By the summer of 2022, Delhi had learned to sweat again.
That sounds poetic only if you have never lived through the kind of heat that turned the walls of a shared room into wet breathing skin, the kind that made the corridor outside our PG smell like damp cement, frying oil, and somebody’s cheap body spray failing in real time. In Uttam Nagar, the monsoon did not arrive like a blessing. It arrived like a leak in the sky, then stayed to make everyone miserable. The lanes filled with brown water and plastic cups, the drains muttered, the autos splashed past like they had personal grudges, and the metro station kept spitting out masked faces with the dead-eyed patience of commuters who had accepted that life was mostly standing in queues.
Our landlord, Bua Devi, said the weather exposed character.
She said it while banging on our door with two fingers and a steel tumbler in her hand, demanding rent in the tone of a woman asking for a kidney. She wore cotton saris with borders faded from a decade of washing and had the kind of face that made you trust her and fear her at the same time. She knew everything. Who had gone out at midnight, who had returned with wet hair, who had started talking to whom on the terrace, who had hidden an extra girl in a room meant for two. She kept the PG running on a mixture of authority, boredom, and pure surveillance.
“Character comes out when the weather turns bad,” she told Sanjana one afternoon, staring at the black sky gathering over the lanes. “And when the electricity goes.”
The lights had gone three times already that week. Each time the room had turned into a hot cave, and the ceiling fan had come to a halt with a slow, offended cough. Then the building would fill with the sound of people swearing in different registers, the clatter of buckets in the bathroom, somebody’s phone torch beam cutting through the corridor like a knife.
I had started to like those blackouts in a twisted way. They made everybody equal for a few minutes. The girl who wore fake pearls to her interview and the boy who pretended to be a poet on the terrace both became damp, irritated bodies in the dark. Delhi loved hierarchy too much to let equality survive long, of course. The generator would kick in, if Bua Devi felt generous or somebody had bribed the electrician, and the old world would return with its fans, its half-light, its grumbling.
By then Sanjana and I had settled into the rhythm of each other’s breathing in the room. She was still maddeningly clean in her habits, folding her clothes with the sort of care that made me suspect her of secretly owning more than one future. I had stopped mocking her in front of her face because it had become too easy and therefore boring. I still thought her choices were weak, of course. I thought that every time she chose a cheaper meal, every time she said no to a man with a car, every time she stayed up making notes for some casting list while I was already halfway into a better life. But she had this irritating habit of becoming more herself under pressure, while I only became sharper.
“Your room looks like a crime scene,” Monika announced the first time she came up to our floor and pushed open the door without knocking.
Monika Kevat had the confidence of a woman who had been arguing since birth and had never once considered that silence might also be a form of intelligence. She wore oversized T-shirts with feminist slogans on them, though the slogans were usually so ironic that I suspected she bought them for the rage they caused in others rather than for the words themselves. She had a loud laugh, heavy silver earrings, and the kind of face that looked permanently prepared to say, I told you so.
She had attached herself to our lives the way damp attached itself to Delhi’s walls.
We had met her at a small café near the metro station where a group of women from some left-leaning student collective had been handing out leaflets about workplace harassment, unpaid labour, and bodily autonomy. Monika had been at the center of the circle, one hand on her hip, explaining to anyone foolish enough to listen that women were not free just because they had more consumer choices. Then she had looked at me, looked properly, and said, “You are what patriarchy looks like when it is wearing lipstick.”
I had laughed in her face.
Sanjana had not.
That was how I knew Sanjana was more dangerous than she appeared. I could always tell when she was offended. She simply became quieter, which made people underestimate the damage.
Monika had also, to my surprise, become a regular nuisance in our orbit because she was useful in a perverse way. She knew people. She knew where the protests were, which casting agents were “all talk,” which art-house people were secretly sleazy, which publications were hiring interns and which editors liked to be flattered. She also liked us, in her own abrasive way, because we did not flatter her back.
At the café that afternoon, she had planted herself opposite me with a glass of lemon soda and begun the same sermon she always began.
“You girls keep calling everything choice,” she said. “But choice is a luxury term. Most women are choosing between different forms of exploitation. That does not make them empowered. It makes the system efficient.”
I had leaned back in my chair and crossed one leg over the other. My black top clung to my body just enough to make the man at the neighboring table keep pretending not to stare. Delhi men had the self-control of hungry dogs.
“And your solution is what?” I asked Monika. “To sit in a circle and say words like ‘system’ until the system feels ashamed?”
Sanjana had looked into her tea and smiled with that maddening softness of hers, as if she were about to stroke a stray animal or slap someone with a flower.
“My solution is not to be stupid about the world,” Monika snapped.
“No one said you were stupid,” I said. “Just loud.”
She gave me a glare sharp enough to cut metal. “You think because you use men you are smarter than women who are used.”
“I think,” I said, “that I don’t need a feminist label to know how power works. Men want beauty, attention, obedience, fantasy. Give them the fantasy, keep the leverage, and take the money. That is not ideology. That is business.”
Monika let out a short, disgusted laugh. “You are calling prostitution business now?”
I smiled at her. “I am calling your moral panic lazy.”