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The rape and murder of a student on a Delhi bus in 2017 made headlines and sparked protests about violence against women. But there are other hazards for women in India, and particularly for single women - who are often unable to live a normal life. Wearing a long, bright yellow frock and two well-oiled plaits, she was silently doing her chores in a village home when I first saw her. For a moment I took Khuddo to be a teenage domestic help, a small girl cooking, cleaning and mopping, just like millions of them who work in homes in India's teeming cities and villages. But when she turned and flashed a shy smile, I saw a face of an older woman. And then I discovered, to a creeping sense of shame, that she was not a domestic help either. Khuddo lived with a vast, extended family in a crowded home with her widowed mother, aunts, uncles and their families. She had four siblings who lived and worked all over India. Her father had passed away a long time ago. Khuddo was about 50, and single. Even as the family grew, she had faded into the background, immersing herself in the drudgery of dull and backbreaking chores. She contributed nothing to the thrumming noise of the family. They called her their "tragic case". "Sometimes, it feels," a family member told me, "she does not exist at all." Why do you dress like a girl, I asked her. Her mother answered instead. "She is unmarried, so she should not look or dress up like a woman." | 
