I was not stupid. That is the part people misunderstand about women like me. They imagine we are driven only by vanity and appetite, as if our brains had been removed at the point where our dresses got fitted. It was never like that. I watched rooms. I watched men. I watched which assistant got ignored and which one got promoted because he had the producer’s cousin’s name in his phone. I knew when to laugh, when to look offended, when to look grateful, and when to look bored enough to make a man work harder. I could tell the difference between a man who wanted your body and a man who wanted to own the story of your body. The first was cheaper.
The second was dangerous.
Khanna was the second.
I had not yet admitted that to myself in any honest language. I called it maintenance. I called it arrangement. I called it strategy, which sounded better than hunger and more intelligent than fear. But there were nights when I sat in the auto back to Uttam Nagar after some event and watched the city blur past in ribbons of light, and I felt a thin, unpleasant ache under my ribs, as if some part of me had begun to understand the price of being always available to the highest bidder.
Sanjana, meanwhile, was doing the humiliating work of becoming real.
That was what I called it in my head when I was being kind.
She went to auditions where the casting assistants barely looked up from their phones. She stood in queues with girls younger and thinner and more desperate than her. She learned to wait without turning bitter. She took the metro to South Extension with a tote bag, a water bottle, and that irritatingly steady face of hers. She came back from Sunita Mehta’s office with notes written in a plain notebook and a look that said no one had died, although she had probably been made to sit for hours under a fan that made a bad noise. Sunita’s office was in one of those narrow commercial buildings where the lift smelt of old dust and perfume. The walls were full of women’s faces—some famous, some almost famous, all of them arranged into the illusion that Delhi was fair to anyone who could stand still long enough.
Sunita was not kind, but she was clean in her cruelty. There was dignity in that. She told Sanjana when her walk was wrong, when her expression looked hungry, when she needed to stop trying to please the camera and start understanding it. She did not say, You are special. She said, Come back next week. That, in our world, was practically a blessing.
I mocked Sanjana for that all the time.
“Next week again?” I said one evening when she was telling me about another callback. “You people call this progress? It sounds like a prison sentence.”
She folded her dupatta and placed it carefully over the chair back, as if order itself could keep the world from touching her.
“At least I know what I am waiting for,” she said.
“Darling, that is because you are slow.”
“And you are in a hurry to be used.”
I laughed first, because she had a talent for turning the knife without looking dramatic. Then I threw a cushion at her. She ducked and grinned, and the room went on being our room.
Monika Kevat had turned up again around then, as if the city itself had summoned her to irritate us. She was one of those women who entered a space with the confidence of a microphone being switched on. Hair tied back sharply, tote bag slung over one shoulder, eyes bright with the fury of someone who had read enough theory to become insufferable. She had met us at a panel discussion near Mandi House, one of those half-serious, half-cynical gatherings where people talked about women’s liberation while sipping expensive coffee and checking whether they were being photographed.
Monika had been on stage with three other women and one exhausted moderator. She had said, with great conviction, that patriarchy survived because women kept making excuses for male violence, and that every compromise with men was a betrayal of the sisterhood.
I had waited until the applause died.
Then I had said, “That is easy to say when you are speaking into a microphone and nobody is asking you to pay someone’s rent.”
The room had rustled. People loved an argument the way they loved free food.
Monika’s chin had lifted. “That is exactly the problem. Women keep normalizing dependence and then calling it culture.”
Sanjana, sitting beside me with her tea untouched, had looked at Monika with a kind of patient pity that would have enraged her if she had noticed.
“You keep talking as if protection is oppression,” Sanjana had said quietly. “In our homes, women are fed first, given the better seat, sent out safely, and respected in daily life. That is also women’s dignity. Not everything has to be turned into a slogan.”
Monika had narrowed her eyes. “And that has solved what, exactly? Dowry? Violence? Child marriage? The whole structure is rotten.”
I had leaned back in my chair. “Structures are always rotten. The question is who is clever enough to use the rot.”
Monika had turned to me, scandalized. “That is a disgusting way to talk.”
“It is an honest way to talk,” I said. “I do not need your feminism to tell me how to handle men. I rule them without a lecture.”
That had set her off.
She had started talking over both of us, her voice rising, all contempt and certainty, accusing us of being class traitors, internalized this, patriarchal that. The usual vocabulary of someone who had run out of argument and found abuse easier. I had watched her with mild amusement, because I had always believed that people who cannot answer become loud. It was one of my better theories, and she proved it every single time.
Sanjana had picked up her tea and said, almost lazily, “There. That is typical. When you cannot answer, you begin abusing.”
Monika had called us both shallow, compromised, hypocritical, and several other things I won’t repeat because they were not clever enough to preserve. We had left her standing there with her righteous face crumpling into irritation, and later, in the auto on the way back, Sanjana had laughed so hard she nearly spilled tea on her kurta.
“She really believes volume is a philosophy,” I said.
“She believes anger is enough,” Sanjana replied.
I had looked at her then. The city lights were sliding over her face in strips as the auto moved through traffic near Janakpuri, and I remember thinking, with some irritation, that she was becoming harder to dismiss. Which was annoying. I liked my comparisons simple. It made me feel superior.