Trishul

By Arnav Timsina

It was a huge win for Sati at the All India Academia and Technology Convention, held in the capital city’s most prestigious Taj Palace. Tonight was the night she had been dreaming of since she was barely seven years old: standing and presenting her ideas in front of the giants of the scientific community. Among them were Ratan Kumar Sinha from BARC, V. Narayan from ISRO, and D. Sivanand Pai from the National Climate Centre, alongside luminaries from India’s most esteemed institutes. For Sati Choudhary, it was a milestone in her pursuit of a dream: clean and free energy for India.

She had dressed with the quiet simplicity that had always defined her, an ivory salwar kameez, a small bindi on her forehead, and strokes of kajal that deepened her already expressive eyes. Her hair, tied back loosely, left a few strands falling carelessly near her cheek, lending her a look at once unassuming and striking.

More than anyone, she idolized Nikola Tesla, the man who once envisioned a world of free energy. Sati understood the weight of her research. Anyone walking in Tesla’s footsteps was bound to move mountains, and she knew it. But she also knew times had changed. Circumstances had changed. Now was the moment for the world to step toward a clean future, before it was too late.

Her presentation was sharp, confident, and meticulously prepared: the blueprint of a contained nuclear fusion reactor.

Sati was ready for raised eyebrows, skeptical murmurs, and snide remarks about the financial strain another fusion project could put on the nation. She knew it always came down to the world’s most common religion: money. But her research had teeth. She demonstrated how her project would cost barely a third of India’s SST-1 (Steady State Superconducting Tokamak), a mildly successful but notoriously expensive research facility.

When this 25-year-old IIT engineer laid out revenue projections and showed how the project could even help reduce India’s crushing national debt, delivered with a calm bravado that made her age irrelevant, every murmur in the hall transformed into awe.

This could change not just our nation, but the direction of the world itself, towards something close to Utopia.

The room fell silent as Sati reached the climax of her presentation. She ended with a statement destined to dominate the next day’s headlines:

“Let the fossils of yesterday be preserved in the museums of the world, lit by the future that India shall share. Let India be known, henceforth, as the nation that gifted the world: The Sun Maker.”

Applause thundered. As the crowd rose to its feet, Sati stood at the center, her words still echoing.

Hours later, exhausted but glowing, she rode past India Gate in a cab, replaying the dreamlike evening on her phone. Congratulatory messages flooded in. Her colleagues had warned her that reporters would be waiting to ambush her at the airport, eager for a glimpse of the “girl from West Bengal with a bright head on her shoulders.” The phrase “Beauty with brains” was already trending. She hated it. To her, it mocked the endless nights of calculations, the obsessive revisions, and the grind she had endured. But she knew it was beyond her control now.

For better or worse, Sati Choudhary had become a celebrity.

_________

Sati had dozed off. Exhaustion from the rush of the last two days had finally caught up with her. The air-conditioning inside the cab, steady at a comfortable 22 degrees Celsius, became a catalyst for her drowsiness. Yet even in her sleep, she could feel the inertia of the vehicle’s movement. It had a constant rhythm. Even the AC’s buzzing whirl felt like a lullaby to her tired body. She had no idea when she passed out, but her instincts kept her half-conscious, just enough to notice when the white noise suddenly came to a halt. The silence, the lack of movement, crept up to her.

“Did I reach the airport?” she thought as she opened her eyes.

All she could see was darkness all around, the street ahead lit only by the cab’s headlights. Her heart started racing as soon as she realised the driver’s seat was vacant. Sati was fully awake now. She reached for her sling bag, hoping to get her phone, but the seat beside her, where it had been, was empty. Panic-stricken, she tried opening the door to her left, but everything that followed confirmed her worst fears.

The horror began as she was shoved back inside by a strong pair of arms, foiling her attempt to escape. Terrified, she turned toward the other side, only to see the door jerk open and a man, twice her size, climbing in, his hand lunging for her mouth. She tried to scream, but it was muffled by the huge, rough palm that clamped down and pinned one of her hands. Sati struggled to tear his grip away, realising in a heartbeat that she was in grave danger. To make matters worse, another man with a muffler wrapped around his face slid in beside the driver’s seat, while the driver himself rushed back and restarted the vehicle.

Sati couldn’t believe this was happening. She flung her free hand desperately, hoping to land a blow on the man gagging her, but to her dismay she was forced back against the seat. As if that wasn’t enough, the sight beside her told her the pain in her mouth was only the beginning. The man at the left door unbuckled his belt, loosened his pants, and clambered inside, seizing her free hand. Irked by her resistance, he shut the door, nodded to the man on her right, and let him pin both her arms. Before Sati could use her mouth to scream, the intruder loomed over her and drove his fist into her gut with crushing force.

The scream that tore out of her had no sound. She felt the air rip from her lungs, leaving her gasping, her muscles refusing to obey as she tried to breathe. It was a kind of pain she had never known. All she could register was the ignition roaring, and the laughter of her abusers as they closed in on her body like hungry rats tearing through a sack of grain.

As the cab sped through dark, unfamiliar lanes, Sati felt herself living the lives of all the women she had read about and seen on the news, victims of the same monstrosity in this city. Her mind, desperate to make sense of it, whispered a question: Why this city? What is it about this place and the crimes against women?

And instantly, she was a child again, listening to her mother’s voice retelling the tale of Draupadi’s cheer haran. The day she was disrobed because her husband had lost a game of dice. The day she lost the dignity that was hers by right. The day she lost the home she had been promised, the Indraprasth she had ruled as queen. Now Delhi. Sati wondered, in the midst of her own violation, if the curse had lingered here ever since. Back then, Krishna had come to Draupadi’s rescue. Sati was not a believer, but in her pitiful condition she wondered if any divine intervention was due.

She wished she could go numb. But the weight of those vicious men, the vulgar music blaring from the Bluetooth speaker, and the tearing of her salwar kameez, the one her mother had given her as good luck for her presentation, kept her fully aware. Pain flooded her body in ways she hadn’t known were possible.

There was nothing she could do as all four of them took turns, driven by lust. All she prayed was that they would let her go once it was over. She realised she hadn’t seen their faces, not even the driver, masked from the start. Considering the city’s air quality, she hadn’t thought twice about it when she first stepped into the cab. Now, she resolved to keep her eyes closed, hoping not to provoke them, hoping it would be enough.

Sati wanted to live. Her project was waiting. She needed to begin work as soon as possible. Her country, her planet, desperately needed clean, free energy. For that, she told herself, she must endure. She must survive.

_________

It was late evening. The circle of Connaught Place glowed faintly under its pale white lamps, pigeons rose and scattered in bursts like torn paper in the wind. Sati sat on a stone bench near the central park, her hair uncombed, a thin shawl wrapped carelessly around her shoulders, the kajal smudged into dark half-moons under her eyes, the bindi long gone. Once, those details had lent her the quiet brilliance of a scholar; now they clung to her face like the aftertaste of something broken. People brushed past her without looking, the office clerks rushing for buses, the couples clicking selfies, the men hawking cheap sunglasses. The musicians expressed the yearning to rebel with their strings and percussion. The city’s pulse ran steady, oblivious. She sat still, too still, as if her body had forgotten the act of belonging.

As a young mother walked with her excited child, for whom all the happiness of the world came from the pink fluff of cotton candy, Sati’s tongue remembered another taste. Grotesque, sharp, earthy – the bitter water her mother had pressed upon her when she returned to her humble town of Shantiniketan, West Bengal, right after she survived the brutality in Delhi, about 8 months ago.

Upon her arrival, Sati’s mother had simply opened the door and stepped aside. No questions, no explanations. The small two-room house smelled of boiled rice and damp wood. Her embrace was brittle, as if her bones carried the weight of years unspoken. They hardly spoke in the first weeks. Sometimes her mother would pour her tea and place her hand over Sati’s trembling fingers. That was all.

But silence has its own way of becoming loud.

The walls of the old kitchen became her first shelter. Night after night, her mother pressed steaming brass tumblers into her hands, the water thick with crushed leaves and roots whose names Sati never asked. Sometimes it scalded her tongue, sometimes it settled heavy in her stomach – always grotesque, always alien. And yet, behind her mother’s averted gaze, fixed on the kerosene flame, Sati understood. This was not nourishment; this was protection, perhaps salvation.

As the steam rose between them, bitter against her mouth, she learned that survival was often a quiet conspiracy – one woman shielding another from the cruelties of men and the indifference of the world.

Little did Sati know that the indifference of the world is yet to be witnessed at its entirety.

The courts had been merciless in their delays, their hollow performances of dignity. She sat there, her testimony reduced to stammers under cross-examination, while the men who had hurt her smirked behind their lawyers.

‘Why did she ride in a cab with the driver wearing a mask? It wasn’t 2020, wasn’t Covid. Maybe she thought something would happen, not this much, of course, but maybe she thought it would help set a narrative around her science project, maybe fetch her some sympathy funds.’

The lawyer’s voice carried the smug cunning of a man who knew he wasn’t after truth, only a story paid for.

The judge, however, considering the severity of the case, delivered the sentence: life imprisonment for all four men. For a moment, Sati dared to breathe, thinking the law had finally sided with her. But within a month, the sentences were overturned, political expediency had intervened. Elections were near, and the men were released on bail, their freedom trumping justice.

Public outrage erupted. Newspapers carried headlines of fury; social media roared. Petitions flooded the courts. The judiciary, bound by procedure, agreed to hear the matter, but the hearings were repeatedly postponed. Dates were pushed, adjournments granted, and months stretched into an endless horizon. Justice, it seemed, would take its own sweet time. And all the while, Sati had to live with the knowledge that at every moment, her abusers walked free with fines, community service, and their heads held high. Justice was a word for speeches, not for people like her.

Her work too unraveled. Emails unanswered. Conference calls cut short. “We cannot afford reputational risk, you must understand,” said one of the professors who once called her “the brightest of our generation.” Her name disappeared from proposals, from journals, from whispers of future projects.

The Sun Maker: her life’s work, her fevered attempt to give humanity a piece of eternity became a cautionary footnote. Colleagues who once admired her now avoided her shadow.

In less than a year, she became a ghost.

One night, exhausted by everything around her, she tried to end it. Rope. Chair. The cheap ceiling fan groaning under her weight. The universe, shrinking to a dark pinhole.

Her ever so vigilant mother found her at the nick of time. Cut her down with shaking hands, screaming her name like it was both a curse and a prayer. The night became a battlefield of tears and half-sentences, mother and daughter breathing in gasps like fugitives of the same war.

It was then her mother said it, almost in passing, almost like a slip:

“This isn’t new, Sati. It happened to me. It happened to my friends. It will happen again. Candles burn, tears dry… and then everyone forgets.” Sati thought of the streets outside, where people stood with candles in protest, voices trembling with outrage. Even as the world rallied, her mother’s words lingered reminding her that public attention was fleeting, and that true reckoning rarely came so easily. Sati stared at her, hollowed out. Her mother’s eyes burned, wet but steady.

“Maybe candles are not the only thing that needs burning.”

Something shifted in her after that.

She stopped waiting. Stopped trying to be welcomed back into the fold. No longer begged for acknowledgement or redemption. She sat at her desk, her notebooks spread before her, and reopened the old designs.

The Sun Maker was no longer a gift, no longer a hymn to creation. It became something else. A blessing in disguise for all the daughters of this cursed Indraprasth.

Her mother did not stop her. She did not encourage her either. She moved quietly about the house, cooking, folding clothes, watering the basil plant in the window. But she never asked again what Sati was working on. Almost as if she had accepted that this was the only language left to them.

And now, Connaught Place.

She sat on the bench as the crowd thickened. Students laughing, content creators filming, street performers entertaining, artists sketching, photographers clicking. Vendors shout, selling snacks and trinkets, fighting for their livelihood, lovers stealing a cigarette behind the pillars. Life was moving as it always did, an endless hive of trivial urgencies.

Sati watched them with the calm of someone who had already stepped outside of their world. She was no longer a part of it.

But she was not done with it either.

She knows what she is about to do will capture the world’s gaze within seconds. Without hesitation, she pulls out a strange device from her sling bag. A switch, and a button covered by a glass lid. She places it on the ground beside her. 

Then, she begins to strip, starting with her shawl, revealing the scars of her trauma in the places her kurta had left uncovered.

At first, people thought it was a one-act play. Laughter, curiosity, murmurs. Cameras swung toward her as the content creators scrambled, capturing every movement.

Her voice, calm and deliberate, rose over the murmurs:

“You called it justice. I sat there in that wooden box while the taste of my mother’s medicine still burned in my mouth, bitter leaves she made me chew so I wouldn’t end up like her, with another child. That taste never left me. I carried it even as I watched your lawyers laugh, your men walk free.”

She peeled away her kurta completely, standing in her undergarments. Gasps erupted. Shutters clicked. Notifications pinged. The eyes of the digital world flashed open. The crowd was no longer curious. They were arrested by disbelief, staring at the shadows etched across her torso, proof of the battle her body had survived that night.

“You call it law. I remember the court’s fans clicking, the smell of sweat, the way their eyes stripped me naked again and again. I remember the weight of silence when the gavel fell.”

A police van screeched to a halt. A lady constable rushed forward, officers fanning out behind her. Sati, undeterred, bent and snatched the device from the ground. The officers froze, recognizing it for what it must be: a detonator.

She continued, her voice steady, slicing through the chaos:

“And you… all of you… you watched. You lit candles, you cried, then you changed the channel. You went back to cotton candy and movie tickets while my mouth was still full of bitterness. Do you see me? Do you even want to? This city has heard Draupadi’s cry before. You heard mine too. You just didn’t want to hold it long enough.”

She let her remaining fabrics loose, and now she was utterly exposed, exactly as God had made her. The gasps became screams. Reporters arrived, broadcasting live. Some spectators fell to their knees, unable to comprehend the audacity, the vulnerability, the fury in equal measure.

“So here I am. No demands. No ultimatums. Just a mirror. Look at me, and know this is what your justice tastes like.”

Sati raised the device above her head. Policemen froze, guns aimed, the chief’s command lost in the tension. She let her hand hover. The crowd stilled. She was calm. She was deliberate. And in that moment, time itself seemed to hold its breath.

She knew the moment had come. She prepared to press the button.

Shots are fired. A bullet tears into her body. But she does not falter. As she falls, almost in slow motion, her hand slams the button. 

A few meters away, something heavy drops from the rooftop of a building. The crowd freezes, paralyzed. Some try to run, but it’s too late. 

It all happened in the space of a heartbeat. 

A white-hot flash ripped through Connaught Place, brighter than a thousand suns, searing the eyes and skin of anyone in its path. In an instant, buildings crumbled, streets buckled, and glass exploded outward like lethal shards of sunlight. The roar that followed was deafening, a monstrous wave of sound that shook the city to its foundations.

Fire leapt into the sky in tongues of orange and black, consuming everything within meters. Cars melted, trees ignited, and the air itself seemed to scream as shockwaves tore through the crowd, tossing bodies, bending steel, and reducing once-solid structures to rubble. Screams were cut off mid-word, swallowed by the roar, the heat, the unrelenting fury of energy unleashed.

The plaza, the hub of life, laughter, and ambition, was gone in seconds. Dust and ash rose in a choking cloud, blotting out the sky, casting the city into unnatural twilight. Buildings that had stood for decades vanished, their foundations fractured. Roads split, concrete sprayed into the air, and a wave of heat rolled outward, flattening homes, offices, and parks alike.

Within moments, the capital city of India, was reduced to decades of ruin in an instant. Survivors, if any, would not know which way to run, their senses overwhelmed by heat, light, and the collapse of everything familiar.

And through the chaos, if one could even see her in the blinding brilliance, Sati stood or had once stood at the epicenter. A single blackened silhouetted figure whose act of vengeance had reshaped history in a heartbeat. 

The trishul was unleashed, decimating the manifested demons, for good.

_________

EPILOGUE

Sati opened her eyes. She was standing, unscathed and unburnt. Her body bore no scars, no wounds, and not even the weight of memory.

She was dressed in the salwar kameez her mother had once gifted her, a reminder of a life that now felt distant, almost unreal.

A mild breeze brushed her hair aside, nudging her to turn towards the towering white mountain, whose majestic stance gave away its identity. The light reflected from its face was blinding but it didn’t burn Sati’s eyes. At its base, a stream of river kept flowing as it cut through the snowy terrain.

“Snow?!”, she wondered. If this was such a cold place, why was she not shivering?

Right then, like an answer to her thoughts, she felt a hand around her shoulder - warm, soft, affectionate. It was adorned with vermillion markings and gleaming ornaments. She had a hunch about whose hand it was. But when she turned she came face to face with… herself.

It seemed to her as if she was staring at a mirror, except that her other self, wore a red sari, draped around her in the ways of a warrior. Her dense, lustrous hair - open, flowing, and embellished with a golden tiara, out of which hung, a golden metallic thread wound around her ears, and hooked loosely in the end, by the nose ring.

Out of all the differences, Sati saw on her doppelganger, none of them were as arresting to look at as the third eye that glowed, vertically on her forehead. Any suspicion about her identity she had before looking at her, vanished within a fraction of a second. Sati realised, as she stood in front of the snow clad mountain, that now she was home. She was with Her.

The End

By Arnav Timsina