📍 Mumbai, December 2013 (Robin)
*“For five years, I lived with my mother’s partner. Outside the home, he called himself my father. But inside the home, he forced me to be his wife.
Every morning, I cooked and packed the family’s lunchboxes. Every afternoon, I picked up my sister from school and helped her with homework. And every night, I stared at the clock while he raped me.
By fourteen, I’d had two abortions. By fifteen, I’d dropped out of school. So he began coming home during the day, too.
And then, at sixteen, I made the hardest decision of my life. I left my little sister behind. And I ran. I didn’t know where I would go. I just ran.”*
Thankfully, Taniya ran straight into Kranti.
She had already spent years moving between shelter homes, so when she fled before sunrise, she knew who to call. By sunset, she was sitting in our living room. The next morning, over chai and biscuits, she shared her story.
She told us about what she’d been going through for five years, how something finally snapped and she decided to run, and how she’d left her nine-year-old sister behind with this man. When she pulled out the only thing she owned, a faded photograph of her mother, one of the women in the room froze.
“She isn’t dead,” Zarina said quietly. “She lives in the brothel next to me.”
Zarina, mother of two Kranti girls, made a few phone calls and within minutes, we were headed to the red-light area.
After asking the brothel keeper for permission, we climbed a narrow staircase and found her sitting on a thin mattress in a small, dark room. Taniya had warned me I would recognize her mother by looking at her arms. And I did.
The night before, Taniya had explained what growing up with her mother was like.
As a child, she helped her mom get ready for work every evening. She would carefully, cleanly pin her mother’s sari every night, and she never questioned why the sari was disheveled when she returned. Her mother usually came home drunk, and when she was drunk, she was gentle. Funny. Caring.
They would sit together, watching television, Taniya with a coke and her mother with a beer. Listening to the stories about her “clients” and “colleagues,” Taniya imagined what a fancy, luxurious job her mother must have. It was the only time Taniya felt close to her.
“The only problem was that while she talked, she would take a blade and carve gashes into her arms. Every morning I would wake up to wash our blood soaked night dresses and the bedsheets before I went to school. But I didn’t care, I loved this special world we had together. Because in the morning, that world was shattered.
It was like a scheduled ritual - by 8am my stepfather was beating my mother, by 12pm my mother was beating me, and by 3pm, I was beating my little sister. Then, one day, five years ago, my mother went out to work and never came home. My stepfather told me she had died, that he had cremated her, and I now had to be his wife.”
With Taniya’s words ringing in my head, I sat down to listen to her mother. She had been trafficked at a young age from Kolkata and had been doing sex work for eighteen years. She had three daughters, each from a different customer, and had put them into different shelter homes.
Five years ago, she found Taniya and Mahek, but she never found the middle daughter. Whenever she walked through Kamathipura, she scanned every face, hoping, and dreading, that she might see her missing daughter, now thirteen or fourteen. The same age she herself had been when she was trafficked.
Survival, over time, narrowed her world. Illness and addiction left her dependent on a man who now controlled her life and earnings.
She knew what was happening to Taniya. But she felt powerless to stop it.
When I asked if she wanted to see her daughter, she began crying. “My daughters,” she kept saying, “what will happen to my daughters?”
Reunited after five years, Taniya and her mother held each other and wept for an hour. Her mother signed papers giving Kranti custody of Taniya. Then we were asked to leave…it was late evening, prime business hours.
Taniya saw her mother two more times after that. In December 2013, her mother died of tuberculosis, age thirty-four.
The following week, Taniya and I went to the police station to close the missing-person case her stepfather had filed. (Is this a good time to confess that I spent the entire hour-long train journey planning how I could accidentally push him in front of a speeding bus??)
When we arrived, my heart stopped.
Nine-year-old Mahek was sitting beside him, her small hand tucked into his.
Taniya ran to her sister and spoke to her softly in Bengali. Years later, Mahek told me that Taniya had already begun planning how to get her out. She knew it would take time. Their stepfather did not let Mahek out of his sight for over a year, knowing Taniya would return for her.
Fifteen months later, he spent one night in jail. That was all it took. Mahek finally arrived at Kranti, age ten.
I wish I could end this by saying we filed a case against him, or that he’s serving time in jail. Or maybe even that we managed to get him into therapy. But none of that happened.
The years that followed were messy and painful. Taniya struggled deeply.
Some days, she showed me the marks her stepfather had left behind. That same weekend, I would discover she had reached out to him for money.
At times, the fear took over completely, long hours where she was no longer present and, half-conscious, would bang her head against a wall while we took turns trying to hold her down. The next morning, her stepfather would call, crying, asking to see Mahek “just one last time.”
And sometimes, she told stories about moments of care, the treats he brought home, the clothes he bought for her and Mahek before himself.
I never pushed for a police case, because part of Taniya loved him. Call it grooming, survival, or something else entirely, but she had no framework for understanding what had been done to her. He was the only “parent” she had ever known.
At times, I thought Taniya was just happy to be alive, grateful that her sister was still in school, or relieved that she didn’t have to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Measured against everything else, the years with her stepfather didn’t seem like “that bad” of a price to pay.
And I had no simple moral ground to stand on.
No amount of good stories could undo the harm he had caused her, or the consequences that followed all of us at Kranti. And yet, those stories complicated my certainty. They suggested that he was not only a monster, that he was also, in some small and deeply uncomfortable way, human.
That realization forced questions I didn’t want to answer. If I couldn’t see his humanity, what did that say about mine? Could I oppose violence and brutality in theory, but secretly take pleasure in it when it was directed at him?
If I could extend compassion to girls who had stolen, hurt others, or acted violently because of their pasts, what would it say about me if I refused to see even a fraction of humanity in him? What did it mean to demand accountability, while secretly wishing destruction?
I never found clear answers.
But I did find some grounding in Maya Angelou’s words: Do the best you can until you know better. When you know better, do better.
I don’t believe anyone’s life purpose is to cause harm. It is not my intention or life mission either, but I have certainly hurt people in my life, especially those I love. And while that is not the same harm, it forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth: I have access to therapy, education, and reflection, and I still fail. So what resources did someone like Taniya’s stepfather ever have?
My role was never to be his judge or executioner. My role was to help Taniya and Mahek survive. And then, slowly, learn how to live.
Years later, Taniya said something that still sits uneasily with me. That despite everything, she is grateful — not for what happened, but for the fact that it led her and Mahek to Kranti, to safety, and to lives they were never meant to live.
I don’t share this as a lesson, or a justification. I share it because it belongs to her. It is the meaning she has made, and the meaning is hers alone.
Today, they are alive. They are together. And in a story without clean endings, that is the truth I choose to hold.
Mahek later found her own voice through theatre and writing. She shares parts of that journey, including performing on Broadway and Edinburgh Fringe.
If you want to hear Taniya tell her story in her own words, she shared it in a talk that has reached millions.
I’m so grateful to know Taniya and Mehek from my love for Kranti. Thank you brave women for sharing your stories with us, you are our teachers. 💗🙏🏽