They didn't tie her hands. They didn't shut her mouth. They didn't beat her.
But somehow, they erased her anyway.
Nitya sat by the window, not because she enjoyed the view - there was none - but because it was the only place the light touched her face. The only place that reminded her the world still existed, beyond the iron- grilled gate and tightly shut doors.
She could hear the life outside - the honk of scooters, the sound of schoolgirls laughing, someone calling for chai.
But her life ? It was frozen.
Not in death.
In control.
Her family walked past her like she wasn't even there. Like she was a burden they were quietly ashamed of.
'' She's just going through a phase '', Ritik had told them.
'' Girls her age.... they get wild. '' They believed everything he said.
Now, no one asked Nitya if she was okay. They asked Ritik if she was behvaing.
She wasn't their daughter anymore. She was there mistake.
Every hour of every day she lived with that one question screaming inside her : '' What did I do wrong ? ''
She thought of the moment it all shifted - the first time Ritik's tone turned cold, the day he locked her door for the first time '' just to keep her safe. ''
He hadn't always hated her so loudly. There was a time he ignored her quietly. And she preferred that silence to this cruelty.
Now, even his footsteps in the hallway made her stomach clench.
One evening, she heard him laughing in the other room with her father - causal, cheerful, like nothing was wrong and she realised something terrifying :
He had already won.
Not by killing her but by making her invisible in the place she called home , the place where no one can even see her sad now the are ignoring her.
That night, she didn't cry.
She sat at her desk and opened an old notebook, tore out the first page, and wrote :
" I am not crazy. I am not wrong. I am not his.
And one day, they'll all see who the real poison was. "
She folded the paper and slid it under her pillow. Not for anyone else.
For herself.
A tiny, defiant seed of who she used to be, who she would become again.
They thought they had broken her.
They had only made her still.
And still water cuts deeper than waves.