The rain was merciless. Sheets of water came down from the grey sky, hammering rooftops, flooding the cracks in the college courtyard, turning the world into a blurred watercolor. Ira sat alone on an iron bench outside the canteen, her bag slumped beside her, the damp seeping through her clothes. In her hand was a single folded paper. The ink had already begun to bleed where raindrops had touched it, but the digits, those ten little numbers, still held their shape.

Her chest carried the weight of a thousand unsaid words. She unfolded the paper again, though she had memorized the number hours ago. Her biological father’s contact details stared back at her. A man she had never seen, never spoken to, and yet whose blood ran in her veins.

Her father. Or as she had always called him in her head, the sperm donor. The phrase had started as armor; it made the absence easier, less tender, less human. But holding the paper now, she felt the word father stirring in some hidden corner of her heart, unwelcome yet undeniable.

The rain blurred before her eyes, and just like that, the present dissolved. She was nine again, walking into their cramped house with her schoolbag dragging at her shoulder, her eyes swollen from tears. That day, a classmate had asked the question she could not answer:

Where is your father?

She had asked her mother the same that night, timidly, desperately, “Maa… why don’t I have a father?”

Sunaina had gone still. The air thickened with something Ira could not name then. Finally, her mother pulled her close, her face shadowed with a pain Ira had never seen before.

“Because,” Sunaina said, her voice trembling with the effort of honesty, “the man who gave you life never wanted to be a father. He never wanted to be my husband. He was… a mistake I was forced into.”Her words cracked, but she went on, perhaps because she knew Ira deserved the truth. That night, Sunaina told her everything.

It began in 1996.

Sunaina was not the girl society celebrated. She was dusky-skinned, curvy in the wrong ways, quiet where others were coquettish. Relatives whispered behind her back—she’s difficult to marry off. Her parents grew restless, afraid of being branded failures.

Then came Madhav.

He was from Kanpur, a man with a reputation steeped in liquor and smoke. A drunk, a chain-smoker, someone whose very name made people lower their voices. No one respectable wanted him for their daughter. So when he barely glanced at Sunaina and muttered a “yes” to marriage, her family pretended relief.

It was a quick engagement, a rushed wedding. No romance, no laughter, only duty sealed in ritual. Within weeks, Sunaina moved to Kanpur, then Nashik, her heart heavy but willing to try. On their very first night together, she conceived Ira. What should have been joy instead lit a fuse.

Madhav did not want the child.

Within days, Sunaina uncovered the uglier truth. Madhav’s heart belonged elsewhere—to his cousin sister. A girl with luminous skin, delicate wrists, everything Sunaina had been told she was not. Ira’s existence was an intrusion in their secret affair.

And so began the cruelty.

Madhav locked Sunaina in small rooms, sometimes leaving her with only water. He forced her to sleep on a narrow, shaky cot, hoping she would fall and miscarry. He denied her food, severed her ties with her family, and made her isolation complete.

But even that was not enough.By the sixth month, Madhav and his mother hatched a darker plan. They told Sunaina to pack her bags, she was going home to visit her parents.

She wanted so badly to believe it.

The night before her departure, her younger sister called. Sunaina, unable to hold back, shared the news, “I’m coming home tomorrow. Isn’t it wonderful?”

That single call saved her life.

When she reached her parents’ house and began unpacking, she found a folded sheet tucked among her belongings. A note. A suicide note, planted to frame her death as her own doing. The realization struck like lightning. They had not sent her home to rest; they had sent her home to vanish.

She wept into her mother’s lap that night, broken yet breathing. And she never went back. The rest unfolded slowly, inevitably.

Sunaina raised Ira under her parents’ roof. Three years later, in a silent courtroom, she finalized the divorce. She asked for nothing—no money, no property—only one thing, that Madhav be stripped of all rights to the daughter he never wanted.

And she won.

The memory snapped shut as Ira blinked against the rain. She pressed the paper in her hand, her nails digging into the soft, wet folds. Somewhere inside her, a war raged. She hated him. She hated what he had done to her mother, what he had almost done to her before she was even born. And yet, he was her blood.

The digits swam before her eyes.

Was he still the same cruel drunkard her mother had described? Or had the years changed him?

Would he even want to hear her voice? Would she?Ira pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging herself against the storm. The world had never felt lonelier.

The paper crumpled in her fist, but she could not let it go. Not yet.

She could almost see herself at a payphone, pressing each number with shaking hands, waiting for a voice she had never known but had always been told to despise. But then her heart clenched. She thought of her mother, Sunaina, fighting through nights of cruelty, choosing survival over despair, choosing Ira over everything else. She remembered the way her mother had once whispered,

“You’re mine, only mine.”

No, Ira wasn’t ready.

With a long breath, she folded the paper neatly, pressing the creases down with trembling hands, and slid it deep inside her notebook. There, it would rest, silent and waiting, just like the questions she still carried.

Outside, the rain fell harder, swallowing the courtyard in silver sheets. Ira rose from the bench, her shoes splashing through shallow puddles, her resolve firm in its hesitation.

For now, the number would remain nothing more than ink on a page. One day, maybe, she would be ready to dial it. But not today. Not yet. And as the storm washed the world clean, the digits clung to her memory, indelible as the past itself.