I sit by my window at that hour when darkness yields to the certainty of the sun. My knees and back hurt as I answer what I hope is my last distress call of the day.

“My plan for Saturday was to stay at home and read a book,” a volunteer tells me on her way home after making sure our own have reached theirs.

The youth of the country is at war, and the war has come inside our houses. Our parents have stopped asking where we go and begun asking where it hurts. Relatives, who renounced their minds to a 76-year-old demagogue drunk on the incense of his own worship, call us dishonourable for demanding answers.

We fight the police and the paramilitary forces who take their annoyance out on our bodies, then a media with a lung full of poison, stamping us Dimagi Naxals, anti-nationals, Pakistan-funded and whatever else its air-conditioned hate circus can dream up.

We fight lawyers’ fees, FIRs, bail dates, savings meant for a house, professional circles where keeping your head down is safer than voicing your opinion. We fight to build lives we have hardly begun. I have an inbox full of rape and death threats from Sanghi goons who want to make examples of those who speak over the ear-splitting jingoism of andhbhakti. They call in the wee hours to see if my voice shakes. It does. We fight them too.

When I joined Meghnad and Rajiv at the Protest Support Initiative, we knew the months ahead would be difficult. “I was not prepared to have another person’s safety rest in my hands”, I told a volunteer providing medical aid in the detention camp. “I think we learnt it the hard way because no........

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