I should have been angry. I was angry. But anger was expensive, and I had begun to feel the budget.
Then there was the scandal, or the almost-scandal, which in Delhi was enough to make everyone act as if they had seen a body.
It started with a video clip, half-lit and badly cropped, circulating through the industry circles like a dirty joke. A senior stylist had been filmed shouting at a junior assistant during a late-night fitting. Then came the thread of messages, screenshots, old complaints, whispered names. Nothing that would have mattered in a city with a conscience. In Delhi, where morality was mostly a service industry, it mattered enough to make men nervous. Everyone suddenly wanted to be seen washing their hands. Everyone suddenly remembered boundaries. The same men who had once flirted with scandal as a badge of sophistication now spoke in grave tones about professionalism and respect.
The worst part was not the scandal itself. It was the way it changed the air around women like me. The men who had once been hungry became cautious. The ones who had once been generous became suspicious. The ones who had once promised opportunity began to speak in the language of risk.
A woman could survive being desired. She could even survive being envied. But being considered inconvenient was the beginning of social death.
That week I had a stress-related collapse of the sort that sounds melodramatic until it happens to you. I had not slept properly in days. Khanna had been calling more often. I had been drinking too much coffee and not enough water and living on cigarettes and the fiction of control. I went for a fitting in South Extension, stood too long under hot lights while a tailor pinned a hem, and suddenly the room tilted. Not dramatically. Not in a cinema way. More like the floor had remembered it was not obliged to be steady for me.
I sat down on the nearest chair, which happened to belong to a very annoyed makeup artist.
Someone said my face had gone white. Someone else asked if I had eaten. Men always asked that question as if a woman’s body were a machine and lunch the only possible maintenance issue. I said I was fine, because that is what women say when they are trying not to become a topic.
But on the ride back I felt the panic arriving in my chest in small, stupid waves. By the time I reached the clinic near the market, I was furious at myself for needing one. Needing anything was humiliating. It made you legible.
The clinic smelled of antiseptic, old air-conditioning, and the despair of people who had come there expecting quick fixes. A television in the corner was playing some afternoon serial with the sound off. A child in a plastic chair was swinging his legs and coughing. A woman in a faded dupatta was arguing with the receptionist about the price of a test. Delhi’s class system was never hidden in places like that. It sat in the waiting room and pretended to be sick with everyone else.
The doctor was a woman with careful eyes and a face that had learned not to show surprise. She asked me questions in a flat professional voice. Sleep? Food? Stress? Periods? Sex? I answered enough to seem cooperative and withheld enough to preserve dignity, though by then I had begun to suspect dignity was just a decorative word for poverty.
“Your body is under strain,” she said at last. “You need rest.”
I laughed, because the alternative was to scream. “Rest is not really part of my current career plan.”
She looked at me as if she had heard that sentence from a hundred girls before me. “Then your current career plan is stupid.”
I liked her instantly for that.
She gave me medicines that tasted like chalk and made me sleepy in a mean, condescending way. I took them anyway. The body, when it starts complaining, becomes a very expensive employee. You may despise it, but you still have to pay it.
When I came out of the clinic, the sky had darkened in that Delhi way where afternoon suddenly looks like an unpaid bill. The monsoon had not fully left the city; it just kept forgetting to go. A damp wind moved through the market. The roads were slick. A man selling roasted corn had wrapped plastic over his cart. An auto driver with one broken mirror shouted at two women arguing over fare. Somewhere nearby, a generator coughed into life after a power cut, and the whole lane smelled briefly of diesel and defeat.
I called Sanjana because I had no one else I trusted enough to be practical with me.
That was not a sentence I would have written in a diary. It sounded too much like truth.
She answered on the second ring, which told me she was not in class or on set or in one of those long, disciplined silences she wore like a clean cotton shirt.
“What happened?” she asked immediately.
“I need a ride,” I said.
A pause. “Are you okay?”
“I said I need a ride, not a lecture.”
“I know. Where are you?”
I gave her the clinic name.
“Sit there. I’m coming.”
She said it the way she said everything difficult: with almost no drama, which made the kindness more irritating. Sanjana had that effect on people. She made decency look like a practical habit instead of a performance.
She arrived forty minutes later in a shared auto, her hair tied back, a mask on, a tote bag slung over one shoulder, looking as if she had come from a life that contained errands rather than emergencies. She was still not beautiful in the way men in Delhi usually meant it. She was something worse, and much more durable: clear. Clean-faced. Straight-backed. Annoyingly unadorned. The sort of girl you underestimated at your own peril.
“You look like shit,” she said, taking one look at me.
“That is your greeting?”
“It is my honest assessment.”
I wanted to tell her to go to hell, but the medicine had made me soft around the edges. Besides, she was already paying for the auto, which made abuse feel tacky.
She bought me water and a packet of biscuits from the pharmacy next door. We sat on the clinic steps while the sky threatened rain and the traffic snarled around us like a bad thought.
“You should have told me earlier,” she said.
“And give you the pleasure of saying I told you so?”
“I do not say that.”
“You do. You just make it sound moral.”
She smiled a little, then looked at me in that quiet, searching way of hers which always made me feel as if I had been caught with my hand in a drawer I had no business opening. “Are you in trouble with him?”
I did not ask which him. There was only one.
“No,” I said too fast.