Ranga's Daughter

Chapter Thirteen: Beyond the Prison Walls
The days began to blur into a rhythm that Meenal hadn’t known she’d come to cherish mornings waking up to the cold clang of the prison bell, hurriedly wrapping the stale chapati and subzi into a steel dabba for her lunch as usual from the jailer, a quick bath under freezing taps, and the routine frisking before stepping outside the gates into a waiting government van. She was no ordinary student, and yet, once the prison gate shut behind her, Meenal felt something she hadn’t in a long time normal.
College had its own noise, its own smells, its own chaos. And in that chaos, Anjali became her anchor.
Anjali was from a middle-class family, sharp-tongued, fiercely loyal, and just nosy enough to keep Meenal on her toes. From the first day they were grouped together for a Gender and Society project, Anjali had taken an odd liking to Meenal. Maybe it was her quietness. Or the way Meenal refused to gossip about anyone. Or how she always disappeared by 4:30 PM sharp without explanation.
But Meenal hadn’t told her anything not yet.
Their project was titled “Structures of Social Shame in Indian Households”. Ironic, Meenal thought. Every interview they conducted, every article they read felt like it was exposing parts of her that still bled. But Anjali had no clue.
Late one afternoon, while sitting under the neem tree behind the Arts building, Anjali nudged her, “You know, sometimes I feel like you’ve lived ten lives already. You speak like an old soul.”
Meenal smiled faintly. “Maybe I have. Or maybe I just listen more than I speak.”
The semesters rolled on.
In her second semester, she began wearing light lipstick a barely-there pink that Ranga had somehow smuggled into the books gifted by the NGO volunteers who supported her education. In her third, Anjali discovered she could draw. Meenal's delicate pencil sketches of women in saris, temple towns, and quiet verandahs surprised even her professors.
During the fourth semester, Anjali finally confronted her.
“I follwed you yesterday and i saw it, i saw you entered the prison gates.”
Meenal froze.
“I won’t tell anyone,” Anjali whispered. “But I deserve to know. Are you... are you okay?”
Meenal’s eyes welled up. She didn’t speak. She simply nodded. And Anjali did the one thing no one else had—she held her hand, tightly, without pity.
From that day on, the wall cracked.
Anjali became her safe space. She packed an extra tiffin. She never asked about what Meenal’s crime was. She never pushed. She just… stayed.
By the end of her fourth semester, Meenal was standing third in her batch. Her attendance was immaculate. Her teachers often said she brought a kind of maturity to class discussions no textbook could teach.
But no one knew she still washed her clothes by hand under cold taps in the women’s cell, or that she cried herself to sleep some nights when the prison lights flickered and the guards yelled.
Ranga never missed her return. Every evening by 5 PM, he was by the gates waiting silently. The guard would nod, and Meenal would walk past him, exhausted, still wearing the world outside.
He never asked her how the day went. But he always said the same words as she passed him:
“Kanna, I’m proud of you.”
And that was enough.