I typed with difficulty: Save the lecture for someone who asked for it.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Reappeared.
Then: Typical. When women tell the truth, the sluts start crying about tone.
Sanjana saw my face and reached for the phone. “Let me see.”
I handed it to her. She read the exchange once, then snorted softly.
“She still thinks abuse is an argument,” she said.
I gave a breath that was almost a laugh. “It is her entire personality.”
Sanjana typed something, handed the phone back, and I read it.
Tone aside, you were right about the violence. But you are still not right about everything.
A minute later came Monika’s reply, all fury and no grammar. A paragraph of insult, then another. Coward. Compromised. Class traitor. Patriarchy’s pet. Sellout. I could almost hear her voice climbing the ceiling.
Sanjana took the phone from me again after I started coughing from the effort of reading.
“What did you send?” I asked.
“Nothing worth memorizing,” she said.
That, too, was Sanjana. She never needed the last word. She needed the truthful one.
I lay back and let my eyes drift to the window. The city was visible in slices between the water stain on the glass and the edge of the curtain. A moving line of traffic. A flyover. A distant block of buildings. Somewhere, a metro train crossed like an artery under skin. It struck me then, with the strange cruelty of late clarity, that I had spent years treating Delhi like a stage and it had always treated me like a temporary resident.
I remembered the first monsoon after Sanjana arrived. The lane outside the PG had flooded ankle-deep. Men had rolled up their trousers and cursed. The chai stall owner had lifted his gas cylinder onto two bricks and kept pouring tea as if the weather were a small administrative issue. Bua Devi had stood at the gate with a steel bowl on her hip, watching us as we ran between puddles.
“You girls will catch fever,” she had said. “Or a man. Both are expensive.”
Sanjana had laughed into her sleeve. I had rolled my eyes and said Bua was dramatic.
Bua had looked at me and said, “No, child. I am practical.”
She was practical about everything. Rent. Gossip. The men who came to the lane pretending to be electricians and the ones who came pretending to be cousins and the ones who came with proper shoes and bad intentions. She knew when a girl had started dressing for a man. She knew when a girl had started crying into her pillow. She knew when one of us was lying about where she had been. She never asked the questions she already knew the answers to. That was her version of mercy.
She had once told me, as she adjusted the hem of her sari on the stairs, “A girl can do anything in this city if she remembers where she came from.”
I had answered, “I remember.”
What I meant was: I remember enough to use it.
That was another lie. Not the sort that sounds dramatic in retrospect. The ordinary sort. The kind that let you wake up in a stranger’s bed and believe you had not become what you feared.
The men had changed my life in ways that were always smaller than they sounded from outside. Khanna gave me money and a car and a room and then, eventually, rules. Rohit gave me photographs that made me look like the version of myself I had invented in my head. Vikram gave me visibility and the bored contempt of someone who thought every woman in a lobby was available if the lighting was right. Arjun gave me access to the ramp and then tried to punish me when I stopped being convenient. Kabir gave me love.
Kabir had been the worst and the best of them because he had not been useful in the way the others were. He had been an actor with too much hope and too little work, the kind of man who still believed every woman he loved was a potential home. He used to bring me aloo parathas wrapped in foil when I was shooting late. He would wait outside studios in the heat, pretending he was there for an audition. He liked my face, yes, but more than that he liked the idea of being chosen by someone difficult. I had taken his devotion and used it like a spare key. I had let him drive me places, carry things, listen to me complain, hold me when I was bored. I had kissed him when I needed softness and pushed him away when softness became inconvenient.
He had once asked me, very quietly, “Do you ever love anyone back?”
I had laughed and said, “Love is for people with free time.”
He had not laughed. That was the last time he looked at me with uncomplicated hope.
I thought of him now and felt, not guilt exactly, but something like the outline of it. A bruise on the soul. Kabir had loved me in the way some men love women they cannot afford: with a faithfulness that becomes a wound. I had used that wound to keep myself warm.
Sanjana knew all of this. She knew because she saw more than I wanted her to see, and because she never pretended not to. That was the burden of loving me. She had never made a religion out of my cleverness. She had always seen the panic under it.
I turned my head toward her. “Did anyone call my father?”
Her mouth tightened a little. “Your brother did. I spoke to him.”
Of course he had. Rahul Yadav would have heard the news and immediately turned it into family business, reputation management, a rescue mission with a moral vocabulary. He had always loved me in the suffocating way men in my family loved women: with possession disguised as concern. He wanted to protect me from scandal, which was another way of saying he wanted to protect the story men told about us. He would not care that Khanna had nearly killed me except as a headline risk.
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“That you were alive.”
“And?”
“That if he came here making noise, I would throw him out.”
I smiled despite myself, then regretted it because my split lip complained. “You?”
“Yes,” she said. “Me.”
I believed her. That was the thing. Sanjana had never been loud, but she had a steadiness that made even my brother’s type of masculinity look like cheap theatre. She was the sort of woman who could stand at a hospital door and make a man reconsider his entitlement simply by looking at him without fear.
I closed my eyes and the old arguments returned, the ones we had conducted over tea, over rent, over men, over choices.
“You are too proud,” I had told her once when she refused a shortcut that would have got her a casting if she had only agreed to “be nice” to a producer’s friend.
“And you are too fast,” she had said.