"Will you sleep with him?" Ohas, Naina's best friend said, his voice low and strange.

"Sleep?" Naina laughed, a mellifluous laugh that reverberated long after she had stopped laughing. "With that old pervert, it'll get over in 30 seconds. I'll do a lot more. I told you before---" she paused, her voice dropping to a serious tone. "I'll do anything and everything and anyone for money."

Money. Naina's eyes flamed and flickered like a light at the sight of crisp notes being flicked by her father's fat thumb. Her mother loomed behind him in the shadows, anxiously chewing her gold chain. The one chain that she owned and wore, passed on to her by her mother.

The eyes of the two women met, one's fierce and glowing and the other's meek and dim. Her mother couldn't hold her gaze for a second longer and she broke it, her eyes focusing on her husband and pretending her daughter never existed. Not out of hate, her mother was too saintly to hate anyone, but out of fear. Fear from what Naina had done years ago still haunted the alleyways and dingy corners of Gandhi Nagar.

Naina felt the dull ache seep into her chest like the gentle pitter-patter of rain on a cloudy day, but she wasn't a Devdas, she was the living incarnation of a Goddess. She plucked away aches and pains and let strength grow so large inside her that not a single weed of weakness could sprout. With fists clenched and bottom lip caught in between her teeth, she watched her father pocket the money. The money that was given to her by her future husband to buy presents.

"Isn't that mine?" she whispered and the minute her father raised his head to look at her, her mother burst out.

"Dinner's ready! Naina come here and help me set the table," her shrill voice implored her and Naina went, not out of obedience, but pity. With a ladle, she scooped watery chole bhatture, a few chanas floating in a salty brown sea. Her father rationed monthly groceries that would last only a week to her mother and her mother poured buckets of water into the curries to compensate. "Serve for your papa, dear. He works for us so hard so we can eat such delicious food every day."

Naina snorted and again before her father raised his head, her mother began, "You drank cold water yesterday that's why you caught a cold. But you shouldn't sneeze in that unwomanly manner. Be careful next time, okay dear?"

She wanted to ask how she could sneeze in a 'womanly' manner, but as long as her sneeze didn't bring earthquakes on earth as most uncles' did, she could try to survive in this sexist household. This was one of the long lists of reasons why she didn't care about marrying the rich oldie, an escape from this prison.

Even prisons would have equal rights, better food and friendly inmates to live with. This one-bedroom kitchen apartment on the outskirts of Mumbai where the walls in the corridor were splattered with paan stains and windows bathed in pigeon shit had invisible prison bars all around, the most horrifying part was that one couldn't see them. One could feel them and Naina would try to reach, again and again, to break free, only to catch nothingness.

Her poor excuse of a father got up from the floor, his checkered shirt tucked in his trousers like a schoolboy. He sat at the table, surveyed the food and once satisfied, dug in. He had the air of a high-ranking inspector when he was merely a clerk at a construction company where he slaved for twenty-five years (Naina was to marry the owner of the company as a "gift" for his services).

He gave away half his paycheck to his relatives who ate meals fit for a Diwali lunch every day while Naina and her mother were forever fasting. If it weren't for how poor he was, she would have murdered him. But she was saving those special skills for a special someone.

"In two days she'll be married," her mother said and the words hung in the air, but her father didn't catch it, noisily slurping the curry like it was soup. "How fast she has grown, our little daughter."

"How fast you made me grow," thought the twenty-one-year-old Naina who wasn't allowed to study further than 12th grade and instead had to take tuitions of snotty children in the neighbourhood.

"In two days she won't belong to us anymore," her mother went on with the sentimentalism while her father ignored her, not that he wasn't happy about his daughter's wedding, he was ecstatic. There would be one mouth less to feed, few chanas to save and the relief of giving away a daughter who was ostracised in the neighbourhood. Yet, his face never betrayed any signs of happiness for forever he wore the stern look of a school principal.

Still, his daughter blossomed like a wildflower among the thorns that he implanted, her light brown face and shiny black eyes were a mirror to her heart. Fearless, she spoke what she wanted, laughed when she wanted and vowed to never cry. Her tears always vaporised into hot steam that would gush out of her like a pressure cooker when she turned angry. And she could get reaaaaally angry.

"Naina?" A small voice called out and when all their gazes landed on the door, the figure shrank like a shame plant. It was Naina's neighbour, a girl who moved in some months back and didn't know about her past. How she and Ohas had killed someone years ago and gossiping whispers and menacing looks still trailed wherever they went.

"Oh, come in, come in." Her mother rushed ahead, opening the door wide open. Nobody stepped into their house and even the girl stepped in as if the house with chipped walls and dim corners was made out of glass. She avoided looking at the father who sulked by the table, disturbed by what he saw as an invasion.

Before her mother could drag another victim in her small talk, Naina led the frightened girl to the only other room in her house and both sat on the cot.

"You can start now," Naina said, stretching her arms carelessly towards her.

The girl hesitated, then took out the henna cone from her purse and held it like a pencil. "What kind of design do you want?"

"Whatever." To Naina's response, the girl looked up with eyes brimming with pity that threatened to drown Naina's pride. "The guy I'm marrying is super-rich by the way. He's the owner of that famous construction company, you wouldn't know." The girl smiled sadly as if she had been told the most tragic tale of all time and that erected the tallest, defensive walls of the chamber of Naina's heart. Her voice faltered, but she persisted, "You haven't seen how big his house is, he has everything you can ever imagine. His bathroom is as big as our entire house."

She was bluffing as she had never seen that man or his house or his company, but none of that was important as long as he had money. But to put forth this point across to that girl who sank further and further into pity made a frustrated Naina clench her jaw till her teeth ached.

The girl mutely drew patterns of flowers out of henna, innocent, little flowers that grew from stems twisting and tangling around her arms. "The girl was naive," Naina thought to herself, insisting the girl draw thorns that were as sharp as knives. She got philosophical in her thoughts, despite thinking of herself as undereducated, "That girl didn't understand dreams of people, dreams of people that could dissipate into the air like flecks of dust and forgotten if it wasn't for money. This world and none of this would exist without money. Money is both a killer and a saviour. Money is power."

Naina was truly, madly, deeply in love with power.

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