Because I failed to give birth to a son, my mother-in-law forced me to undergo a 21-day purification ritual. I silently shaved my head, wore white, and followed every demand—until they realized I had never truly surrendered
Part One: The House With Two Kitchens
My name is Nisha Kulkarni, and I am twenty nine years old. I grew up in a small two bedroom flat in Kothrud, Pune, where my parents taught me to argue, to read, and to code. I work as a quality analyst for a mid sized IT firm, the kind where you get a free bus and a coffee machine that never works. I thought I had made all the safe choices.
When I married Rohit, it was not an entirely arranged match, and not entirely love either. We met at a cousin’s wedding in Nagpur, exchanged Instagram IDs, spoke for six months. He was gentle, soft spoken, a civil engineer who said he wanted a partner who would continue working. His mother, Savitri Aatya, smiled a lot in the beginning. She had a big bindi and an even bigger house in old Nagpur, a wada style house with two kitchens, one for daily use and one, she said, for rituals and festivals.
For two years after marriage, life was manageable. I travelled to Pune for work every week, Monday to Thursday I stayed in a paying guest near Hinjewadi, Friday to Sunday I was in Nagpur. Rohit was mostly on site. Savitri Aatya managed the house with an iron discipline that I initially mistook for efficiency.
The trouble started after my second miscarriage. The doctor said it was a hormonal issue, treatable, and that I needed rest. Savitri Aatya heard a different diagnosis. In her world, a woman who could not produce a son after two years was carrying paap, sin from a previous life. And sin, in her world, had to be washed.
She did not shout. That was her style. She said it over dinner one night, serving Rohit an extra ladle of ghee.
“There is a shuddhi ritual in our family,” she said, not looking at me. “Twenty one days. It has cured many women. My own great aunt did it and then gave birth to three sons. You will have to do it if you want to stay in this house as a daughter in law.”
Rohit looked down at his plate. That was his style.
I asked what the ritual involved. She explained it as if she was explaining a recipe. Head must be shaved completely, to remove vanity. White clothes must be worn, to show surrender. You must stay locked inside the small ritual kitchen at the back, no sunlight, no outside food, only boiled rice and salt. No one in the house will speak to you during those days, because your words are impure until cleansed. On the twenty second day, you will come out pure.
I laughed. I thought she was joking.
She was not.
The next morning, she called a barber home. Not the usual ladies beauty parlour didi, but an old man with a rusted straight razor who usually shaved men at the square.
I told Rohit, this is not okay, I will not do this. He said, Aai is old, let her do her customs, it is only twenty one days, what is the harm.
I told him it was illegal, it was cruelty. He said, do not make a scene.
That night, Savitri Aatya came to my room and said very quietly, “If you refuse, I will tell everyone you are a barren woman who does witchcraft to stop my son from having children. I will send you back to Pune, but not to your parents. I know people who can find you work in other houses. You think your IT job will save you? I will sell your shame in this locality so no one gives you a room. You will obey, or you will be sold in another way.”
It was not a loud threat. It was a cold, businesslike threat. The kind that women in her generation knew how to make stick.
I pretended to cry and agree. I had to.
Part Two: Twenty One Days of White
They shaved my head on a Tuesday morning.
I sat on a low stool in the back veranda while the barber poured water on my head. My hair was not very long, I had cut it to shoulder length after joining IT, but it was mine. As it fell in clumps on the newspaper, I watched Savitri Aatya watch me, her face satisfied, as if she was finally seeing the daughter in law she wanted. Bald, stripped, reduced.
She gave me two white cotton sarees, thin, almost transparent, the kind widows wore in her village. She gave me a white blouse with no lining. She took away my phone, my laptop, my books. She took my slippers too, saying bare feet must touch the kitchen floor to absorb the earth’s purity.
The small ritual kitchen was barely eight by ten feet. It had no windows, only a high vent. It had an old chulha that they no longer used, and a single bulb that flickered. A mat was laid in the corner. A steel plate and a steel glass. A bucket for bathing and a separate bucket for other needs.
She locked the door from outside. I heard the sound of the bolt. Then silence.
For the first few hours, I tried to be strong. I recited code in my mind, test cases I had written. I tried to remember the lyrics of old Hindi songs. By evening, the heat inside the kitchen had become unbearable. Nagpur in May is cruel. The small room was like an oven. Sweat ran down my bald scalp. I knocked on the door and asked for water. No answer.
The family followed her instructions literally. No one was allowed to speak to me. Rohit came home at night, I heard his motorcycle. He walked past the kitchen. I called his name. He did not answer. I heard his niece, little Shruti, ask, “Why is Kaku locked?” and Savitri Aatya saying, “Because she is dirty, do not go near.”
I had two daughters in those two miscarriages. Not sons. Daughters who never took a breath. That night I mourned them again, and I mourned myself.
On the second day, food came, a small hole at the bottom of the door slid open, and a plate of boiled rice and salt was pushed in. No dal, no pickle. I ate it because I had to stay alive.
It is strange what happens when no one speaks to you. Your own mind becomes very loud. I thought about running away, but where would I go, bald, in white, without money, without a phone, in a locality where everyone knew Savitri Aatya.
By the third day, I had stopped expecting Rohit to save me.
What Savitri Aatya did not know was that I had anticipated this exact ritual two weeks earlier.
I had overheard her talking to her sister on the phone about shuddhi. I had spoken to my cousin sister, Priya, who lives in Pune and is a lawyer. Priya had said, if they do this, we need proof that will hold, not just your word against hers. She had bought a small cheap Android phone, a Jio phone with a good camera and a long battery life, and had hidden it inside a packet of sanitary pads, which she knew Savitri Aatya would never touch because she considered them impure. She had visited us on the pretext of giving me haldi for good luck, and had slipped that packet into my cupboard.
When they took my main phone, they did not check that packet. When they locked me in the kitchen, I had that second phone inside the folds of my petticoat.
On the third night, after everyone slept, I switched it on.
I pretended to obey, to sit with my shaved head and white clothes in that locked kitchen where no one was allowed to speak to me, but I had already arranged for Priya to secretly give me a phone hidden in a packet she knew my mother in law would never touch, and from the second night onwards I live streamed the entire treatment on Instagram and Facebook, whispering into the camera at 2 am, showing the locked door from inside, the boiled rice, my bald scalp, and clearly telling viewers how my mother in law Savitri had threatened to sell me to another household if I refused this twenty one day purification ritual for not producing a son.
Part Three: The World Outside The Kitchen
I did not know how to go viral. I only knew how to be honest.
My first live had four viewers. My second had eleven. I spoke in a mix of Marathi, Hindi, and English, the way we naturally speak in Nagpur. I said, “My name is Nisha Kulkarni. I am locked in my own house. My mother in law shaved my head because I had two miscarriages. She says I am impure. If you are watching this, please do not let her say this is our culture. This is cruelty.”
I showed the bolt on the outside. I showed the calendar I was scratching on the wall. I showed my white saree.
By the fourth day, Priya had taken one of my videos and posted it on her LinkedIn and Twitter with my permission, tagging a few women journalists and a local NGO called Stree Shakti Kendra.
On the fifth day, my live had two hundred people. Someone recorded it and put it on WhatsApp. The local WhatsApp aunties who usually forward good morning messages forwarded my bald face instead.
On the sixth day, a reporter from Lokmat came to the house. Savitri Aatya told him I had gone to Pune for treatment. He asked why the small kitchen was locked from outside and why there was a smell. She said it was old grains.
On the seventh day, the police came for a preliminary inquiry. Not to arrest, but to ask. Savitri Aatya opened the kitchen door for five minutes, gave me proper food for the first time, warned me with her eyes. I said nothing to the police then. Priya had told me, wait till it spreads enough that they cannot cover it up.
I waited.
On the ninth day, my video reached a Marathi news channel. They ran it with the headline, “Shuddhi or Shame? Nagpur Woman Locked for 21 Days for Not Giving Son.” My face was blurred, but my voice was not.
By the twelfth day, my Instagram followers went from 180 to 40,000. Women from all over Maharashtra started stitching my videos. Some were daughters in law who had faced similar rituals, being made to eat neem, being made to sleep outside during periods. Lawyers offered help in comments. A doctor from AIIMS Nagpur offered to do a medical checkup free.
Savitri Aatya started to feel the heat, literally. Her temple friends stopped calling her. The milkman asked her, what is happening in your house. Rohit stopped going to his site because labourers were asking him.
She did not open the door though. She thought if she opened early, the ritual would be broken and the sin would double. Her belief was stronger than her shame.
Inside, I was changing too. I was still bald, still in white, still eating salt rice, but I was no longer silent. Every night at 2 am, I had a community. Women who said, we are listening. I read their comments in the morning. I was not impure. I was not alone.
Part Four: The Door Opens
On the seventeenth day, the pressure became too strong to ignore.
A team from the District Women and Child Welfare department came with two lady constables. This time they had a written complaint from Stree Shakti Kendra. This time they had my live videos saved on a pen drive.
Savitri Aatya had no choice. In front of cameras that a local channel had brought, in front of neighbours who had gathered in the courtyard, she had to open the bolt.
The door opened after seventeen days. The light hurt my eyes.
I walked out slowly, bald head uncovered, white saree crumpled, bare feet blackened by the kitchen floor. I did not cry. I looked directly at Savitri Aatya, who was trying to arrange her pallu and look dignified.
The lady officer asked her, why was your daughter in law locked.
Savitri Aatya tried to say, it is our family custom, she agreed willingly.
I took the small Jio phone from my blouse and played my first live, where I had recorded her threat. “I will sell your shame, I will find you work in other houses.” Her voice was clear.
There was a gasp from the neighbours. In Nagpur, izzat is everything. Being caught on camera threatening to sell your daughter in law is worse than any sin she could invent.
She folded her hands and apologised. Not because she was sorry, but because she had to. She said in Marathi, “Majhi chuk jhali,” I made a mistake.
Rohit stood in a corner, head down. He did not look at me.
That apology was not what I wanted. I wanted an exit.
Priya arrived that afternoon with a lawyer from Nagpur, a sharp woman named Advocate Deshpande who wore a black coat in the heat as if it was armour. We had already prepared the papers. I had been drafting them in my mind during those long nights in the kitchen.
I said to Savitri and Rohit in front of everyone, I will not file a criminal case for wrongful confinement and criminal intimidation if you give me a divorce on mutual consent with favourable terms. I want my stridhan back, all my jewellery, my share of the savings we made during marriage, and a compensation amount for mental cruelty that will allow me to rent a place in Pune and restart my life. I want it in writing today.
Savitri Aatya tried to bargain. Advocate Deshpande said, we can also go to court, there are videos, there are witnesses, there is a threat to sell, which is trafficking under Section 370. The compensation will be decided by a judge then, plus jail time.
Rohit, who had not spoken to me for seventeen days, finally spoke. He said, “Give her what she wants, Aai.”
We signed a settlement in the hall of that wada house, while I was still in white. Fifteen lakh rupees as one time settlement, return of all my gold, twenty tolas that my parents had given, plus a no objection certificate that I could continue to use my office flat in Pune. The divorce petition would be filed jointly next week, with a six month cooling period waived because of cruelty proved on record.
I took the papers and my bag that Priya had packed for me. I left the two white sarees on the kitchen floor where I had been locked.
Part Five: After White
I live in Pune now, in a one BHK in Wakad that smells of fresh paint. I still work in IT. I wear a short buzz cut, not because I have to, but because I decided to keep it for a while. It suits me. My team calls me S Furiosa now, affectionately. I laugh.
The money helped, but it was not the point. The point was that for seventeen days, I was not allowed to speak, and then the whole state heard me.
People ask me, did you forgive your mother in law. I say, forgiveness is a luxury word. I understood her. She was a product of a system that told her that a woman’s value is in her womb, that sons are insurance, that rituals can control fate. That system made her a victim first, then made her a perpetrator. I do not want to be either.
Rohit called me once after the divorce came through. He said he was sorry. He said he has moved to Amravati for work, away from his mother. I said sorry is not a time machine, but I hope you become a better man for someone else, if there is someone else.
My mother, who had been quiet all this while because she thought interfering in sasural matters was not our culture, now tells every girl who visits us, “Learn to keep a second phone, beta, and a cousin who is a lawyer.”
Aarav is not my son, I do not have a son, and I still do not think that is a sin that needs cleansing. I have two daughters who never breathed, and I light a diya for them every year, not in a locked kitchen, but on my balcony, where there is sun and air and people who speak to me.
If you are reading this and you are locked somewhere, literally or otherwise, remember this. Sometimes you have to pretend to obey while you quietly set up the camera. Sometimes the door will not open from inside, no matter how hard you push. You need people outside to push with you. And they will, if you let them see what is happening.
My head is still shaved, my clothes are no longer white, and I am finally, completely, pure, not because any ritual cleansed me, but because I told the truth.
