الإنجليزية 1446

The grind of hard labour is inescapable for Shakuntala, a help in a rich household in rural Odisha who supplements her meagre income with a second job as a peon at a private school—all so that she can one day give her infant daughter, Bharati, the gift of education and the promise of a better life. Shakuntala’s life mirrors that of millions of other women living on the fringes of Indian society, battling poverty, unpaid domestic work and sexual abuse. When Bharati turns six, Shakuntala must fight the school headmaster who refuses to admit the girl without the father’s name, throwing up questions of identity and personhood—after all, in a patriarchal society, whom do children belong to when fathers forsake them?