I wanted out the way a thirsty woman wanted water and a drowning woman wanted air. Not in any noble, poster-ready way. Not because I had suddenly discovered the sanctity of the female soul or the tragic poetry of self-respect. I wanted out because I was tired in my bones, tired in my mouth, tired in the soft tissue behind my eyes where vigilance had taken up permanent residence and started behaving like a tenant who never paid rent.
For years I had told myself that I was not trapped, only invested. That was the lie with good tailoring. I had wrapped myself in it and gone to parties, studios, hotel lobbies, terrace bars, and once a stupidly expensive penthouse where the glass walls made the city look like a dirty aquarium. I had said yes when it suited me, no when it paid me, and nothing at all when silence was more profitable than speech. I had made men feel chosen and therefore generous. I had made them feel clever and therefore easy. I had made myself into a method.
And then one evening, standing at the mirror in Khanna’s bathroom while the air conditioner hissed like an irritated snake, I looked at my own face and saw not youth, not glamour, not even danger. I saw a woman who had become very good at entering rooms and even better at leaving parts of herself behind in them.
I was wearing a black dress with a slit that had once made a casting director stare too long and later made a married producer forget his own surname. I had put on the dress because Khanna liked it. That alone was reason enough to hate it. The city outside the window was all wet sodium light and traffic, the monsoon pressing its damp palm against the glass. Somewhere below, a scooter horn kept bleating with the persistence of a small animal that had not yet understood it was doomed. Delhi never changed its mind about noise. It only changed the kind of noise.
My phone lay on the counter beside the basin. Three missed calls from Khanna, one from Sanjana, and a message from Arnav that was as neat and dangerous as a blade left on a table.
Evidence is enough now, he had written. He is starting to know. Be careful.
That was the thing about journalists, if they were any good. They could make panic sound like paperwork.
I had stared at the message for a long time. Then I had called Sanjana first, because if I was going to lie to someone, I preferred to do it to the person most likely to smell the lie and survive it.
She picked up on the second ring.
“Where are you?” she asked.
Her voice still had that mountain calm in it, the one I had once mistaken for weakness because I thought everything valuable had to arrive with fireworks. Sanjana had always been maddening in that way. She could stand in a room full of men who had been raised on entitlement and say one quiet sentence that made them look suddenly middle-aged and absurd.
“At work,” I said.
“It is almost midnight.”
“So?”
“So you sound like you are standing in a parking lot.”
I closed my eyes. “You are annoyingly observant.”
“I am trying to be helpful.”
“That is usually your first mistake.”
There was a small pause. I could picture her in her room, probably in an old T-shirt, hair tied up, one hand on the phone and the other holding her temper like a cup she did not want to spill. Sanjana did not waste anger. She used it like money.
“Are you safe?” she asked.
It was such a simple question that for a second I nearly laughed. Safety was for people who had not spent years converting charm into leverage and leverage into rent. Safety was for women who could afford to be boring.
“Yes,” I said, which was not a lie exactly. It was more like a prayer addressed to the wrong god.
“I do not think you are,” she said. “Not with him.”
I leaned my forehead against the cool mirror. “You sound dramatic.”
“I sound tired of watching you pretend that danger is the same thing as power.”
There it was. The sentence I had spent years keeping at the edge of my hearing because if I heard it clearly, it might begin to rearrange my life.
I smiled anyway, because smiling had become an old reflex whenever I was cornered. “And you sound like a schoolteacher.”
“And you sound like someone who is about to do something stupid.”
“Everything I have ever done has been stupid according to you.”
“No,” she said. “Only the things that can kill you.”
She had a way of saying these things without self-importance, which made them harder to dismiss. If Monika had said it, I would have rolled my eyes and accused her of importing slogans into private life. If some man had said it, I would have taken it as a challenge. From Sanjana it arrived like weather. I could argue with weather, but I could not make it stop.
“I am leaving him,” I said.
Silence.
Then, very quietly, “Are you serious?”
I looked at my own reflection again. The dress, the mouth, the carefully controlled face. All that expensive self-invention, and beneath it a girl from Mainpuri who had once believed Delhi would bow because she had arrived in heels. What a ridiculous faith. What a useful one.
“Yes,” I said. “I am tired.”
That was the truest thing I had said in months.
Sanjana breathed in slowly. “Where will you go?”
“I have a place.”
“With whom?”
“With nobody.”
“Nisha.”
“I said I have a place, not a wedding invitation.”
“You are making jokes because you are frightened.”
That annoyed me enough to be almost comforting. “And you are making moral speeches because you think they protect people.”
“They sometimes do.”
“They mostly irritate them.”
“This is not the time.”
“It is exactly the time.”
I turned off the tap, because the dripping had started to get on my nerves. The bathroom was narrow and over-bright, with one bulb that made every flaw in the tiles look like a moral failure. From the corridor came the smell of fried onions from the cook’s room, incense from someone’s door, and damp plaster. The building had that old Delhi smell of shared survival, of too many lives breathing through one wall.
“I have spoken to Arnav,” I said.
That shut her up for a beat. “About what?”
“About Khanna.”
Another pause. Then: “You should have told me.”
“You would have made a face.”
“You should have told me anyway.”
“I did not want your face.”
“I am serious.”
“So am I.”
I heard her shift on the other end, maybe sitting up straighter. “What did Arnav say?”
“That he has enough to make noise.”
“Noise is not the same as safety.”
“Neither is your version of virtue.”
She gave a short laugh, but there was no amusement in it. “That is such a dishonest way to speak.”