Chapter 1: Monsoon Betrayal

When I was seven months pregnant, my cover as an undercover cop was blown—just as the monsoon thunder rattled the window grills and the smell of wet earth mixed with the stink of gutter water outside.

That sticky Mumbai monsoon clung to my skin, the air swollen with humidity and the distant honking of BEST buses rising and falling like a fever dream. I was cornered like a rat. The young don who once cherished me smashed my teeth with the butt of his country-made revolver, kicked in my ribs—hard enough that I felt the bones shift—and locked me away in a pitch-dark storeroom that smelled of wet cement, rust, and the stale tang of fear.

I miscarried in that suffocating darkness. No shlokas, no comforting arms—just muffled cries swallowed by four concrete walls. Somewhere beyond the door, I could hear rainwater dripping steadily, and the faint scratch of a rat moving in the shadows, each sound sharpening the loneliness. The don took away my dead child, leaving me emptier than I’d ever felt, and I never saw him again.

Five years later, a little girl crawled into my cell and said to me:

"Mummy, Papa is drunk. He’s crying—crying and saying he misses you."