“Anyone who has beaten you in the night can do it again,” he said.

Geeta, too, had lost her swagger. When people asked about Sanjay, she told them that he had fallen off the roof. She denied that she had been trapped in the house with the other women. She was no longer eager to boast about her campaign against the village council.

“They are powerful,” she said. “They are stronger. They beat us up like dogs.”

On the day Sanjay was discharged, Roshan was lounging with his male relatives on a rope cot outside the temple. The heat was soporific, and beside them, two buffaloes nosed through a pile of dung, quietly grunting.

All told, it had been an expensive night, Roshan said. To avoid criminal charges, he had had to pay 3,000 rupees for Sanjay’s medical care and an additional 4,000 to ensure there would be no investigation. But it was worth it, they all agreed.

Even Roshan’s concession — allowing the women of the village to return to work in the factories — had turned out in his favor. Though the Nat women had headed out almost immediately, nearly all of the factories were now shuttered: China had closed its markets to Indian meat, and Brazil’s currency had declined so sharply that its meat was now cheaper than Indian buffalo.

So that was that. No one was hiring.

Roshan could not help preening a little. “See, in our community, a woman is a woman and a man is a man,” he said. “This is what it is here. Women have lower status and men have higher status.” If any more women propose to challenge that principle, he said, “we will quietly, politely tell them this is not a good thing.”

And that night, as the sun slipped down over the sugar cane, Roshan and the others laughed and laughed.