A Burning
Dr. Ananya Mahapatra
This story is inspired by the intersectionality of gender-based violence, systemic oppression, and the silencing of vulnerable voices that often lie in the background of our work around grief and loss with survivors of trauma. Through the protagonist's perspective, I have tried to explore the psychological dimensions of complicity and moral awakening amid structured inequity and systems of oppression, often those that are meant to protect us. The story aimed to symbolize how violence against women is often obscured as well as the societal devaluation of certain lives. Rage embodies the human spirit's resistance against acceptance of brutality as inevitable. Through this narrative and its symbolism, I wanted to capture both the crushing weight of systemic injustice and the potential for awakening consciousness.
O
n the ash-covered steps of the ghat, the nights are brighter than dawn. This is where the living arrive with their dead, from all over the
city. The steps of the ghat cobble down to the banks of the river. The river washes the sins of the dead and returns their souls, clean, for the afterlife. Bodies cremated at this ghat give up their souls to her without a murmur. They do not suffer.
​
Constable Ram Bharosey stood beside the flaming pyre of his mother. He was at the ghat with his family. There were many others like him who milled around the bodies of the departed. The night sky loomed over them like a shadow and the burning fires cast a quivering sheen on their faces. It was during the nighttime that the ghat was most alive, booming with fire, heat, and dust. The air around them was too thick for tears, the orange glow too bright for lamentation. Wood smoke billowed in great waves. The crackling fire shrouded all sounds of mourning.
​
His mother had been ailing for over a year. His wife had made a great show of weeping an unending stream of tears for her departed mother-in-law, even though there was no love lost between them. Ram Bharosey remained unmoved. He had been here before for his father. He was the eldest son in the family, and this onerous task was his alone—to shepherd his mother's soul to the heavens. He murmured a prayer for his mother’s salvation, but his mind was elsewhere.
​
Tomorrow morning, he had to report for duty. The time had been fixed, even though he was ordered not to breathe a word about it to anyone. Tomorrow night, there would be another burning.
​​​
*
​
Constable Ram Bharosey watched the burning in silence. The girl was not part of an eternal conflagration. She burned slowly, alone, not on the holy riverbank. They were in a clearing at the borderland between the city and forest—a dead girl and a bunch of policemen assigned to cremate her. At the witching hour. The forest was unfamiliar territory for him, even though it was as old as the river. It belonged to those who lived on its fringes. The girl, who was from one of these villages, was now lying stiff and cold while the flames from the pyre lunged at her body. This burning wasn't preceded by ritual fanfare. No mystic chants were uttered by a congregation of priests, and it made Ram Bharosey restless.
​
What would become of her soul? He thought to himself.
The girl’s death was unfortunate, as was the ruckus that upended the calm of their city thereafter. Ram Bharosey was a god-fearing man. He believed that the dead must be disposed of with reverence. The body will burn, decay and turn into dust but the soul, it goes back to where we came from. This cremation by policemen and not priests was a sacrilege to him. He wanted no part in it, but when his supervisor barked on the phone to return to duty, he couldn’t find the courage to refuse.
A row of men in khaki uniforms had cordoned off the funeral bed. Constable Ram Bharosey was part of this human fence. A sudden breeze—brittle and cold—leached into their bones, and they shivered despite the flames. They were only doing their duty—what was asked of them by their superiors. God knows they wanted to get this over with. Nobody was happy about this midnight fix. But what choice did they have? The girl was dead anyway. It wouldn't hurt anyone if this unfortunate matter died out as well.
​
The men were silent, but a wailing noise pierced the air. It was the girl’s aunt. Ram Bharosey stared at the naked brown back of the girl's father as the man kneeled on the ground. If it weren't for the staccato sobbing sound, it would appear as if he were praying. Ceaselessly, he begged to call off the cremation.
​
They made one hell of a racket, thought Ram Bharosey, but he had not understood the urgency of his senior either or the way he quelled the requests of the father and the aunt.
​
Why could they not wait till the morning? It was not as if the rabble would rouse the dead.
He wondered whether they would have taken her to the ghat, on the same stone steps where he had cremated his mother the previous night. But the people of the forest lived by different rules. They had no use of incense lamps and incantations by the riverbank. The forest was their mother, not the river.
​
Ram Bharosey kept a watch over them with the other men, but he felt something stir inside him. It was nothing close to grief. Grief belonged to his dead mother. This was something strange and unfamiliar. Like the silt that sat at the bottom of the riverbed, it pricked at his conscience without shape or warning. It wasn’t loud enough to be sorrow, nor sharp enough to be anger. Just a slow, encumbering heaviness that spread through his limbs and weighed him down.
​
The officer hushed the father brusquely. The cremation will happen here and now. See, you have signed this paper. It means we are doing this according to your will. Why are you causing trouble now?
​
A yellow-white paper shone in the harsh light of their vehicles. If the girl's father could read, he would find his name scribbled in its bottom right corner. But the dead girl's father had never held a pen between his fingers. Neither could he read a word of what was written on the paper thrust in his face. He only clutched his head as the letters danced in front of his eyes like a string of mocking figures.
​
*
​
Ram Bharosey was the first to find her on one of his evenings of patrol duty. When he found her in a thicket of prickly bushes, her bruised mouth whimpering, her thin body trembling, his first reaction was to look away. But he placed her in his rusty police vehicle and took her to the nearest government hospital, not knowing that life would pulse out of her body despite his efforts.
​
Then the darkness came to light—this horror that befell a girl who foraged in the forest every day, like many others. The village worshipped the forest. Some men had entered its groves and taken not just a girl's body but the sacred heart of the forest as well. She was their mother. It was bound to have consequences.
But the men who plundered in the forest were powerful men.
​
When the village swarmed with government babus, reporters, and groups of sharply dressed sloganeers, it was Constable Ram Bharosey who was fortuitously entrusted with the duty of taking the girl to the big government hospital in the city. And it was he again who brought her back in the hearse that came all the way from the hospital morgue.
​
Her eyes were closed; white cotton plugs occluded her nostrils. A quiver of purple veins fanned out from her neck. As she was drawn out of the shining white vehicle, Ram Bharosey had mused at the coincidence.
​
He wondered if it was an omen—if this girl had somehow chosen him to transport her from the crime scene to the police station, from the small-town hospital to the big-city hospital, from life to death. And now he was summoned again for this act of final transportation—from death to nothingness.
​
Life is a quivering line with peaks and troughs. Death is horizontal, sharp, and unambiguous. But something had changed in the crossing over, from life to death. When, on his superior’s orders, he placed the dead girl’s body on a bed of neatly stacked firewood, he staggered under its weight. The body that had felt weightless only two weeks ago—stiffened by death's rigour—felt ten times heavier now. While he gasped to catch his breath, like an empty cocoon, her body lay there, silently mocking the battalion of armed men.
​​​
*
​
Ram Bharosey had closely watched the sequence of events that followed the incident of that fateful afternoon. He was the first man on the crime scene, but that fact was fast forgotten. Nobody wished to speak to a mere constable. The sloganeers marched to the local MLA’s office. Women in spectacles and starched sarees gathered outside his office holding placards. The tamasha was presented on their local news channels. In the evenings, Ram Bharosey found his wife and his sisters glued to the television set, watching the news instead of TV shows about bickering women. He noticed that even they never asked him anything about what had happened. No matter how many hours they spent discussing the incident, they made no mention of the fact that he, as part of his duty, was stationed at the epicentre of their burning curiosity.
​
On the contrary, when some of the women in their neighbourhood asked his wife whether her husband could furnish some details that the news channels had not told them already, she would shake her head and brush away their queries. His wife, who weaved glorious tales of her husband's policing feats, now shook her head dismissively. Nahi, nahi ji, this is a hi-fi case. Top secret. My husband is only a constable. He doesn't know anything.
​
Ram Bharosey was bewildered by his wife's sudden bout of modesty on his behalf. He felt half-inclined to protest but his wife took no notice of his privileged knowledge of the case; she did not mention it in their morning conversations. When he came back from work, she handed him his evening cup of tea without asking: How was work today?
​
Only on the day when a reporter had found his way to their door did she say to him: Be careful what you speak in front of others.
About what? He had asked, frowning.
​
About that girl. And the forest people. And the men.
​
Ram Bharosey knew what he saw. Seventeen years on the force had taught him to tell the difference between those who held the stick and those who got beaten by it. The men who went into the forest lived in the city. They were the kind of men who lived in grand houses. They moved in big cars and trampled upon the ones who lived in the forest. Even though the forest and its bounties had existed long before the river descended from the mountains and the city found its place along its course.
​
You’re saying I should keep quiet? That I should pretend nothing happened?
​
His wife pottered in the kitchen and said nothing.
​
She knew that, no matter how great the uproar over the incident, it would soon blow over. The girl who was raped belonged to a subterranean world—one you hardly noticed unless it spilled into yours with blood and noise. Whatever happened was ghastly, but not out of order. She found wisdom in siding with those above her than those below. She was worried about her husband's outspoken nature and his dismissal of the age-old order. The uniform bestowed an unspoken supremacy to the wearer, but some things were beyond his baton-brandishing swagger.
​
His wife knew better than to upset the state of affairs of their world. Like the girl’s father, she too was an uneducated woman. She had read no books, and she couldn’t write her name. She would fail to recognise a letter of the alphabet even if it lumbered across the road like a big black buffalo. But she knew the shape of the words that were tattooed on her wrist. The names of her father and his father, and his father before that. It reminded her of her place in the world. It was all the education that mattered. Ram Bharosey’s wife went about the business of living, in deference to the rule she knew by heart: justice, as they knew it, boiled down to a matter of transaction amongst a few. It could not trickle down to reach those who lived at the bottom.
​​
*
​
The flames had surrounded her from all sides now. The night was alive with the crackle of dried wood. Smoke curled its slender fingers up into the darkness. The ash mingled with the dust in the air and was carried by the wind in all directions.
​
The poker-faced men watched the burning in silence. The job was almost done, and they could finally go home. Soon all that would remain would be ash. The villagers would go back to their homes. The news people would go back to their city offices. The protesters would break their processions and take their slogans elsewhere. But something in Ram Bharosey kept shifting, made him restless, like a dog turning circles. The air grazed his eyes, burned his nostrils, and sandpapered his throat. Ram Bharosey puckered his eyebrows and cleared his throat; he rubbed his eyes and coughed hoarsely, but the smoke sucked his breath out, and he gasped for air. His superior clicked his tongue in annoyance to say something sharp. But someone reminded him that the man had lost his mother. He motioned another constable to toss a bottle of water at him. Ram Bharosey missed his grip on the bottle, and it rolled away from him in the direction of the pyre. A shower of cinders ambushed him, and the heat staggered his gait as he fumbled for the bottle like a blind man.
​
Be careful, Ram Bharosey! His superior barked at him. You want to get burned as well, along with this girl?
​
Poor man, he came straight from his mother’s funeral.
​
Another man grabbed him by the shoulder and directed him towards the police van. His vision, still clouded by the dust and light, took a while to adjust to the nighttime dimness inside the van. From the van, he could hear the men talking and laughing. A few of them had lit their beedi. It was close to dawn, and they were getting impatient to go home.
​
Khadey khade bhook lag gayi.
​
Your wife didn't cook dinner for you, or what?
Arey, someone get chai samosas.
​
How much longer will this take?
​
At this rate, we will have to report straight to the police chowki from here.
​
A feeble little girl, and it took a whole night to get her off our backs.
Ram Bharosey turned away from the bantering men and looked at the girl’s mother sitting on her haunches, staring at the flames. She made no sign of having heard the jeering men and continued to gaze on. The girl’s father made no sound either, but his jowls trembled. He had the look of a man who already knew that his appeal for justice for his daughter's death would be quelled by a verdict suggesting acceptance of how things were, how things have always been, and how they would remain in the future.
Ram Bharosey wondered if someday, someone would decide to upset that order. Would men, after years of trampling over, raise their necks from their underground refuge? Could a man emboldened by the light of a burning pyre relinquish their inheritance of injustice?
​
The pyre burned on, like a beacon. The body of a dead girl, a farmhand's daughter. A girl who went into the forest one morning and came back in pieces.
​
Only Constable Ram Bharosey, from his vantage point inside the police van, saw the fire break out in the eyes of the dead girl's father. Only he saw the flash of rage that propelled him, made the man leap into the dark like a wounded beast and attack the sniggering men surrounding his daughter's burning body. The grieving father kicked and screamed a thousand curses while the policemen struggled to contain him. Every blow of the lathi on his shuddering frame ignited a new spurt of fury in his eyes.
​
In a moment between the blows of the lathi, the man looked up straight into Ram Bharosey’s eyes. The rage had turned to ash. But Ram Bharosey felt as if he had been split open. As if the man could see through his uniform, through the buttons and belt and badge, and find the man within who had stood still the whole night doing nothing. Saying nothing. Only watching.
​
The eyes that blazed with anger had now turned mud-coloured, like the skin of the river. And like the surface of the river, they reflected to him the cowardice of men who must do away with a girl's body in the dead of night to protect their reigning order.
​
The other constables were closing in, sticks raised, ready to put the man down like a dog.
​
But before he knew it, his feet had moved. Ram Bharosey was off the van and between them, one hand pushing back a lathi mid-air, the other bracing the old man’s trembling shoulder.
Bas karo, he said. His voice cracked a little, but he stood his ground.
​
They looked at him, confused. His superior stared at him, stunned. Ram Bharosey never spoke more than he had to. He didn’t know what he was doing. Maybe tomorrow he'd be pulled up, maybe suspended. But the lathis had dropped. And the beedi burned to ash between silent fingers.
​
The night was about to end. The first light of morning bled slowly into the sky. Ram Bharosey did not speak up again. The fire had begun to die out. He stood beside the girl’s father and faced the pyre in silence as smoke curled upward, carrying the last traces of the girl into the pale dawn.
Dr. Ananya Mahapatra
Dr. Ananya Mahapatra is a psychiatrist and writer whose work explores the intersection of mental health, literature, and storytelling. Alongside her clinical practice, she facilitates therapeutic reading and expressive writing workshops that use the power of words as tools for emotional healing.
Her short stories and creative non-fiction have appeared in Kitaab International, Hektoen International, and USAWA Literary Magazine. Her fiction has also been featured in acclaimed anthologies, including The Best Asian Short Stories 2018 (Kitaab International, Singapore) and The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology (2022). She has been shortlisted twice for the Deodar Prize in 2023 and 2024.
Her personal experiences during the pandemic led her to train in bibliotherapy and establish Heal With Words a platform dedicated to reclaiming storytelling as a quiet act of healing. Through this work, she seeks to harness the therapeutic potential of literature to restore voice, selfhood, and connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
Writer, Psychiatrist
Ink & Quill
Collective
Like what you see ?
To join just our book club
Book Club Membership
Want to start your writing journey with us?
IQC Membership
© The Ink & Quill Collective 2025. All rights reserved.