Lipstick Under My Burkha, and a Secret That Belongs to Whoever Finds It

At a swimming pool in Bhopal, a woman of fifty-five has just been saved from drowning. The cause was a prank, and the instructor who rescued her is a young man called Jaspal. When she comes back to sign up for his lessons she has to give her name, and she gives it: Usha Parmar. Not Buaji. Buaji means aunt, and it is what the lanes around the old building she owns call her: the devout elder who arranges other people’s marriages. Usha Parmar is a woman who wants to learn to swim. It may be a long time since anybody needed that name.

Then she buys a swimsuit. Then, at night, she begins to ring him, and she uses neither name. She calls herself Rosy, after the heroine of the pulp erotic novel she reads in secret, Lipstick Dreams, whose pages the film reads to us throughout, in her voice. The voice that has been telling us Rosy’s story is now Rosy, on the telephone.

Three other women live in the same building, and each of them is keeping something. Rehana, a college student, stitches burkhas in her family’s shop, wears one to college and takes it off when she gets there; inside the gates she sings and wears jeans. Leela, a young beautician, is sleeping with Arshad, a photographer, and planning a way out of town with him, while her mother arranges her marriage to another man. Shireen, a mother of three, puts on her burkha and goes out selling door to door, and she is so good at it that her company wants to promote her. Her husband does not know she works.

None of these wants is large. Each could live a long time in secret, and in Alankrita Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha that is exactly how each of them lives. What the film cares about is not how much these women want. It is what a want becomes once it is in other people’s hands. The film’s own history added another pair of hands: a certification board, which refused to let it be shown until a tribunal overruled the refusal.

The argument of this essay is in its title: in this film, a secret belongs to whoever finds it. Making it means following all four stories to their ends, so a plain note comes first, for anyone who would rather see the film.

This essay discusses the whole film, including how it ends. If you would rather see it first, this will keep.

Lipstick Under My Burkha is a Hindi-language film written and directed by Alankrita Shrivastava and produced by Prakash Jha. Ratna Pathak Shah plays Usha, Konkona Sen Sharma plays Shireen, Aahana Kumra plays Leela and Plabita Borthakur plays Rehana, with Sushant Singh as Shireen’s husband, Rahim, and Vikrant Massey as Arshad. It was first shown in the autumn of 2016, at film festivals in Mumbai and Tokyo. In Mumbai it won the Oxfam award for the best film on gender equality. At the Tokyo International Film Festival, where it screened under a Japanese title that means the lipstick inside the burkha, the Japan Foundation Asia Center gave it its Spirit of Asia award. It reached Indian cinemas only on 21 July 2017, after a refusal and an appeal. It runs a little under two hours.

The four women live in Hawai Manzil, an old building in the crowded lanes of Bhopal that Usha owns, and their stories are threaded through the novel she reads, in which Rosy wants things and says so.

Then every secret is found out. The mall’s cameras show Rehana stealing, and she is arrested and taken out of college. Manoj finds the video Leela made of herself with Arshad and breaks off the engagement. On the day Shireen is promoted, Rahim learns of her job, rapes her as punishment and tells her to quit. Jaspal learns that Rosy is Usha and denounces her to her family, who throw her novels and her swimsuit into the street while the neighbourhood watches.

Rehana, Leela and Shireen help Usha gather her things from the road. Usha asks Rehana to read her the last pages of Lipstick Dreams, and the four women pass a cigarette between them, their lives in pieces and their futures unanswered.

The title promises that something lies underneath, and the film keeps the promise. What lies under each cover is a want, and none of the wants is a vice. It helps to list them without adjectives. Rehana wants to wear jeans, to sing, to belong to the crowd at college whose names everyone knows. Leela wants a business, a partner in it, and a life that is not the marriage arranged for her. Shireen wants to work, to be good at it, to be paid for it, and to decide for herself whether she will be pregnant again. Usha wants to learn to swim, to be wanted, and to talk about it with someone.

Set out like that, they are almost embarrassingly ordinary, which is the reason for setting them out. None of the four is asking for a scandal. Each wants things that a great many people, somewhere, do in daylight, and each has found that her version can exist only in secret. The secrecy is not a trait of theirs. It is the only form their wants have been allowed to take.

The burkha is the film’s image for that form, and the image needs care. In the film the garment is not only a cover laid over women. It is something Rehana makes, stitch by stitch, in her family’s shop, wears out of the house and takes off at college; it is what Shireen puts on to go out and earn money her husband knows nothing about. It hides, and it also carries. When the film was new, Shrivastava put it in one sentence to the Indian news site Scroll: “The burkha hides a lot but is also privy to many secrets.”

Two of the four women are Muslim and two are Hindu, and the two who never wear a burkha hide as much as the two who do. Usha’s cover is a title, Buaji. Leela’s is an engagement. Asked by the American magazine Salon why she had made her leads both Muslim and Hindu, Shrivastava answered, “Patriarchy knows no religion,” and went on to say that women across religions are boxed in by the roles a patriarchal society prescribes, and that where it is hard for women to pursue their dreams in the open, they are bound to rebel in secret, Hindu or Muslim. The film is set in the old city of Bhopal, where, she added, Hindus and Muslims live in very close proximity, and she liked what she called its organic and chaotic harmony. So this essay treats the burkha as the film does: as an image of concealment that the film lends to all four of its women. It is not the essay’s verdict on a faith, and it says nothing about what the garment means to the women who choose it. That is theirs to say.

The jury in Tokyo seems to have seen this. In the comment the Japan Foundation Asia Center published with its award, the jury’s representative, the critic Philip Cheah, praised the film’s daring blend of comedy and serious drama, dream and reality, and truth or dare, and said that its doubled style mirrors the double lives the four women are forced to lead. The film, he added, “challenges us to enjoy the pain and suffer the joy.”

Look first at how the discoveries happen, because the film takes care to vary them: a mall’s cameras, a recording Leela made herself, a husband walking in on the day Shireen’s work is rewarded, a voice on the line learning who Rosy is. There is no single door a secret leaves by, the film seems to say. There are many, and some of them are in the woman’s own hand.

Then look at who passes sentence. In none of the four cases is it a court, except in the narrow matter of Rehana’s theft, which is a crime, and the film does not pretend otherwise. Everything else is private, and it comes from whoever is nearest: a father, a fiancé, a husband, a family and the street outside, which supplies the audience.

What the sentences have in common is not proportion. A theft is answered with the end of an education and the start of a husband hunt. A private recording ends a marriage before it begins. A job is punished with rape. Phone calls between two adults are punished with a public shaming. Set against what was done, every sentence is enormous, and measuring was never the point. The logic is possession. Once a want is found, it belongs to the finder, and the finder may do with it what he likes.

Ratna Pathak Shah, who plays Usha, was interviewed for a London School of Economics blog on the set of her next project, in London, the day after the certification board refused this film. The board, she said, had simply announced that it would not give a certificate, with “no questions, no reasons or very strange reasons.” She was talking about a committee. Her words fit every judge inside the film as well. None of them asks the woman anything. None of them explains. The only reason ever offered is the thing that was found, which everybody is assumed to understand.

And some of the judges are women. Leela’s mother catches her daughter with Arshad, and has already chosen her a husband. Rehana’s mother is the one set to find Rehana a match. Usha herself, for most of the film, is the neighbourhood’s arranger of marriages; it was she who arranged Leela’s to Manoj. It would be easy to count these women among the villains, and the film does not make it quite so easy. Leela’s mother earns her living posing nude for art students, and she may want for her daughter a security her own work has never given her. Usha arranges marriages because that is what Buaji is for. The anger the film earns is not at these women. It is at an arrangement that pays women in respectability for keeping watch on one another, and calls in the debt the moment one of them wants something for herself.

Shireen’s story has to be told most plainly, because it is the one most easily softened. At home her husband, Rahim, rapes her whenever he chooses. He forbids contraception, so she has had abortions in secret. When a doctor finds an infection and tells her they must use only condoms, he still refuses. The film does not present this as a good marriage going through a bad season. It is how her house works.

Name the ban on contraception for what it is. It is not a preference about the size of a family. It is a claim of ownership over her body, and it leaves every consequence for her to carry, alone and in secret. Japan’s Cabinet Office, on the page where it sets out the forms that violence between spouses can take, lists refusing to cooperate with contraception as sexual violence, beside forcing sex on a partner who does not want it and forcing an abortion. It is a sober government page, written about neither India nor this film, and it describes Shireen’s house exactly.

Against that house the film sets her work. Out of the door in her burkha, she is good at something, and somebody pays her for it. The job is the one place where her competence is seen and rewarded. It is also the one part of her life her husband has not claimed, which is exactly why it has to be secret.

Before the end there is a scene that tells you who she is. Meaning to tell Rahim about the job, she discovers instead that he is having an affair. She follows the other woman home and introduces herself as his wife. It is not a scene of revenge. It is a woman insisting on being named correctly, in the one role everyone around her agrees she has.

On the day she is promoted, the day her competence is recognised in front of other people, Rahim walks in. He congratulates her coldly. He takes her home, rapes her as punishment, and tells her to quit and stay at home. Any account of the film should say this plainly: it is rape, inside a marriage, used to put a working woman back where her husband wants her. Being his wife is not consent. Nothing about the day, the job or the marriage makes it anything else.

It is worth knowing, without making a lesson of it, how India’s law described this act when the film was made. Exception 2 to section 375 of the Indian Penal Code said that sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen, are not rape; in 2017 the Supreme Court held that the exception could not cover a wife under eighteen. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the code that replaced the Penal Code on 1 July 2024, keeps the exception in its section 63, with the age at eighteen. The exception is contested within India: in September 2026 the Supreme Court said it would examine its constitutional validity under both codes, and listed the challenges for final hearing. This essay offers no view on how that should be decided, and no advice to anyone. It notes only this. In the words of the code the film was made under, what Rahim does had no name as rape. This essay calls it by its name.

Of the four, Leela is the one with a plan. She runs her own parlour, and she pitches her make-up and Arshad’s photographs to businesses that stage weddings far from home, hoping the work will carry the two of them round the world. Her want is not only a man. It is a man, a business and a way out, and the film lets her be practical about all three.

Her mother has a plan too: through Usha she has arranged Leela’s marriage to Manoj, a man with nothing obviously wrong with him. Arshad refuses to run away with her; when she makes him jealous, he promises to, but she is trying to get over him, and makes a move on Manoj, who wants to wait for their wedding night. It is a mess, and the film lets it be one. She is a young woman with a plan and a heart that points two ways.

Then Manoj finds the video and ends the engagement. Say plainly what that is. The recording was hers: a private record of something between two adults, made on her own phone, not made for him and not given to him. His finding it, and making it the ground of his verdict, is a violation of her privacy, whatever he felt on seeing it and whatever anyone thinks of what she did. There are two people in the recording, and the engagement it ends is hers.

Rehana is a college student, and the film takes her double life literally. She stitches burkhas in the family shop, wears one to college and takes it off at the gates, and inside them she is a singer in jeans who loves Miley Cyrus.

What she does to belong is not admirable, and the film does not say it is. The make-up, the dress and the boots are stolen, and when the mall’s cameras show the theft, the police arrest her. Earlier, when she was arrested at a protest against the jeans ban, her father had let her off with a warning. This time the matter is a theft, and it is treated as one.

Here the film draws its most useful line, and it draws it quietly. The police punish a theft. Her family punishes a life. The young man she likes walks away. Her father takes her out of college and starts the search for a husband. None of that is the penalty for a pair of boots. It is the family’s verdict on everything the college stood for: the jeans, the singing, the protest, the girl without the burkha. And the verdict is a marriage. The institution she was being kept for becomes the thing she is punished with.

It would be possible to tell her story as the comic one, a girl who took off her burkha and got into trouble. The film is better than that, and it is worth reading her with the respect it gives her. She is young, and she wanted what a great many young people want: to be in the room where the music is, and to be seen there. What she loses is not the boots. It is the room.

Usha has three names, and the film is built so that each means something different. Buaji is the one the neighbourhood gives her: a kinship word, aunt, that makes her everybody’s elder and nobody’s woman. It comes with duties, piety and the arranging of marriages, and with a silence about anything she might want for herself. Usha Parmar is her own name, the one she gives at the swimming pool. Rosy is borrowed, from the paperback she reads under cover, and it is the only name under which her desire is allowed to speak.

The film’s boldest structural idea is that its narrator is, in effect, her secret. Throughout, Ratna Pathak Shah’s voice reads passages of Lipstick Dreams over the four stories, and Rosy’s longings run alongside the women’s. In one passage the critic Aseem Chhabra transcribed, Rosy watches girls in jeans riding freely on motorcycles, holding on to their boyfriends, which is Rehana’s want spoken inside another woman’s fantasy. The film’s narrator, then, is a widow of fifty-five reading an erotic paperback in secret, and the film does not treat that as a joke. It treats it as the film’s own voice.

This essay honours her want because the film does, and because it deserves it. She dyes her grey hair black. She rings Jaspal at night and becomes Rosy on the phone, and for a while she has what the novel promised: someone on the other end who wants to hear from her. Nothing here is ridiculous. A woman of fifty-five who wants to be desired, and arranges her body and her evenings around the wanting, is doing what people of every age do. The only unusual thing about her is how much it will cost her.

The essay “Wanting Something Still May Matter More Than Looking Young” argued that looking young is really a claim about how much time remains, and that a live want makes the same claim truthfully, because something still ahead of you is evidence of unspent life at any age. The black dye in Usha’s hair could be read as the first of those two projects. The film seems to suggest that it serves the second. She is not trying to look younger for its own sake. She is getting ready for someone. That essay also argued that a shortage of things to want is easily mistaken for a loss of the capacity to want, and that such things arrive by encounter. Usha’s arrives by accident, in the water. A prank restocks a catalogue that the role of Buaji had let go out of print.

Then Jaspal finds out who Rosy is. The calls have not changed; what has changed is who he knows is making them. The critic Puja Sen wrote of the revulsion with which the young instructor regards Usha once he discovers that she is the woman he has been talking to. He does not simply stop the calls. He takes the news to her family, and her family, with the neighbourhood watching, throws her novels and her swimsuit into the street.

That scene is the film’s indictment, and it is aimed with care. It is not aimed at Usha, who has done nothing to anyone. It is aimed at a young man who was glad to be wanted until he learned the age and standing of the woman who wanted him; at a family that answers a widow’s private life by turning it into a public exhibit; and at a street that comes out to watch. What is thrown out is the novel and the swimsuit: the story she was reading and the body she was learning to move in water. The narrator’s book is lying in the road.

Four years later Ratna Pathak Shah played another woman who had set a want aside: Sandhya, in Thappad, who gave up singing for her family. The essay “Thappad, and the Question Nobody Asked Her” read her as someone for whom it may be easier to ask a daughter to endure than to reopen the life she has lived. Side by side, the two roles look like two answers to the same arrangement. Sandhya’s want was surrendered in silence. Usha’s was kept in secret. Lipstick Under My Burkha shows what the secret costs when it is found.

The essay “Three Women, and the Audience a Want Acquires” offers a reading that fits this film almost uncomfortably well. What decides the fate of a woman’s want, it argued, is often not the wanting but who was watching, and who acquired the right to narrate it afterwards. In its reading of Lina, a woman takes the account of her affair, in her own voice, to a group of women who meet at a doctor’s office. They can enforce nothing. Even so, the want stops being a fact about her week and becomes a claim about what kind of person she is, and the room is entitled to rule on it forever, without a hearing. The loss, that essay said, is jurisdictional. Before she speaks, the want is hers to interpret. Afterwards its meaning sits with a standing committee that never adjourns.

Lipstick Under My Burkha is the same transfer with the safety catch off. None of these four women chose to speak. Each was found out. And the committees that take jurisdiction over their wants are not peers who can only hold an opinion. They are a father who can end an education, a fiancé who can end a marriage before it starts, a husband who can rape, a family and a street that can lay a woman’s private life out on the road. Lina’s room could only judge. These rooms can act.

That is why the last scene weighs more than its length. After everything, the four women are together, in one place. It is a room of peers, like Lina’s, and it does the opposite of what Lina’s did. Nobody rules on anybody. Usha, whose private reading has just been thrown into the street, asks Rehana to read her the last pages of the novel, and Rehana does. A story that one woman read in secret, in the voice of a pulp heroine, is now read aloud by another woman, to someone who asked to hear it. For the length of a cigarette, jurisdiction has come home.

It is a small thing, and this essay does not want to make it larger. Nothing is restored, nothing has been done about Shireen’s marriage, and Usha’s neighbourhood has still seen what it saw. But one thing has changed that the film spent nearly two hours showing to be the heart of the harm. Until now the account of these women’s wants was held by everyone except them. In the last scene, they hold it. What they will do with it, the film does not say.

The film’s own release ran the same course, with one difference worth dwelling on. In February 2017, months after its festival prizes, the Indian press reported that the Central Board of Film Certification had refused Lipstick Under My Burkha a certificate. As Shrivastava later put it, the board rejected the film outright and said a blanket no to its public exhibition, in effect banning it. The board’s letter, as it was reported at the time, called the story lady oriented, said the women’s fantasy was above life, and objected to sexual scenes, abusive words, what it termed audio pornography and a sensitive touch about one particular section of society.

Read the reported reasons again, slowly, with the film in mind. A story oriented to women. A fantasy that rises above life. Sexual scenes. A touch about a community. It is very nearly a synopsis. The board found what the film’s men find, women wanting things and imagining things, and returned the verdict the film’s men return. Shrivastava said as much, more drily, later that year. The whole experience of the ban, she told Salon, “did feel like the story of the characters in the film in some way was becoming the story of the film.” It was, she added, rather ironic.

Then the difference. The film could appeal, and it did. In April 2017 the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal directed the board to certify it for adult audiences, with cuts the makers had volunteered and some more besides. As the news agencies PTI and AFP reported the order, the tribunal found that the board’s committees had misdirected themselves in refusing the film for being women-oriented, and held that there could be no embargo on a women-oriented film, or on one containing women’s sexual fantasies and the expression of their inner desires. Shrivastava told Salon that she had to reduce “some seconds of the sex scenes,” because a film that could not be released at all would have been worse.

Now set that beside the four stories. The film had a tribunal above the board, an appeal, reasons given on the record, and a ruling that a film may be about women’s desires. Rehana has nobody above her father. Leela has nobody above Manoj. Shireen, as far as the film shows, has nobody she can take it to, and the criminal code of the day would not have called it rape. Usha has nobody above her family and her street. The film won the one thing none of its women is offered, which is somewhere to go after the verdict.

The essay “Lust Stories, and Whose Want Gets a Hearing” noticed that the anthology released the year after went straight to a streaming service and never came before this board, whose remit covers films shown in cinemas, so that some of its frankness was a matter of channel as well as nerve. The same caution runs the other way: what happened at the board is a fact about one institution in one year, not a measure of a country, and the tribunal’s ruling is as Indian as the refusal.

Now the case against, made as its critics made it, because some of them are right.

First, the image itself. Writing for the Nepali magazine The Record, Puja Sen argued that the film falls into “a false tradition-modernity binary,” in which lipstick, cigarettes and western clothes stand for freedom and the burkha stands for oppression. The charge lands hardest on Rehana’s story, which Sen found the least compelling of the four, and it is fair: the film’s shorthand for a young woman’s freedom is often a pair of jeans and a pop song. This essay has argued that the film lends the burkha to all four women as an image of concealment, and shows the garment carrying as well as hiding. That is true of the film at its best. It is not true of every scene, and a viewer who finds the shorthand reductive is not misreading it.

Second, solidarity. Sen called the film’s inability to imagine female solidarity, or even a more layered friendship, perhaps its greatest lack. Nisma Chauhan, writing in Pakistan’s Express Tribune, went further. The women, she wrote, “don’t demand the right to their own agency outside of their secret lives,” and the film, in a strange and disappointing way, ends up suggesting that resistance is futile. This is the strongest objection to the reading above, and it deserves a straight answer. On this account the solidarity arrives only after every one of the four has been defeated, and it lasts about as long as a cigarette. If a film can imagine women together only once they have lost, what exactly has it imagined?

The narrower answer this essay can give is that the film’s pessimism is also its accuracy. Suhasini Krishnan, writing for The Quint, argued that the cigarette is less about the women rebelling than about sharing an experience, about knowing they are not alone, and noted how much the film leaves unanswered about what becomes of each of them. That is closer to what the last scene does. It does not claim the women have won. It claims, very quietly, that none of them is alone with what happened. That is not agency in the sense Chauhan means, and this essay will not pretend it is. It is the precondition for any. A want that is found out and punished alone stays a private shame. The same want, set beside three others just punished for theirs, begins to look like what it is: a pattern.

Third, the ending as craft. A reviewer for the Indian news agency IANS found the last scene a bit theatrical and forced, and Sen counted the cigarette among the film’s predictable signs of freedom. Both are fair responses to a short scene asked to carry a great deal. And fourth, against this reading itself. It leans hard on that short scene and on the idea of jurisdiction, and a reader may fairly say it has built a structure out of a gesture. It is also made from outside the language and the city of the film, and where it goes beyond the critics who could hear every line, it is interpretation.

A viewer in Japan may notice Usha’s name before anything else. Japanese has its own words for addressing a woman by her place rather than her name: okusan for the wife of a house, okaasan for mother, someone’s mama at the nursery gate, obasan, aunt, for a woman of a certain age whom a stranger does not know. None of these is unkind. But a woman can go a long time hearing little else, and the moment at the pool, when Usha is asked for a name and gives her own, may land with some force.

On Shireen’s house, the government’s own language is plainer than a reader might expect. The Cabinet Office page that counts a refusal to cooperate with contraception as sexual violence also says that sexual intercourse between spouses can amount to the offence of non-consensual sexual intercourse under Article 177 of the Penal Code, and that being married does not make sex obtained by violence or threats permissible. It adds a careful note: its examples are things a person may bring to a consultation, and not all of them necessarily meet the legal definition of spousal violence.

The Penal Code itself has said so in words only recently. The revision that took effect in July 2023 wrote into the offences of non-consensual sexual intercourse and non-consensual indecency that they apply whether or not the two people are married. The Ministry of Justice explains that the prevailing view already held this, but the text had not said so, and the revision made it explicit, by way of confirmation.

None of this is a ranking. Japan’s wording is three years old, and India’s exception is before India’s own Supreme Court. A code is a text and not a life, and in either country a woman can live inside a marriage that neither text describes. What the two pages offer a reader is vocabulary. Shireen’s house has names, in plain official Japanese: sexual violence, and within it, a refusal to cooperate with contraception.

For readers who live in Japan far from their own families, the film’s watching street may look like the opposite of their problem, and in one way it is. Usha’s neighbourhood watched too much. A woman who has moved countries may have nobody watching at all, which is a different danger: nobody to notice, and nobody to gather her things from the road. The last scene of this film is about three women who did notice. It is worth asking, in any city, who those people would be.

Not that secrets are good, or that a want must be hidden to survive. The film does not say that, and neither does this essay. What it takes is a distinction. A secret is not always a lie. Sometimes it is simply the only form a want has been allowed to take, and the question worth asking about such a secret is not why she hid it, but what would have happened if she had not.

It takes, too, a question for the moment of discovery. Who holds the want now? A father, a fiancé, a husband, a street, a committee; or the woman herself, and whoever she chooses to tell. The film’s cruelty is that it hands the want to everyone but her. Its one mercy is the last scene, in which the want comes back.

And it takes Usha, who was not ridiculous at any moment of this film. The shame in the street scene belongs to the people throwing things.

If you have ever kept something you wanted small and quiet, so that it could survive the people around you, the film has one thing to say to you, and it is not advice. The keeping was not a lie. It was the want, doing what it could. And the story of it is yours to hold, even after somebody else has found it.

This is a reading of a film. It is not legal, medical or therapeutic guidance. Nothing in it is a statement about any reader or advice about anyone’s marriage, and it diagnoses no one, the characters included.

The film was not screened for this essay. It rests on the film’s published record and on the accounts of critics and reviewers. Lines of dialogue are paraphrased, never quoted as exact. The words of the director and of Ratna Pathak Shah are quoted only from interviews read where they were published. The certification board’s letter was not read, and its reported wording is paraphrased; the tribunal’s ruling is given as the news agencies reported it; the Tokyo jury’s comment is taken from the Japan Foundation Asia Center’s announcement.

Indian and Japanese law appear only as their texts, courts and ministries state them, with their own caveats, as of the dates given, and the Indian Supreme Court’s hearing of September 2026 only as the press reported it. Neither country is set above the other.

No director, performer, critic, festival, tribunal or government office named here has any connection with this publication, and none has endorsed it.

Is there a want of yours that has only ever existed in a form other people could not see? What would it need, to exist in daylight?

When something private about another woman came to light, did you ever find yourself, even for a moment, standing with the street?

Who calls you by your name, rather than by what you are to them?

If an account of what you want were found tomorrow, whose would it become? And who would you want to read it aloud with?

For readers in Japan: the Cabinet Office’s Domestic Violence Hotline Plus takes calls in Japanese at any hour on 0120-279-889, and its chat service also works in ten other languages, English among them. In an emergency, the number is 110.