This, she was told, was the limit of her power in the world.

This is the story I entered for the 2019 Alpine Fellowship writing prize which won first runner up. The theme was Identity and around the time I was fishing around for ideas for it, I was also visiting my mum and recording her talking about her life.

She mentioned that her mother used to tell these stories about Manasa to the other women in the village and described running past the statue hidden in the woods. I thought then about the goddess being in exile and when I went home to write up some notes from the recording, it seemed everything I was writing kept circling back to this idea of exile.

I started looking up Manasa's story and saw there were many versions of it, so I felt it would be part of the tradition handed down by the women in my family to create my version of the story. I've never felt part of a tradition before.

All the versions I read did celebrate the women, Manasa and Behula, for their strength and power, but they always still made the men the centre of the story. So here you will not find an obsession with who Manasa's father really was so she could be properly attributed to a man; that her eye was gouged out by another jealous goddess; that Behula's mission was to convince her father-in-law Chand Sadagar to worship Manasa, which he eventually does grudgingly, but only with his left hand . You will find details like this holding women's stories hostage in myths and religions all over the world. When you free them, you really see their power.

So I'm just the latest woman in the generations of women in my family to tell this story. My version is about the bloody, messy, muddy power we've always been told is worth less because it belongs to women. I hope you like it.