The Gold Chain of Desperation

What happens when sitting judge of court asks men to beg, borrow, steal to pay alimony to ex wife?In the heart of India, marked by a sandstone pillar declaring the nation's geographic center, lies Vishrampur. It is a city of citrus and embers, of wide, tree-lined avenues that give way to tangled lanes humming with relentless life. Like any city, it is a living thing, its veins coursing with the stories of its people.
And like any living thing, it is bound by chains. There are the visible chains of commerce and traffic that choke the roads at dusk, and the invisible chains of history that tether its modern pulse to an ancient past. But deeper still are the chains worn by its inhabitants. They are forged not of metal, but of duty and desperation, of love and law, of memory and misfortune. They are the debts that bind a son to his family, the court orders that tether a man to a woman he no longer knows, the grief that links a widow to the ghost of her husband, and the shame that shackles a family to the crime of one of its own.