Sitting in the basement of the apartment Madhvi had once called home, she heard the merging noises of the clouds roaring and her mother in law weeping upstairs. The one who seemed to have found peace in all this commotion was her 10 year old daughter, Ritu who slept as if she had finally found her safety net.

Ritu was expectionally close to her grandmother and naturally preferred sleeping with her. Madhvi had spent many nights hearing the grandmother tell her grand daughter stories of lords and demons, of rights and wrongs. Did she seem to forget the difference when it came to her son, Shwetansh.

Madhvi peeked out of the window. The sky had adorned a shade of grey. The clouds would burst any second now.

She pulled her knees close to her chest and placed her hands on them. The stench of blood hit her nostrils and she looked at her hands that were of the color of a deep shade of red. Regardless, she tried resting her head on them but the smell of this little amount of dried blood seemed to fill the entire basement.

The rain picked up momentum and drowned the sobbing noises from upstairs or maybe her mother in law was done crying?

Madhvi shut her eyes but she heard the voice of her daughter as if not coming from a memory but from the girl beside her.

"There is no way Dadi did not know even if she blames her Diabetes for it. Even if she hadn't seen it she must have heard it when Papa came into the room at night, she must have felt it when he sat on bed."

Madhvi closed her ears. It was as if the memory was hammering on her head. She looked at the weeping sky. Weeping, as if making up for the drought of tears in her eyes. For some reason she couldn't cry.

"It was him Maa! He did this to me. I'm telling the truth. It wasn't my fault. He did it. You trust me, right? Don't you?"

"It still aches mumma!"

Madhvi couldn't drown the voices in her head so she accepted them as if accepting a punishment from the heavens above for failing to protect her daughter.

The rain, wind, thunder and lightning picked up speed. Madhvi stared blankly outside. It wasn't as if she didn't try. She confronted, stopped him, physically resisted and even reported but he channeled his anger on her. The mother in law who was silent now, used to become silent similarly then. And blind. Oblivious.
She touched her lips and flinched in pain. She opened the camera of her phone and saw the bruises, old and new, near her eyes, face and neck. In her image, she could only see a failed mother, a woman who couldn't protect her own flesh and blood. Of all the blows the blindness of her mother in law stung the most.

The stench of blood grew so strong that she decided it was time she should finally wash her hands. She picked Ritu up and placed her in her husband's car's backseat gently.

"If she loved her granddaughter, she wouldn't send anyone after us. She will let us leave quietly." Madhvi thought.

She started stepping towards the basin to clean her hands. The rain had picked more speed and the wind opened losely shut windows of her neighbours. There was a storm outside and somewhere deep within Madhvi but was it raging or did it quench the fire, the range inside her? Is that why she felt so calm?

Her husband's loving face flashed in front of her eyes, then the violence he inflicted and then the events of last night which she remembered vaguely.

A thud. A crash of her head into a table, or a door? She couldn't recall.
The sound of something, someone being dragged across the floor.
The shimmer of a metal.
The feel of a plastic handle in her hand.
The resistance the knife felt as it pierced his back.
And then the opening of flood gates in her heart and the rush of rage in her heart that flew and burnt everything like lava leaving no trace of 'morality' in her.
The brutal, repetitive, stabs and blows she gave to her husband's chest with the knife.
The blood.
So much of it.
Everywhere.
But it didn't stink as much as her hands did right now.

And a scream that seemed to come out of her throat but didn't resemble her voice, the voice of a loving homemaker.

So, she washed her hands in the basin, wiped them and then sat in the driver's seat of the car and drove out of the neighborhood on to the main city roads.

The day that changed her life seemed oddly ordinary on the city roads.