But in late December, as he was brought into the police station in Lucknow, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, in the middle of the night, he felt something had shifted. “Police officers abused me badly while I was in their custody and they threatened me in many ways,” he said. “One [senior officer] said to me at the police station: ‘I will fuck your mother. I am going to throw all your family members in jail where they will rot for life. I will destroy your family’.”