“From what I have heard, my mother was lynched by a mob. She was branded a ‘Boksi’. They say I was just 12 days old. My mother’s absence did not affect me because I never knew her presence. Sometime later father brought home another wife and they started their own family. We were abandoned. My poor sister did everything to make sure that I survived hunger, thirst and diseases. She was also the one who pleaded to a family asking for the son’s hand in marriage for me. When I got married, things did not improve. My husband was also from a poor family of Dalits. So work automatically became limited because of this discrimination. When I had my daughter, we both were worried. We wanted to give her a comfortable life, the one that we could never live. So with my daughter in my back, I started working too. We needed the money. It was hard manual labour. But we both feel we have done the best we could. She is a grown woman now and she is married. And she lives with us with her husband. Because I could not see my mother and always wondered what it would have been like to have one, I made sure I was available for my daughter. We are like friends and unlike me, she knows a mother’s presence. She knows when her husband shouts at her or her child tires her, she can come to me and share her sorrows.”