Nina leaned against the wall as she spoke. It had been a week since she began talking to her captor.

“Kamala was an old woman who took us in. She barely had space for herself in her hut, but she let the three of us stay with her. It was cramped, and it was loud when it rained, but it was still a roof over our heads.”

Nina was narrating the part of how an old woman had come to their rescue when they wandered into her temporary asbestos hut during a rain.

“But the city was changing pretty fast. Vast and empty lands were being replaced by tall buildings. Each time we were thrown out of our slum, we had to rebuild our hut somewhere else. Most of the time, the places had mold on the walls and pests like cockroaches and rats. We had even gotten used to the smells due to lack of decent toilets.” One of the reasons why Nina suffered through a borderline OCD to remain clean was whenever she saw filth, it took her back to those days.

“Whenever we lay down to sleep, Devi and I took turns to make up stories for Uma. We’d tell her about the huge house we’d build for the three of us with dozens of rooms and bathrooms. We’d talk about what each of us would have in our room as decor.”

Nina closed her eyes. She did set up two of the rooms in the house where she and Suraj lived. Those rooms had the same decor that her sisters would have liked.

Nina took a deep breath to forge on. She knew she couldn’t stop her narration.

Although, she did wonder what was going through her captor’s mind as she narrated her story. Was her past able to get to him? Make him view her as someone other than a rich man’s wife? Or did he think she was making up a story to draw sympathy?

She had noticed that whenever she began talking, there was complete silence from the room next to her. Before that, she would at least hear the creak of the bed as her captor tossed about restlessly.

Sometimes, she paused in the middle of her narration, trying to listen for some sign to indicate he had fallen asleep. But there was complete silence and Nina knew he was awake, listening to her every word.

Nina was reminded of the story of an Arabian queen who saved herself from her blood-thirsty brutal husband by narrating a thousand tales—one for each night.

Nina might not have a thousand tales to tell, but she had one tale. It was her tale. She had seen and experienced enough in her life to be able to speak through the entire length of her captivity.

What if you remain his captive forever? A part of her mind asked.

Something said he wouldn’t keep her for long. She hadn’t been lying to him when she said she saw grief in his eyes. He was a man reacting to pain and was lashing out at the target nearest to him. If she could convince him to see that she wasn’t the evil he thought her to be, then she would be able to rewrite her and Suraj’s fate.

She suspected her captor was a good judge of character, and he would definitely know when someone was lying, so she made sure she spoke the complete truth, and that her words came from within her heart.

“A year later, we mourned the passing of Kamala. She was easily over ninety, but it came as a shock to us.

“Four weeks after Kamala’s passing, the school holidays began…” Nina felt her voice catch. She hated this part.

“Devi, Uma and I loved school,” she continued. “For most kids, school was boring and everyone looked forward to the holidays. But for the three of us, school meant survival. It cultivated our hungry minds along with providing us with refuge during the day. And more importantly, the meal they served in the school during lunch was our only source of sustenance. And when the holidays began, it meant… starvation.”

Nina realized right then that the problem with speaking from the heart, was that a person would be forced to re-live those memories once again. As she continued to narrate the events that took place many years ago, she re-lived the desperation and hopelessness of that time.

She should probably be embarrassed to be baring her heart to a total stranger. Some of the things she was telling him, she hadn’t even told Suraj, because she hated re-living the past. But now, when she narrated her life, even though it hurt a lot, it also felt cathartic.

“Ten days into the holidays, Devi and I gave Uma every scrap of food we could beg, steal or find, but that didn’t stop our little sister’s body from slowly shutting down and eventually giving up.” It was brutal to watch their sister fading away right before their eyes and not able to do anything.

“When Uma died, it was a shock for Devi and me. Our entire existence was defined by how we took care of our little sister. With her gone, we felt incomplete and aimless.” She had told her captor already about how Devi and she had been taking care of their sister until then.

“I stayed in the hot, sweltering asbestos house with the rotting corpse of my younger sister while Devi tried to get help. It took more than a day for someone to come.” Nina had several recurring dreams of waking up in that sweltering tin house with the dead body of her sister.

“Over the years, Devi and I have always felt guilty, thinking that had one of us tolerated the advances from the dirty old man with whom our mother left us with, then maybe, just maybe, Uma might have been alive…”

She took a deep breath. “It’s been close to twenty years, but I still mourn my little sister.”