Many of us have seen women love people who hurt them. Not dramatically. Not with raised voices or slammed doors. Quietly. With meals cooked at 5 a.m., with silence swallowed like medicine, with daughters being told that endurance is strength and selflessness is virtue.
Indian families don’t call it manipulation. They call it love. The terrifying part is that both things can be true at the same time.
This tension sits at the very centre of Cobra Orchard. Three women: Gunvati, Deepshikha, and Laadwinder – each navigates a world where control wears the face of devotion. Where the person who claims to love you is often the person who asks the most of you. Saying no is not disobedience. It is betrayal.
The Language of Loving Control
Manipulation in Indian families rarely announces itself. It arrives as a sacrifice and guilt. It is the weight of everything someone has done for you, quietly laid on the table before any request is made.
“After everything I have given up for you.” “I only want what is best for you.” “You will understand when you are older.”
These sentences are not lies. The love behind them is real. But love used as leverage stops being love. It becomes a debt a child can never repay, a contract signed before they can read it.
In Indian families, this dynamic runs deepest between mothers and daughters. The mother who sacrificed her ambitions expects her daughter to validate that sacrifice. The daughter who is given every advantage is expected to use it in ways her mother approves of. When she doesn’t, it isn’t just disappointment. It feels like treachery.
Why the Women of Cobra Orchard Can’t Simply Leave
Readers of psychological thrillers sometimes ask why characters don’t just walk away. The question makes sense from the outside. From the inside, it misses something deeper.
Gunvati, Deepshikha, and Laadwinder don’t stay because they are weak. They stay because they were raised to believe that staying is what good women do. That the family unit is sacred and loyalty to blood is not a choice but a way of being.
This is the particular cruelty of manipulation in Indian families: it is not imposed from the outside. It is imbibed. It becomes the voice inside your own head. By the time a woman recognizes it for what it is, it has already shaped every decision she makes.
The Difference Between Love and Ownership
Real love should leave room for the other person to disappoint you. It should survive the word no. It does not require a loved one to remain the same, choose the same path, and carry the same beliefs.
What Indian families often practice is more like ownership. Not out of malice. Out of fear.
Fear of judgment from the community. The fear of losing a child to a different world. Also the fear of not having mattered enough.
I wrote Cobra Orchard because I wanted to look at this honestly. My intention isn’t to condemn Indian families or romanticize them. But simply ask a question nobody in Indian families is allowed to ask: what does love really cost the person who receives it?
If you recognize this kind of love in your own family, explore Cobra Orchard and meet the three women who finally name it.
Godman fiction and how it takes readers on an Indian thriller ride!
Have you ever been loved in a way that felt more like control? I’d like to know. Leave a comment below.
Three women. Two timelines. One curse that refuses to die. Set in the shadow-drenched villages of Uttar Pradesh, India — across the 1970s and the early 2000s.
Cobra Orchard is a psychological thriller about secrets buried so deep, even the earth forgot them. Read Cobra Orchard on Amazon Kindle
Terveen Gill is a writer who has always been drawn to the uncomfortable truth hiding beneath ordinary lives. A Times of India and Chandigarh Literary Society award-winning short story writer, she is also a graphic novel script writer, indie filmmaker, and a former engineer.
Her debut psychological thriller Cobra Orchard is the culmination of that instinct: a dark, immersive novel about three women, a sinister guru, and secrets buried so deep they have begun to rot.
Hi Terveen. I’m reading a short story by Camille Bordas from ‘One Sun Only’. It is about a Malaysian tribe called the Pawong. Instead of pointing out their differences from us she shows us in a brisk narrative which explains the title ‘Most Die Young’. THe narrative draws me in, not an info sheet on their differences. I suggest this is the way to go. Cheers.John —