That was when Monika’s face changed. She had a quick temper, which is fine in a revolutionary and embarrassing in a friend.
“Oh, please,” she said. “You two are both hypocrites. One of you sells herself to rich men and calls it strategy, and the other one excuses patriarchy with family values. Spare me your moral theatre.”
I smiled sweetly. “There it is. The usual performance. When you cannot answer, you abuse.”
“Typical feminist and leftist habit,” Sanjana said, not even looking at her. “Shout first, think later.”
Monika’s eyes flashed. “You are both regressive.”
“And you are loud,” I said. “Do you want tea or a fight? Because you are only equipped for one.”
She left ten minutes later, offended and muttering, which was her usual exit from any argument that made her have to slow down and be precise. I watched her go and thought, not for the first time, that ideology was often just vanity with a vocabulary.
But even that thought had less bite than it used to.
Because there were other things happening to me now, things that did not care about arguments.
The calls from Khanna grew stranger. Less patient. More frequent. He began to ask who had taken me to the clinic, as if the answer were something he had a right to know. He commented on my tone if I sounded distracted. He asked where I had been when I did not answer quickly enough. Once, when I was in a cab on my way to a shoot, he called four times in a row and then said, very softly, “You are becoming difficult.”
I laughed. “I am busy.”
“No,” he said. “You are forgetting yourself.”
That sentence should have irritated me less than it did. Instead it lodged somewhere under my ribs.
The worst part of possessive men is that they always think they are being loving. They do not see themselves as jailers. They imagine they are preserving what they have bought. Khanna had started treating my time, my silence, my movement, even my moods as property. If I smiled at the wrong man, he noticed. If I did not answer the phone, he noticed. If I went to a café with Sanjana or stayed late at a studio, he noticed. He did not need to shout. He had money. Money made a man quiet in a dangerous way.
I began to alter my routine to avoid his temper, which was how the leash worked before you noticed it was around your neck. I changed cars. I switched numbers once and then regretted it because all his people knew all my people. I started telling him less, which made him ask more. Every lie bought me an hour and cost me a day.
At the studio, the others could feel it too, though they did not name it. Women always know when another woman has begun to live under pressure. It changes the face. It changes the timing. It changes the way you look at a door.
One evening after a shoot, Rohit leaned against the backdrop stand and said, “You seem tense lately.”
I was still in makeup, my hair pinned up, my dress clipped at the back. The mirror threw me back at myself in fragments. A cheekbone. A mouth. A pair of eyes that looked expensive and tired.
“I am fine,” I said.
He smiled in that careful, almost-pitying way men use when they think they have already outgrown you. “You used to be more fun.”
That one stung because it was cheap and because some ugly part of me knew he meant it as a compliment.
“Then you should have enjoyed me more while I was available,” I said.
He gave a short laugh. “That sounds like a threat.”
“It was a memory.”
Later, in the parking lot, I saw Sanjana waiting near the gate. She was not doing anything dramatic. She was simply standing there with her bag tucked under one arm, looking as if she had every right to be wherever she was. That, more than anything, made me wary. Women who wait without fidgeting are never waiting by accident.
She saw me and lifted her chin in greeting, as if we were colleagues and not two people who had spent too many years orbiting the same dangerous men. I walked toward her slowly, still half in costume, still carrying the stale heat of the studio lights on my skin.
“Do you have a minute?” she asked.
I looked past her, toward the line of cars and the gate and the men lingering near their drivers. “For what?”
“For something you may not want to hear.”
I should have kept walking. I knew that even then. But curiosity is often just obedience wearing a prettier dress, and I had never been able to resist a woman who came to me with the face of someone carrying bad news.
We moved away from the gate and stood beneath a dying neem tree where the light was thinner. Sanjana folded her arms, then unfolded them again. She was younger than me, but there was a hardness in her that did not come from age. It came from having learned early that softness was expensive.
“Rohit has been asking questions,” she said.
My first instinct was irritation. Men asking questions was hardly news. “About what?”
“About you. About where you go. Who you meet. Whether you still see certain people.”
I let out a small, humorless breath. “He can ask.”
Sanjana’s eyes stayed on my face. “He is not asking like a friend.”
No, I thought. He was asking like a creditor.
She hesitated, and I could see she did not want to say the next part. That is how you know the next part matters.
“He said you have been difficult lately,” she said. “He said you are changing the terms.”
I almost laughed then, because he always made it sound as if my life had been a contract I had signed in good faith. As if I had not paid for every hour of his attention, every display of loyalty, every public smile that disguised a private humiliation.
“What terms?” I asked.
Sanjana’s mouth tightened. “The usual ones.”
There it was, the small ugly hinge on which everything turned. The usual ones. The ones never written down. The ones men called love when they wanted to sound noble, and business when they wanted to sound clean.
I had known, of course, that Rohit watched me. I had known he liked being the center of my weather. What I had not allowed myself to admit was that my fear had become useful to him. He had begun to depend on it. He no longer needed to threaten me openly. He could simply let me imagine the consequences, and I would do the rest.
A car door slammed somewhere behind us. A burst of laughter rose and fell. The studio carried on around us with its usual indifference, as if no one’s life had ever been rearranged in a parking lot.
“What did he say exactly?” I asked.