That summer, my visibility increased in the way cheap perfume increases in a closed room: slowly, then all at once. A small magazine did a feature on “new faces to watch,” which was a pretentious phrase for girls they had not yet ruined. A stylist borrowed me for a showcase and kept telling people I had “presence,” which meant he had no idea how else to describe my face. I walked two shows, one in a mall and one in a half-decent hall near Connaught Place where the backstage area was so cramped that models kept stepping on each other’s heels and pretending not to notice.
Backstage at the second show, I met Arnav Joshi properly.
I had noticed him before, in the way one notices a man who is not trying to be noticed. He was in the corner with a notebook, not dressed like the others, not performing interest. There were plenty of men in that world who came armed with smiles and business cards and the eager stupidity of people who thought access was the same as intelligence. Arnav was different. He looked like he was collecting dust for a reason.
He asked me a question about the rehearsal schedule.
Not about my face. Not about my body. Not even the usual lazy compliment men used as a handshake.
I said, “You are either a journalist or a bore.”
He smiled slightly, as if he had heard worse and better.
“Journalist,” he said. “Arnav.”
“Nisha.”
“I know.”
Of course he did. That was the problem with becoming visible. People began to know your name before they knew your character, which was a terrible order in which to be introduced to a human being.
He did not linger. He asked a few precise questions, then moved away to speak to someone from production. I remember watching him across the room and thinking he had the patient face of a man who was dangerous in a very unshowy way. Not the loud sort of danger that wears leather and makes women nervous in elevators. The quiet sort. The sort that waits.
At the time I dismissed him. I had too many men circling already. One more observer was not a threat.
I was wrong, but not in the way I expected.
Kabir, for instance, was never a threat. He was a wound in human form.
He had been hanging around the edges of the industry for months—actor, failed model, occasional host, one of those boys who had good skin and no leverage. He loved me with embarrassing sincerity, the kind of love that makes a woman feel briefly powerful and then vaguely dirty. He would bring me coffee, offer to pick me up from shoots, send messages after midnight that were longer than necessary and sadder than they should have been.
“You do not have to carry everything alone,” he told me once when I had been rude to him for no reason except that I was tired and he was available.
I had looked at him and thought: that is exactly what I am doing.
Instead I said, “I am not carrying anything. I am moving.”
He had smiled as if I had said something profound. Men like Kabir were always eager to turn indifference into poetry if the woman was pretty enough.
That year I used him when I needed company that did not require payment. He liked taking me to late coffee places in Hauz Khas where the music was too loud and the walls were covered in fake plants, because he thought pretending to be modern might make him worthy of me. Sometimes he paid. Sometimes I did. Once, after a show, he held my hand under the table in a café and said he wanted me to stop seeing men who treated me like a project.
I had laughed and kissed his cheek to shut him up.
He had looked happy for three seconds, which was how I knew exactly how much damage I was doing.
Sanjana saw it before I did, or maybe she saw it and did not say anything because she knew me too well.
“Why are you still with him?” she asked one night when Kabir had left after dropping me back.
“Because he is useful.”
She stared at me. “That is a horrible thing to say.”
“It is also true.”
“Do you ever say what you mean?”
“I always say what I mean. The world just prefers prettier lies.”
She was silent for a moment, then said, “You are not wrong about the world. That does not make you right about yourself.”
I hated when she did that. Not because she was dramatic, but because she was not. She landed things softly enough that they stayed.
The monsoon that year came down hard, turning the road outside the PG into a flooded argument. Water seeped into the walls, the plaster swelling in small ugly blisters. Bua Devi complained that the building was held together by prayers and bad cement. The metro stations were packed with masked bodies and damp umbrellas, the air inside the trains thick with wet clothes and cheap deodorant. Men still stared, of course. The pandemic had not cured them. Delhi had merely learned to keep its face half covered while continuing its habits.
One evening, when the electricity had gone out for the third time and the room was lit by the blue glow of our phones, Sanjana sat cross-legged on the bed with her campaign contract open and a pencil tucked above her ear. She had started to look more grounded, which in our world meant more dangerous. A girl who had nothing could be dismissed. A girl who had something, even something small, had to be negotiated with.
“I have to go to Sunita’s office tomorrow,” she said.
“For what?”
“She said she wants to try me in a larger campaign if this one does well.”
I let out a low whistle. “Look at you. The slow donkey may reach the palace after all.”
She threw the contract at me. “And you?”
I shrugged. “I have a fitting in Gurgaon. Then a dinner.”
“For Khanna?”
“For whoever pays.”
That was the line I used when I wanted to sound amused instead of trapped.
Sanjana looked at me for a long second. The fan buzzed overhead and the room smelled of wet clothes and talcum powder and the faint onion smell from the neighbouring room where somebody was cooking because electricity or no electricity, girls still had to eat.
“You know,” she said, “you do not have to keep doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Acting like you are always the one in control.”
I laughed. “And you do not have to keep acting like struggle is a moral achievement.”
“It is not moral. It is just mine.”
That answer irritated me more than it should have, because there was no vanity in it. Only stubbornness.