The seeds for Sohini Chattopadhyay’s debut book, The Day I Became A Runner (HarperCollins India), were planted in the aftermath of the gangrape and death of the 23-year-old paramedical student in Delhi, in December 2012. Protests had followed. “And while there was a lot of condemnation of the viciousness of the attack,” Chattopadhyay says over a video call from Kolkata, “Within that, there were those three inevitable questions—what was she doing, where was she doing and what was she wearing. It was almost like a chorus, ‘doing what, going where, wearing what’.” Then came the “staggering remark” by Abhijit Mukherjee, the son of then President of India Pranab Mukherjee and a Congress MP from Jangipur in West Bengal, who claimed that “dented and painted women were part of these protests”.

Chattopadhyay, a National Award-winning film critic, had by then been a journalist for eight years, and was on a year’s break to pursue a Master’s degree in sociology in Edinburgh. She remembers feeling angry about everything that was happening around her. “My response was purely physical. I felt like I had to put myself out there on the streets… I had to claim public space, inhabit it, and legitimately.” The one way she could do that, she remembers thinking to herself, was through running.