I wrote Hindsight because I needed to understand something. Not to resolve it. Not to arrive at an answer I could hand to a reader neatly wrapped. I needed to understand what it costs a woman to build a life on a story she was never given in full.
Sandhya goes back for a book. Last day of college, her friends have walked ahead, and she remembers the copy of Roots left under the tree. She is thinking about Philadelphia. About sweaters. About whether she is brave enough. She is almost smiling.
She is almost smiling.
That is where the book begins. Not with the assault, because the assault is not the point. The point is the almost smile. The point is that she was living inside her own mind, inside her own future, and men ended it in a moment and the world moved on around her as if nothing had happened to anyone who mattered.
I read the CNN investigation this morning. My hands shook.
Men have built a global ecosystem for the assault of unconscious women. They call it a community. They share dosages. They livestream to paying audiences. They offer each other encouragement. One man, describing what he did to his wife while she slept, was talking to an undercover CNN reporter for months. He shared his address. He was unafraid.
Zoe Watts, whose husband raped her for years with their son’s sleeping medication crushed into her bedtime tea, said something I cannot stop thinking about. She said: we worry about who’s coming behind us on the street, but we don’t worry about who we lie next to.
In Hindsight, there is a character named Uma. She is not Sandhya. She does not know what happened to Sandhya. She is a woman in Austin, Texas, reading about Nirbhaya in 2012, standing at a laundry machine with a stain that won’t come out, and experiencing the slow, nauseating arrival of seeing yourself in a news story you thought was about someone else.
She sits down and writes a blog post. She writes: I remember having my buttocks slapped, pinched and my breasts fondled as I stood sandwiched between strangers in a crowded bus. I coped by carrying safety pins, protecting my chest with solid files, and stamping on the feet of those who groped me. My friends and I shared tips on how to keep ourselves safe.
Not once did we question why, she writes. We did it because, you know, boys will be boys.
She ends the post: It could have been you.
I wrote Uma in 2015. She was writing in 2012, about 2012. I am sitting here in 2026 and the post writes itself again. Same post. Different women. Different year. Same world.
Sandhya feared most men. She said so to Aditya, out loud, on a road in a small town. And Aditya said: you have good reason to be scared. And then he did nothing with that information. Not because he was cruel. Because he, too, had accepted the terms. The world is dangerous. Women know this. And we all agree not to make too much of it.
What destroyed Sandhya was not the assault. It was the decision made for her afterward. Surya, who loved her, who was twenty-two and terrified, looked at her broken body and chose a story. Not raped. Just an accident. You fell. He gave her a version of herself that was smaller than what had happened to her. And everyone in that room accepted it. Her parents. The doctors. Vennila, who sat by her bed and said nothing.
The men in those Telegram groups are doing the same thing, at scale, with technology, and with each other’s help. They are deciding what their wives know about their own bodies. They are replacing their wives’ reality with a version they can live with. The woman wakes up tired, with bruises she cannot explain. The man says: you’re imagining it. You’re mental. That didn’t happen.
Nobody asks.
They decide what we can bear. They decide what we need to know. They decide how much truth our bodies are entitled to. And they do it tenderly, some of them. They do it with love, which is the cruelest part. Surya did it with love. The men on those forums do it with the language of marriage, of intimacy, of rights they consider theirs.
Gisèle Pelicot stood in that courtroom and said shame must change sides.
The shame has not changed sides. Not even close.
I wrote Hindsight in 2024. Uma wrote her post in 2015. The words are the same. The anger is the same. The women carrying safety pins and stamping on feet in crowded buses are the same. The girl almost smiling on her way back to get a book is the same.
I thought I was writing fiction. I was writing a document.
Hindsight is available here.
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