I had been so sure then. That certainty now looked less like confidence and more like a fever.
Sanjana had arrived fifteen days later with two suitcases, a cheap umbrella, and that infuriating habit of apologizing to furniture when she bumped into it. Dehradun had shaped her differently from Mainpuri. Not softer, exactly. More patient. Hills instead of plains. Cantonment discipline instead of political noise. She carried herself as if she expected the world to be rude but not fatal. I had mocked her for it on the second day, maybe the third, when she asked if we could pay the electricity bill on time and I laughed and said, “You sound like someone’s obedient daughter.”
She had looked at me and said, “And you sound like someone who thinks volume is the same as strength.”
I had hated her for that line. I had also remembered it.
Now, with a tube in my arm and my ribs burning when I breathed, I thought: yes. She had been right. Even then.
The city outside the window had changed while I was lying there between consciousness and whatever came next. Delhi always changed its clothes too quickly. One season it wore dust, another it wore rain, another it wore a thin mask of wellness and another it wore grief like a cheap shawl. But the bones were the same. Metro pillars stained with advertisements. Chai stalls under flyovers. Men in offices pretending not to be hungry. Women carrying bags that weighed more than their pay. The same lane in Uttam Nagar where the waterlogged road reflected broken neon after a monsoon shower. The same shared bathroom queue where we had once stood with buckets and wet hair and argued over whether dignity was a luxury or a discipline.
I had once thought I was smarter because I moved faster.
That was what my life had been, really. Speed with lipstick.
I had learned how to read a room before I learned how to respect it. I knew which photographer wanted to be admired, which producer wanted to feel young, which show organizer wanted the girl who made him feel powerful and then grateful. I knew how to tilt my head, when to laugh, when to let silence do the work, when to make a man believe he had invented desire all by himself. I called it strategy because strategy sounded cleaner than hunger.
Khanna had been the biggest of them, which was exactly why I had gone to him.
R.K. Khanna. Wealth with a belly and a temper. The kind of man who never had to raise his voice in public because the room had already learned to lower itself around him. He had liked me because I was beautiful and rude and not obviously grateful. Men like him did not want worship; they wanted resistance they could pay to overcome. He had bought dinners, bags, a driver sometimes, a room with too much polished wood and too little air. I had told myself I was using him. That was the joke I used to tell myself when I was trying on expensive things in his bathroom mirror.
I was not stupid. I knew what I was doing. I knew it was transactional. I knew Delhi was full of women and men pretending that sex was the only currency that mattered when in fact it was just the easiest one to shame. I knew I was bartering access. The ugly part was that it worked. It worked often enough to make me feel vindicated.
Rohit had given me my first serious portfolio after a night that began with a dinner I could not afford and ended with his hand on my thigh and my smile arranged like a lockpick. Vikram had put me in front of an ad-film lens because I had said the right thing in a corridor and then the wrong thing in his car, which turned out to be exactly what he wanted. Arjun had promised a ramp slot and a bigger show if I kept “being nice,” which in his language meant remaining available, decorative, and grateful.
I had played them all. I had won enough to believe winning was the same as arriving.
And each time I won, something in me shrank a little and called it discipline.
Sanjana had watched all this with the expression of someone witnessing a fire through a window. She never judged me in the simple way people like to imagine moral people judge. She judged the cost. That was what I did not understand until much later. She was never saying desire was evil or money was dirty or ambition was shameful. She was saying that the bill always came due somewhere else, and usually on the bodies of people who had not agreed to pay it.
I had mocked her for working retail, for giving auditions and then waiting, for taking calls from Sunita Mehta and writing down instructions in her notebook as if discipline were a religion. Sunita, with her sharp eyes and her dry voice, had been the first person in that industry to look at Sanjana and see reliability instead of hunger. She did not flatter. She did not promise miracles. She gave Sanjana a small reel job, then a casting, then another. It was humiliating work, the honest kind. Waiting in corridors. Being told to come back. Being told no by assistants barely older than teenagers with sunglasses on their heads and power in their pockets. Sanjana endured all of it with that same infuriating calm.
I had once laughed and called her weak.
Weak. As if patience were a defect and not an instrument.
My phone buzzed on the side table, and the sound dragged me back to the room. Sanjana reached for it before I could. She glanced at the screen and made a face.
“Monika,” she said.
I almost laughed, and it hurt.
“Of course it is.”
She handed me the phone. My fingers trembled. The text preview was enough to make me know the tone before I opened it.
You should know I told you both this would happen. Men like him don’t just ‘lose control,’ they are enabled by the whole rotten structure. Also, if either of you has started crying over patriarchal violence now, spare me. You girls loved the system when it paid you.
I stared at the screen.
Even in my condition, Monika could still sound like an argument wearing lipstick. I saw her face immediately — sharp cheekbones, aggressive eyeliner, the kind of confidence that came from being certain the world was intellectually beneath you. She had a real point in her somewhere, usually buried under ten layers of accusation and one layer of self-righteousness. She was not wrong that the system fed on all of us. She was not wrong that men like Khanna were not isolated monsters but polished symptoms. She was not wrong that women got blamed for the violence done to them while institutions called it procedure. On paper, she was often right.
But Monika never knew when to stop being right and start being human.