WE met at school when we were both placed in the same bench; but an unlikelier pair of friends never existed.

I was twelve and petite; she was thirteen, tall, and looked more like a sixth-former. I was quiet and shy, preferring to bury my head in books rather than socialize; she was rambunctious and friendly as a puppy, making friends with everyone. I was one of nine children, and my parents were still young; while she was the only surviving child of a widow who had been blessed with her only living child when she was nearing the end of her child-bearing days.
Until his demise when she was aged ten, her father had spoiled her rotten. We will call her Nazarene.
We had lost touch with each other less than one year after we met; but, decades later, I got a call from her and a request for a meeting. She wanted to talk, and the story she narrated is replicated in various ways and dimensions throughout the corridors of human existence.
I remember our math teacher let us call him ‘Mr. Singh’. I hated him because he was always pulling my long plaits and wrapping them around his hands, immobilizing me; and to my innocent, childish mind, there was something wrong with what he was doing, but he was a teacher and I had been brought up to respect my elders.
But I noticed that Nazarene would laugh whenever he did it to her, and would linger on in the classroom alone with him long after the other students had left.
I thought he was giving her lessons, because she was not very academically inclined.
He was giving her lessons, all right, but not those that should be imparted by a teacher to a student… And a married teacher with a child at that!
As her tale of woe and disillusionment unfolded, varying emotions engulfed me, because this man was a predator, who should have been in jail with no hope of parole.
From the classroom, they had progressed to under her home in the dark of night, where he initiated her into the netherworld of a forbidden sexual liaison. Neither thought of the wife and child left alone and lonely at his home as they pursued their selfish desires that became a full-blown affair.
And this was rural social landscape, where some things are unforgivable.
Their late-night encounters were discovered and scandalized within the community, but what was tragic was that the teacher’s young wife committed suicide, and his father-in-law took the child away. My friend does not know where, and seemingly does not care.
My friend aborted her first child, and, despite her aged mother’s agonising pleas, moved in with this teacher when she became pregnant a second time. But he never married her, and after her son was born, he totally ignored her, except for the maid services she provided; and soon the physical abuses started.
Emotional and psychological abuses had been a constant ever since she moved in. Her mother would not accept her back home because of the disgrace she had brought to a highly religious, conformist Muslim family.
Alone and uneducated, with neither money nor goodwill from anyone because she was shunned as a pariah in the small rural community that blamed her for the death of the young, well-liked and respected Mrs. Singh, she began drinking, and was soon a raging alcoholic.
Her mother had by then died, and her uncle had reclaimed the family home; so when Mr. Singh took away her son and kicked her out of his home, she literally had nowhere to go but into the streets.
She recounted a subsequent life of depravity that is no less than a horror story, until a kindly Roman Catholic priest took pity on her, had her cleaned up, and gave her a job in his rectory. He enrolled her in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and, bit by painful bit, she stopped using alcohol, although, she said, the craving never went away.
Today, she is in the church and has many friends, but no family.  Her mom grieved herself to death, and she does not know where Singh took her only son. She lost everything worthwhile in her life, and for awhile, even her life (figuratively) itself, all because of a mistake she made when she was a teenager.