She ignored that and used the torch to check the room. There was a crack near the window frame where the rain sometimes came in sideways. She asked if I knew where the bucket was. I did. She asked about the washroom timings downstairs. I told her Bua Devi made a list in her head and enforced it with the expression of a prison matron. Sanjana nodded as if this were all normal. It was not normal. But Delhi liked to dress up its humiliations as practicalities.
A sharp knock came at the door a few minutes later.
“Open,” Bua Devi called from outside.
I muttered, “The queen arrives.”
When I opened the door, Bua Devi stood in the corridor with one hand on her hip and an expression that could have curdled milk. She was a thickset woman in a faded sari with a bindi the size of a small accusation. Her hair was oiled flat, her nose ring glinted, and her eyes had the calibrated cruelty of a woman who had survived marriage, rent collection, and other people’s lies.
She looked past me into the room, saw Sanjana standing by the window with the torch, and immediately made a mental inventory.
“This one is new,” she said.
“Yes,” I replied. “You’re very observant.”
She ignored me. “Rent will be on time?”
“Of course.”
“Late means extra.”
“Everything in your life means extra,” I said.
Her mouth twitched, which was as close as Bua Devi came to laughing. She stepped into the room, inspected the bed arrangement, the almirah, the damp patch near the wall, and Sanjana’s neatly folded clothes. Then her gaze landed on my suitcase, open and half-spilled like a confession.
She clicked her tongue. “One is respectable. One is trouble.”
I smiled sweetly. “Which one is me?”
She looked at Sanjana. “Not you.”
Sanjana, to her credit, did not bristle. She said, “I’ve just arrived.”
“That’s how trouble begins,” Bua Devi said. “First they arrive. Then they say they are only here for work. Then boys come. Then complaints. Then tears. Then police. Then one day the room is empty and the landlord has your unpaid bills and your reputation.”
“That is a very cinematic understanding of tenant management,” I said.
“It is a very Delhi understanding,” she shot back. “You girls think this city is your mirror. It is not. It is a grinder.”
I was about to tell her that grinders were useful if you knew what you were doing, but she had already turned to Sanjana.
“You,” she said, pointing a finger at her with no malice but plenty of authority, “keep your things locked. This one”—and now she pointed at me—“will borrow your lipstick and your sanity.”
I laughed. Sanjana smiled into her hand.
Bua Devi left as abruptly as she had come, leaving behind the smell of attar and warning.
When the door shut, Sanjana said, “She likes you.”
“She fears me.”
“That too.”
I tossed my hair. “I am expensive to offend.”
She said, “I can see that.”
The power returned around seven, just long enough to make the fan begin its unhappy revolution. The room lifted a little from darkness into its usual tired self. We both went down later to the tea stall because the rain had thinned to a persistent drizzle and the room had become too small for two women and their opinions. The lane was a mess of puddles reflecting broken tube lights and the wet undersides of passing autos. The tea stall was a corrugated tin structure with a blue tarpaulin roof and three plastic stools, always occupied by men who looked as if they had been born waiting for something.
The chai seller, a thin man with a face like a dried apple, greeted me because I had been there twice before and because Delhi remembers repeat customers more affectionately than relatives.
“Two teas,” I said. “And samosas.”
Sanjana looked at the tray. “You eat fried food in this weather?”
“I eat what is available.”
“That sounds like a philosophy.”
“It is. Very advanced. You wouldn’t understand.”
She sat carefully on the stool, holding her tiffin in her lap like it was a passport. We drank the tea standing at the edge of the awning while the rain misted down on the lane. The tea was too sweet, too hot, and exactly right. The samosas were greasy enough to qualify as a moral compromise.
Around us, the neighborhood performed itself. A boy on a bicycle nearly skidded into a gutter and swore. Two women carrying vegetables over their heads walked past without stopping to look at us, but I knew they had looked. In places like this, every woman was being measured against an invisible standard: too bold, too quiet, too pretty, too poor, too much of something. Sanjana looked like a girl from home trying to remain decent in a city that considered decency a provincial hobby. I looked like a girl who intended to turn indecency into a career.
“What made you come?” she asked.
I took a sip of tea and considered lying, because lying is an art and I was already gifted. But the rain had made the evening sentimental in the ugly way weather sometimes does.
“Mainpuri got small,” I said. “And everyone in it got larger than they deserved.”
She nodded as if she understood. “For me, it was the opposite. Dehradun got too comfortable. I wanted to see if I could do something difficult.”
I made a face. “That is such a nice-girl answer.”
“It’s also true.”
“Truth is often badly written.”
She smiled. “What about you? Is modelling really the dream?”
I looked at the puddles, at the bikes, at the anonymous faces under the awnings, at the city pretending to be temporary while secretly arranging everyone’s fate. “It’s not a dream,” I said. “It’s a ladder.”
“A ladder to where?”
“Higher than this.”
“That’s vague.”
“It’s enough.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I want to earn my place. Not be handed one.”
I laughed, because I genuinely thought she was being naive. “Handed? In Delhi? Darling, nobody hands you anything. They rent it to you at interest.”
She turned to me. “And you think the rent is worth it?”
“At least it gets you somewhere.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not.”
There it was again—that irritating calm. As if the world could be approached with caution and still be conquered. I wanted to tell her that caution was just fear wearing clean clothes. Instead I looked at her hands, which were holding the tea glass without shaking, and felt a small, unwilling respect. Not for her choices. For her nerve.
On the way back, we passed a wall plastered with old posters for coaching centers, local dentists, and one faded notice about a fashion workshop that had already happened. The paper peeled from the wall in the rain, curling at the corners like a dead flower. Sanjana stopped to look at it.
“You should go,” I told her. “If the workshop is still running in the poster’s spirit, maybe they’ll take you.”
She rolled her eyes. “You make everything sound ridiculous.”