The Shadows We Leave Behind

By Rethika S

I. The Game We Played

I was born in Tambala but raised in Hyrad, a place where the streets never felt like home. Every year, I returned to Tambala for the holidays, a visitor in my own birthplace.

That was when life still had its fleeting joys—playing dark hide and seek with the neighbourhood kids.

Lights off. Heart racing. Shadows swallowing us whole.

There were seven of us—four girls, three boys. We laughed, we ran, we hid in corners where the darkness wrapped around us like a secret.

And in those moments, I trusted the night. I trusted them.

But shadows do not protect.

Not when monsters lurk within them.

II. A Body That Lied

At eighteen, we moved back to Tambala for my college education. It should have been a fresh start. Instead, it became a battleground.

The pain started small, a dull ache in my stomach, a whisper of discomfort. But it grew—twisting, gnawing, stealing my strength. Doctors found nothing.

Yet, the pain persisted.

I missed classes, again and again.

And then, the final verdict—no attendance, no exams.

I was drowning, and no one saw it.

Until the MRI scan.

The doctor held the film against the light, and I saw it in his face before he spoke.

“Brain tumour.”

I should have been afraid. But all I felt was relief.

If the scans had found nothing, they would have called me a liar. At least now, I had proof.

III. The Man Who Owned My Scars

I left college. Two years vanished in a haze of isolation—until I met him.

He was kind, at first. Gentle words, warm touches. Love. Or something that looked like it.

Then, love turned into something else.

Words became knives. Touches became bruises.

He broke me in ways I didn’t know I could be broken.

But one day, I walked away. And even though I left with nothing, I was free.

IV. The Monsters in the Dark

Memories are strange things. They resurface when you least expect them.

Dark hide and seek. The thrill of hiding. The boys.

Their hands. The wrongness.

I was just a child. I didn’t understand then, but I do now.

One of them still lived next door. He had a wife, a family. A normal life. He got away.

For years, I carried that silence.

Until I couldn’t anymore.

V. The Reckoning

I returned to college. My parents weren’t happy. I didn’t care.

And then, one day, I told the truth.

I told the sisters of those boys what had happened.

First, disbelief. Then, horror.

They never looked at their brothers the same way again. They never let their own children near them.

One of their wives—disgusted, furious—left him.

When he had nothing left, he came to me.

Face twisted with rage. Hands curled into fists. He tried to kill me.

But justice has its own way of arriving.

His own parents, unable to bear the weight of his sins, ended his life.

VI. The Irony of Karma

And the man I once loved?

He married a woman far crueller than him—a police officer.

She made him run errands like a servant. He raised his voice once—she slapped him.

He considered divorce. She threatened to throw him in jail for dowry harassment.

He had thought himself a predator.

Now, he was the prey.

VII. The Girl Who Refused to Break

And me?

I lived.

I finished college. Got a job. Lifted my family from poverty. My sister and I built the life we were never given.

I turned my pain into power.

I wrote. Poems, books—stories of survival, of women, of truth.

I taught. Not just girls, but boys too. Because silence is the enemy, and knowledge is the weapon.

And when I finally breathed my last at fifty, I left behind more than a life.

I left behind a lesson.

The shadows had tried to consume me.

But I had become the light.

By Rethika S