I sat cross-legged on the bed and scrolled through my contacts. There were a few people in Delhi already, the kind of contacts girls collected the way other girls collected bangles: a cousin’s friend, a senior from some beauty pageant workshop, a photographer who had once said I had “presence,” a producer’s assistant who had liked my profile picture and then, after I had ignored him for three weeks, had liked it again as if persistence were a form of prayer. None of them mattered yet. They would. In Delhi, things only became real after enough people had pretended to want them.
A message came from my brother.
Call home when you have settled. Don’t roam around alone after dark. Father is already worried. Remember who you are.
I stared at the screen and almost laughed.
Remember who you are. As if I had been in danger of forgetting.
I typed back: I arrived safely. I know exactly who I am.
That was not entirely true, but it sounded good.
Evening came early, as it often did in the city when the sky was clouded with heat and residue from somewhere else. The lane outside turned a shade darker, the shops lowered their shutters, the samosa stall near the corner lit its stove, and the smell of frying oil crawled through the open window with all the subtlety of gossip. Somewhere a generator coughed to life. The electricity had flickered once already, and now the fan was moving with a kind of tired persistence, as if it had accepted that no one would replace it and had decided to continue out of spite.
I went out to buy water and came back with a packet of biscuits and a bruised tomato, because apparently even I could not be trusted with a simple errand when left alone in a new city.
The room looked smaller when I came back into it, as if the walls had leaned in to inspect my purchase. I set the water down by the bed, the biscuits beside it, and bit into one of them standing up, because sitting felt too much like surrender. The biscuit tasted of sugar and dust. Not terrible. Not good. Very Delhi, I thought: something dry enough to choke you and cheap enough to keep you coming back.
Outside, the lane kept up its ugly little theatre. A scooter barked past. A woman shouted at a child. Someone’s television was turned up so loud I could hear the laugh track through the wall, bright and stupid, like the city was mocking itself. The fan above me kept circling, pushing warm air around the room in patient, useless loops. I lay down fully clothed, one arm over my eyes, and listened to the building settle.
I had told no one the truth, which was that I was not just here to work. I was here to become visible. That was the real hunger. Not safety, not comfort, not even independence, though I would have taken those too. I wanted the kind of life that made people shut up when they heard your name. I wanted to be the sort of woman my brother would mention carefully, with pride and irritation mixed together. I wanted my father to hear of me from other mouths. I wanted my mother, if she thought of me at all, to think of me as someone who had escaped the shape of our house.
In the dark, my room held no promises. It was a rented box in Uttam Nagar with a peeling patch near the switchboard and a window that looked onto another wall, close enough to touch if I leaned out and ruined my life. But I lay there feeling, with the certainty of the young and the desperate, that this was temporary. The mattress was temporary. The chipped bowl on the shelf was temporary. The smell of damp paint and frying oil and the neighbour’s detergent was temporary. I would stay a little while, work, save, sharpen myself into someone unavoidable, and then leave all this behind in one elegant motion.
I even gave myself a deadline, because hope is more manageable when it has a date. Within months, I told myself. Not years. Months. By then I would have money in my account, a better room, a better voice, a life that did not require explanation. I would not be the girl who had arrived with one suitcase and a face too full of expectation. I would be someone Delhi had to make room for.
The fan clicked, slowed, and then resumed its tired spin. The power must have dipped again, because the bulb gave a small shiver of light. I stared at the ceiling until the plaster blurred into a pale country of cracks and shadows. Somewhere in the building a door slammed, and then there was silence so complete it felt staged.
I lay awake that night certain this room was temporary, unaware the real test would arrive in fifteen days and look nothing like me.