Sanjana finally looked up. “And I think,” she said, in that calm voice that could make a room go still, “that you keep forgetting women are already respected in our homes in ways your politics never acknowledges. Food is served first to the daughter in many houses. The mother protects the girl. The family bends around her safety. Not every culture needs to be explained by imported anger.”
Monika blinked at her. “Imported anger?”
“Yes,” Sanjana said. “Sometimes your feminism sounds like it was delivered in a box with instructions.”
I nearly choked on my soda. Monika’s face went red.
“My feminism,” she said, each word pressed flat with fury, “is about women not getting crushed by men like you two are busy polishing the boots of.”
I laughed then, properly, because she had finally stopped pretending to be above the mud.
“There it is,” I said. “Typical feminist and leftist thing. No argument left, so abuse starts.”
Monika stood up so fast her chair screeched on the floor. “You are both ridiculous little sellouts,” she said. “One of you is a whore with better grammar and the other is a sentimental idiot pretending virtue is a career.”
Sanjana’s face hardened, but she remained composed. “And there it is again,” she said. “Abuse when you cannot answer.”
Monika pointed at both of us like a prosecutor who had lost the case and was now threatening the witnesses. “Enjoy your compromise. Enjoy your patriarchy. It will eat you alive.”
Then she stormed out, nearly colliding with a waiter carrying a tray of tea glasses.
We sat there for a moment in the stale café air, the fan above us rattling like an old ceiling trying to remember if it was still useful.
Then Sanjana laughed. It was a small laugh, but real.
“She is exhausting,” she said.
“She is right about one thing,” I said. “The industry does consume women. It just pays better when you hand yourself over prettily.”
Sanjana looked at me sideways. “That is not a compliment.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
We both smiled then, because the world was ridiculous and because Monika’s rage had a kind of pathetic theater to it. Still, her words stayed with me longer than I admitted. Not because she was right in the moral sense. I was never so sentimental as that. But because she had named something ugly and obvious: the industry was a machine, and women were the material. I had simply decided I would be a piece of the machine that moved.
The problem, as it turned out, was that machines also had parts that broke.
Kabir Anand entered my life through a side door and a bad joke.
He was the kind of struggling actor Delhi produced in batches: long-limbed, underfed, dramatic in a way that had not yet earned money, with a face that looked slightly too earnest for its own survival. He was introduced to me by a stylist friend of Rohit’s at a shoot in a studio in Okhla, where the air conditioner was making a noise like a dying animal and the makeup artist had already sworn three times before noon.
Kabir had been sent to help carry clothes and fetch coffee because, apparently, this was what “starting out” meant in the city: being useful enough to remain visible.
He had looked at me once, just once, and then had the foolishness to smile as if the room had improved.
“You are Nisha Yadav,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow. “And you are observant.”
He grinned. “I saw your last shoot in an online portfolio.”
“Did you like it?”
“I thought you looked like trouble.”
“Good,” I said. “Trouble is more memorable than beauty.”
He had laughed, actually laughed, and that was the first thing I liked about him. Not the fact that he admired me, because men admired me in clusters and trampled each other doing it. Not the fact that he was handsome in a scruffy, underreharsed way. It was that he seemed to know his own disadvantages and had not yet turned bitter enough to weaponize them.
Later, when the photographer was screaming at a junior for losing a clip-on earring and the model in the next chair was asking for another round of contour because she had seen herself in the mirror and disliked reality, Kabir came up to me with a paper cup of tea.
“I thought you might want this,” he said.
I looked at the cup, then at him. “Do I look like someone who drinks tea?”
“No,” he said. “You look like someone who pretends not to need anything.”
That was a dangerous thing to say to me, because I had spent years building a face that made need look like a vulgar habit.
I took the tea. “You have a death wish.”
“Not really,” he said. “I just thought you might not bite.”
“I bite when bored.”
He smiled again, that stupid, open smile. “Then I’ll try not to bore you.”
He was useful from the beginning. He knew which auto drivers would overcharge less if you spoke with enough authority. He knew which cafés near the metro station let people sit for hours on one chai. He knew little corners of the city where you could get a decent coffee, a cheap sandwich, a quiet phone charge, a place to wait out an hour without looking desperate. He had one of those male bodies that looked capable even when the bank balance was not. He also had the irritating decency to never act as if helping me was a transaction.
That made him both safer and more dangerous than the men who paid.
It started with small things. A ride back from a late audition near South Extension when the metro was crowded and my feet hurt from standing in heels for six hours. A packet of chips when I was too hungry to behave. A call to say he had heard of a casting and thought I should know. A message after midnight asking whether I had eaten. I answered selectively, because I was not an idiot. I knew when to make a man wait. I knew when to reward effort with a little warmth so he would keep producing it. Men were very simple creatures once you removed their ego from the room.
Kabir, however, was not simple in the usual way. That was the trouble. He did not only want my body. He wanted my attention in the soft, loyal, domestic sense. He wanted to be the man who saw me between jobs, between men, between versions of myself. He wanted to be useful enough to be kept.
I found that strangely comforting.
Not because I loved him. I did not, not then. Love was a word people used when they wanted to legalize their foolishness. I liked him because he looked at me as if I was a person and not merely a set of angles and eyelashes. That was rare enough to feel like charity.
And charity, once accepted too often, becomes a habit.
By August, I had begun to look like money.