She had boarded coach B3 at Indore to travel home for Rakshabandhan. When the Indore-Bilaspur Narmada Express chugged into Katni station on August 7, her family was waiting on the platform but she did not alight.

The disappearance of a 29-year-old woman, a law graduate with dreams of becoming a civil judge, was a mystery. Had she been trafficked? Or had she somehow fallen off the train? Nobody could say.

Tracing her movements through CCTV footage and eyewitness testimony, Madhya Pradesh police tracked her down two weeks later to Lakhimpur Kheri on the Nepal border. Astonishingly, she had engineered her own disappearance, the police said. “She wanted to become a judge while her family wanted her to leave her studies, her ambitions and get married.”

Archana Tiwari had made a life of her own living in a hostel in Indore as she practised in the high court and prepared for the judicial services exams. The........

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