The Bandit Queens

by Parini Shroff

People didn’t play games in these matters because it was fun, she realized, they did it because the alternative was to fling open your arms to rejection and say do with me what you will.

Phoolan Devi had spent her truncated life vacillating between terror and rage, understandably, but Geeta now knew she didn’t want to live that way. “But forgiveness doesn’t mean I’m right back where I started.”

For me, fiction is when research meets compassion; I believe this is often why facts don’t change people’s minds, but stories do. To Arthur, my navigator: Nevada-1-2-1-Papa-Papa