Some sins can never be undone. They resist the futility of cleansing rituals. Not even the toxic waters of the Ganga can enable their evaporation. They stick to the body of the sinner, infecting the soul, like maggots consuming it from within, until the non-material sinful flesh begins to fester and turn fowl, and the stench accumulates, assuming the virality of a disease.

Complicity extends beyond the boundaries of the active perpetrator(s), because the act of violence was a symptom of internalised impunity by those who inherited the doctrine of cruelty by virtue of their upper-caste births; and those who validate this naturalised impunity by excusing it, by saying nothing.