A half-naked woman ran across the street, beating her breasts as if they were drums and screeching, "He died! He died!"

"I heard she went mad after her baby boy died," said the woman recovering from an eating disorder to the female guard in the mental asylum.

"She killed her own child," the guard said, unfazed like a stone in gloomy rain. "Her madness is a ruse."

"What? Really? No way." The woman scoffed, looking at the half-naked woman's innocent and pitiful face resembling a starving child's. "No mother can kill her own baby. Especially a woman like her."

"Everybody believes the same, but you haven't seen her in the night. When I go to check the rooms, you'll see her in the corner of her room, combing her disheveled hair, applying makeup, looking no less than Madhuri Dixit. She will then calmly listen to old Bollywood songs till sunrise. On one such night, she invited me and told her story."

The woman looked at her, aghast. "That she killed her own child?"

"And turned it into a curry and fed her husband and in-laws," She said plainly as if supplying boring bureaucratic information. "They don't know that, of course. To them, the child passed away from an illness and was buried in the backyard."

"She's a total mad woman! A psycho! She should rot in jail!"

"Her madness is only a ruse. It helped her get out of that house, to enjoy this freedom here." She pointed at her nakedness, at how freely she sprinted and kicked a can across the ground like a schoolboy playing football.

"God, I feel sick. The little food I ate is now stuck in my throat," the woman said, clenching her stomach. "That conwoman. It always looked like she had been through a lot. More than any of us here."

"Which is why she killed her child. Look at her." The guard tipped her chin towards the woman's half-naked body, the cesarean scars deep across the stomach, the dark patches on her breasts, and the stretch marks running like rivers which made her young body look old. "Those patches are burns. If you look at her back, there are cuts from being whipped all over. When she was brought here, she was sick and deathly. Starved for 2 weeks, nobody thought she would survive."

"What do you mean?"

"A classic case of dowry. She was abused by her in-laws and husband. She had two daughters before this child, both aborted and fed to her like meat."

The woman stooped and heaved. "God, I feel so sick."

"You'll get used to that here," the guard said, her eyes glancing over the other mad women in the compound. "None of them have tried to cross the fence yet. They enjoy the most freedom confined in this madhouse, away from their monstrous families and husbands. This is their home now. The day one of them tries to escape is the day I'll believe this world is finally fit for women."

"I just need to lie down," the woman said as she stumbled inside the madhouse, paying no heed to the guard's words. "I feel a little faint."