile, I had failed my first attempt and so had Lizzy. We both had to give up a few things. Lizzy had to give up boys, drinking and smoking to realign to a routine. She had only enough to support her for another year. I was working but considering the involvement of our offices which secretly worked on retaining the workforce by being the Satan Satin in their workers life, collecting information and using the data against the people when required was becoming tough to handle. When I failed, people asked me about my failure. Even though I had not told them.

They made fun of me, gave me a few flyers which indicated some organisations where we could train ourselves for these courses. I checked a few prices, given my confidence was lowly, a lakh, a few thousand bucks. It did not seem worth, given those organisations had no background support to help me stand up.