ABSTRACT
Translated as ‘The Offspring’, the story features Damayanti, a Brahmin widow with two young daughters. She makes her ends meet by trading her body with men from the village. But when a wealthy man, from a lower caste, proposes that she bear him a child as his invalid wife cannot have a child, she flatly refuses. At the insistence of a local priest, she agrees to sleep with the wealthy man, but when she learns that she is pregnant, she cannot compromise between her sense of Brahminical superiority and the promise of money that the wealthy man had offered.
