There was always somebody crying softly behind a closed door. Somebody else was always on a call with a boyfriend who had stopped paying attention. Someone’s tiffin always smelled better than everyone else’s. Monsoon came in late and mean, drumming the tin roofs, flooding the lane, turning the corner outside the tea stall into a brown mirror of old plastic bags and floating leaves. The power would cut for an hour, sometimes two, and the building would become a hot box of damp bodies and irritated women. Bua Devi would blame the transformer, the weather, the government, and sometimes fate, in that order.
Sanjana arrived fifteen days after me, carrying one suitcase and a plain canvas bag, as if she had come to Delhi for work and not for a war.
I remember her stepping into the room with her wet hair stuck to her neck from the monsoon rain and looking at me with that calm, unshowy face. Dehradun girls had a way of carrying silence like a virtue. She wore a pale salwar suit that looked old but clean, and her dupatta was folded carefully over her arm. She had the kind of beauty that did not announce itself. Not smaller than mine, exactly. Just less interested in being admired.
“So you are the new roommate,” she said.
I looked her up and down. “You are fifteen days late.”
She smiled faintly. “Delhi was busy rejecting me.”
That was the first thing I liked about her. She could take a hit without turning it into a philosophy.
We spent that first evening arranging our things in the room, each of us trying not to look at how little space we had been given by life. The room was barely large enough for two beds, one rickety cupboard, and a fan that wobbled like it had doubts about its own engineering. The shared bathroom down the corridor had a door that never fully shut. The mirror there was cracked in the left corner, so every girl who used it looked slightly more honest than she wanted to be.
Sanjana noticed my new phone the moment I put it on charge.
“Nice,” she said.
“Necessary.”
She understood the tone and left it there.
Later, when we were both on our beds and the rain was tapping the window like an impatient auditor, she told me she had come from Dehradun because Delhi had more opportunities. She had done a course in beauty and styling, worked briefly in a salon, and wanted to get into fashion properly. She was not one of those girls who spoke of modelling as if it were a divine right. She spoke of it like a difficult job with good pictures.
I liked that too. It made her sound less deluded than the others.
The next day, while I was downstairs making tea from the common kettle, one of the girls from the room across the corridor pulled Sanjana aside and offered her a number. Not a casting number. A man’s number. The kind of number that arrived with a smile and a warning wrapped in the same breath. I saw it happen from the stairwell, the exchange of glances, the slight lowering of the voice, the old routine dressed up as opportunity.
At dinner, Sanjana told me about it with the calm of someone describing a mosquito.
“She said I could get quick money if I met him tonight.”
I snorted. “And you said?”
“I said no.”
I looked at her properly then, because the answer was too immediate to be accidental.
“You said no to money?”
“I said no to being used.”
I laughed because that was easier than respecting her. “Used? Darling, everything in this city is use. Even the metro uses you. Even your landlord uses you. At least with a man there is cash.”
She watched me with a kind of patient pity that irritated me instantly.
“I do not want to become somebody’s disposable thing,” she said.
“Oh, please,” I said. “That sounds noble until rent is due.”
She did not rise to the bait. That annoyed me more than if she had shouted.
Instead she said, “I would rather struggle than be bought that way.”
There are certain statements that make a person want to slap the speaker simply because the speaker has managed to sound morally inconvenient.
I leaned back against the wall and gave her my best smile, the one that made men stupid and women suspicious.
“Struggle is for people who can afford the luxury of principle,” I said.
Sanjana folded her hands in her lap. “And being bought is for people who have mistaken humiliation for ambition.”
That landed harder than it should have. I pretended it didn’t.
“Very pretty sentence,” I said. “You should frame it and hang it over your bed.”
She did not smile this time. “You can call me stupid if it helps you sleep. But I know what I do not want.”
I lit a cigarette at the window, though the smoke made my eyes sting.
“What you do not want,” I said, “is money with too much honesty attached.”
She glanced at me. “And what you want is money with no honesty at all.”
“Correct.”
She looked away first. That was the first small victory I gave myself over her, though in truth she had won simply by refusing to become what she disliked.
A few days later Monika arrived at the PG with a stack of flyers and the energy of a woman who had never met a sentence she could not turn into a lecture.
She lived in the room next to ours and worked at some NGO office near Dwarka, or maybe she had a workshop there, or maybe she merely liked saying NGO because it made her sound morally insured. She had cropped hair, thick spectacles, and the sort of voice that arrived before her body did. She could not enter a room quietly if her life depended on it.
She saw me and Sanjana in the corridor one evening and thrust a flyer at us.
“Discussion on women’s autonomy,” she announced.
I looked at the flyer. “That sounds like a threat.”
She ignored me, as was her custom. “You girls should come. These issues are important.”
Sanjana took the flyer and read it. “What issues?”
“Patriarchy. Gendered labour. Women’s right to choose.”
I smiled sweetly. “I do choose, actually. Very often.”
Monika’s eyes sharpened. “That is not what I mean.”
“No,” I said. “You mean I should choose the way you approve of.”
She gave me the sort of stare people reserve for bad habits and corrupt governments.
“You are participating in your own exploitation.”
I laughed out loud. “And you are participating in a very expensive sentence.”
Sanjana, because she had more patience than I did, asked, “What do you mean by autonomy?”
Monika straightened as if she had been waiting her whole life for an audience. “I mean women should not have to negotiate their bodies for access. They should not be forced by economics into degrading choices.”
I nodded once. Fair enough, as far as it went. Not wrong, just incomplete.