The mornings start earlier in villages, and the nights come sooner. Kerosene lanterns still hang outside front doors, and patterns are drawn outside doorways with rice flour and flower petals. The children wear their oversized uniforms when they head off to school. The uniforms are made of a coarse material that will grow with them, and they will grow into the too-large clothing eventually. Vimala ties up her daughter’s hair into ribboned braids while her daughter eats breakfast. The breakfast is humble and practical, rice from the night before mixed with buttermilk, a green chili and some mango pickle added in for flavor.

“Be careful walking to school,” Vimala says, a mantra that is common in their mornings. Her daughter Chinni has to walk half an hour to get to school, and while she is always accompanied by her friends, Vimala still worries. The road is more of a dirt path, and she knows how easy it is to be tempted by something off the path. People with safety and security could dream of paths less taken and find whimsy in twisted, poorly maintained routes. For people like Vimala and her family, the well-worn paths were the easiest and the shortest paths to the destination.

“Yes, Amma,” her daughter says, and Vimala wishes that she could offer her daughter more than just words of advice and warning. Her husband owns a bicycle, but he is off to work at the break of dawn. In the evenings, he leaves the fields for the local bar, spending half his salary on cheap liquor and fried snacks. Vimala does not know what he finds in the sordid, dirty place. The few times she has visited to bring back her inebriated husband, she found a place filled with grimy men, cheap string lights covering a thatched shed, some delusion of being something more than the place actually was. It was a place of vice, a place where dreams died, a place where men withered and finally let go of their hopes of leaving the village behind for something grander and greater.

Chinni is well-behaved, and she comes home with report cards with high numbers and comments from her teachers that Vimala reads with pride. But she is alone in her pride. Already, she is hearing from her in-laws about the eventual day when Chinni will be taken out of school. The only thing keeping Chinni in school is the free lunch given by the government and the free childcare provided by the teachers. But the colleges that come after school will ask for tuition, and there is no college within a traveling distance from their home. Chinni will have to be kept in a hostel, and Vimala knows that in their family, such things are unheard of.

In their village, daughters are treated like yearly crops. They are raised to harvest and then sold. Sons are trees, watered and cared of, expected to provide shade. Daughters are never treated as one’s own. Vimala sees that thought in both men and women. She remembers the sting of her own childhood, of never belonging. Her mother’s home became her brother’s, and this new home she has with her husband is her husband’s. But it seems she is alone in remembering. Everyone else around her seems to understand and accept that it is the way the world works, and it is the way the world must continue to work. They want her daughter to repeat Vimala’s life. When Chinni is a girl still too young, she will be placed like a doll in front of some strange family and their son. The family will appraise her value and demand a dowry, as if they are doing Vimala an enormous favor by taking her daughter away from her.

Vimala wants to say she will never partake in the ritual, but her life is evidence that she has done everything just as other people have. She will live the same life as the people around her, and perhaps the only inheritance she will leave her daughter is the same fate. A transactional marriage with a man that others deem appropriate, a lifetime of domestic chores and simple living, a life devoid of dreams. Vimala wishes that her daughter could live any life other than her own. Anything would be better than a life so barren of love, so bereft of hope, and so destined for an inconsequential life and death.

But she cannot offer anything more to Chinni. Instead all she can offer her are the smallest of pleasures. Vimala takes out two candies from the knot she’s made at the end of her saree. They are hard mango candies, sweet and sour, wrapped in thin paper. She presses them into Chinni’s hand.

“Come home right after school,” she says. “Don’t hang around the school field.”

Winter is coming, and the days are growing shorter. The path from the school to their home is too narrow for cars, but people travel on bicycles and motorbikes, and she knows the recklessness of men when they are given anything that can go fast. “Chinni” means small, and her daughter has always kept to her namesake. She is a bird-like thing, thin and gangly, easy to miss.

“And walk on the side of the road,” Vimala warns her.

“What if I don’t?” Chinni asks, a joking tone in her voice.

“Then the Boochodu will get you!” Vimala yells, tickling her daughter’s sides. It is a frequent joke in their house. A threat of a mystical bogeyman who will take her daughter away. Vimala had received the same threats from her mother when she was a child, although the tone had been different. Vimala had thought the Boochodu to be a real person, some shadowy figure in the night who came and abducted unruly children. For her daughter, the Boochodu was a character restricted to bedtime stories. Chinni knew he wasn’t real nor a real threat.

After Chinni leaves, Vimala sets out to complete the day’s work. She is considered a housewife, but the house is much to maintain. She hears of women in the cities who have maids or machines to do the dishes and the laundry, but in their little village, all she has is her two hands. They are rough and calloused now, and she resents the day Chinni’s will be the same. She feeds the chickens in the yard and cooks lunch for her and husband. With the steel lunch box tied up in cloth, she walks to the field to join her husband in working the land.

It is difficult labor, under a sun that does not relent, but it is the only work available in their land. She sets out to leave earlier in the evening than her husband. Someone has to be home when Chinni returns. A train passes through the edge of the farm land, and she imagines the journey of the train, all the people traveling inside of it. The train makes the same journey every few days, but it has seen more of the world than Vimala has. She has never been to a city, and the little television in their home is a relic of the past, with a screen that curves outward and where everything is too colorful, too artificial.

In the evenings, after Chinni comes home from school and before her husband comes back, she watches a soap opera for a half an hour while Chinni does her homework. It is the one little pleasure in her otherwise mundane life. The woman in the show is belittled and humiliated, overworked, and Vimala sees parts of herself in the woman. Granted, the woman lives in a palatial house, wears jewelry even to sleep, but at the core, their problems are the same. A bad husband, a sad marriage, and a life that seems devoid of hope. But in those soap operas, hope does sprout eventually. All the problems are resolved by magic. The woman’s husband changes into a romantic hero, and the heroine herself discovers she is special and talented. After thousands of episodes and countless misunderstandings, there is a happy ending.

But Chinni is not home yet, and the soap opera episode ends on another cliffhanger. Vimala goes out of their little house to see if she can see a little figure walking on the road in the dusk. There is no one, and the light is rapidly diminishing. Soon, she will be able to see nothing. She lights the kerosene lamp and heads out beyond their compound fence.

It is only a half-an-hour walk, a route Chinni has taken for over a year. Sometimes she does come home late, disregarding Vimala’s warnings to play with her friends in the dusty school field. From her home, Vimala ventures out on the path to school, but she sees no one. She goes to the homes of Chinni’s classmates, but they tell she left the school on time while they stayed behind to play. She comes home again, hoping that she might find her daughter in the house, but it is empty.

At the bar, her husband is too drunk to be of any help, and so she walks the path between their house and the school. She checks behind the school building, where there are always abandoned beedi butts and broken bottles of liquor. She checks the fields and the bus stand and finds nothing.

She continues her search, poring through the streets of the village, knocking on every door that she can think of. Chinni is light enough that most adults can carry her with one arm. There are so many places where a little girl can be hidden. So many ways to hurt a child so fragile.

Finally, she makes her way to the bar, where her husband is sitting with friends. His face is slack with drink, his words slurred. It takes him a minute to register what she is saying, and when it does, he is not as worried as her, not nearly as concerned. The men start from the bar, each armed with heavy steel flashlights and lanterns, searching through the fields and the nearby forest, calling out her name.

The other women come to Vimala and escort her back home. Her home is relegated to waiting, to wailing in silence while the sky gradually lightens into morning. The day passes and another, and a week goes by. Her house remains empty. The police are informed, but there is little they can do. The truth is that village lives do not hold much value, and Vimala herself knows that it could be a freak accident. There are old wells in the village that have never been filled up or closed. As more of the forest is being converted to farmland, kraits and cobras are beginning to crawl through the rice paddies and the village alleyways.

After a week, there is an unsaid acceptance of Chinni not returning. Her husband stops his search and buries himself in half-hearted grief and alcohol. The police ignore her gaze when she goes to the police station for updates. Vimala is not angry with them. There is nothing to search for. The old films she sees on television have crimes with clues, with pieces of fabric left for detectives to find, with motives and money to be gained, but in her case there is nothing.

Vimala continues her search, scouring the fields and shining lights into open borewells, venturing further into the surrounding forest and calling out Chinni’s name and getting no response. She stops going to the fields and stops cooking their humble meals. Their house gathers dust and she gains the feral appearance of those on the fringes of society.

She goes out earlier and earlier on endless searches in the same area, seeing if there is some new hiding spot in her old village she will discover. Hope is long gone, but she wants an end. She wants an answer. One morning she leaves for the rice paddies far beyond their village. She has scoured the land multiple times before, but soon it will be winter and the mornings will be too cold for her to walk for long periods.

She spots small footprints in soft soil, and she thinks of all the times Chinni has walked and played in the village. Her one pair of shoes were things to be saved and sparingly used, polished every morning before school and kept neatly outside the door of their home.

Vimala follows the footprints. It cannot be Chinni, but it is perhaps some other child lost in the fields. It is early enough that the snakes will still be out, and their village rests at the foothills of mountains known for leopards.

She follows the footprints and goes into the forest, to where the trees are so densely packed together she has to squeeze between them to pass. The footprints are now dirty marks of mud, and she gets the feeling the child was running. Vimala notices the increase in the length of the gait, but it takes her minutes before she sees how the footprints are different now. They are an adult’s footprints now, and the forest is no longer filled with the morning birdcalls or even the sounds of her own footsteps.

The footprints disappear, and when Vimala stops, she sees she is lost. It is a simple thing most days to get back to the village. It is only a matter of heading downhill, where the forest meets the edge of the fields. Now the land is flat where it should not be, and the trees are strange and gray.

Vimala hears footsteps, slow and deliberate. When she turns, there is no one and nothing.

“Who’s there?” she asks, hoping it is not a leopard or a bear.

Instead, it is a young woman dressed in rags. She looks like Vimala, yet is taller and wilder. Her hair has ribbons streaked through it, and her feet are not barefoot but bound with cloth. It is Chinni, but not so small anymore. Instead, she is a changed thing. She is a wild and free thing, unhindered by responsibilities and untethered from the rules of society.

“Amma,” Chinni says, and her face is filled with joy but devoid of childhood. She has seen things, this young woman, and survived things. She stands straight in a way Vimala can never stand. In her life, she was expected to bow to the world, to the people around her, to her husband. But the young woman in front of her does not slouch to hide her body or wear a veil to cover her hair.

“Chinni?” Vimala asks.

It is a mirage or a delusion. Vimala has finally succumbed to the madness, and she welcomes it. It is a pitiable thing to be half-mad. To embrace the madness fully is to no longer see the concerned and critical looks of the people around her. It is a madness in which she can be with some form of her daughter.

Vimala embraces her daughter. She ignores the changes in the temperature, the way the sky is red, and the way her daughter’s form flows and changes shape like water within her arms. The way something is not quite right, because something wrong is better than nothing at all. Because the monster who steals disobedient children away may be spiriting them to a place where they belong. And for all of her effort and all the ways she shrank and bent herself to fit into the roles she was given, she never felt she belonged.

In the village, a little girl returns to an empty home. She keeps her shoes to the side of the door, and calls for her mother.