“I am not far away.”
He said my name then, very slowly, like he was trying to pin a butterfly without damaging the wings. That should have frightened me more than it did. Or perhaps it did frighten me, and I had simply become too practiced at swallowing fear whole.
“Come downstairs,” he said again, softer now. “We will talk.”
“About what?”
“About what you think you are doing.”
“I am thinking of leaving.”
“Not tonight.”
“Yes, tonight.”
“No.”
The word was so flat that for a second I almost laughed. Men like Khanna did not really understand the concept of women as separate weather systems. They believed storms could be negotiated with enough money.
“I will see you tomorrow,” I said.
“No.”
I ended the call.
My hands were shaking now, though I refused to call it fear. Fear was too clean a word for what I felt. This was the body’s ancient knowledge that the room had changed while the mind was still busy performing superiority.
I walked out into the corridor. The building was half-lit, the tube lights buzzing like trapped insects. On the landing below, Bua Devi’s door was open and her television was on too loud, spilling a soap opera into the stairwell. She looked up as I passed.
“You are going out at this hour?” she asked.
She always spoke as if she had been appointed guardian of the entire moral architecture of the lane.
“Yes,” I said.
She eyed my bag. “Travel?”
I gave her my sweetest smile. “Sort of.”
Her mouth tightened. She knew enough to know she knew nothing, which made her more dangerous than people who asked direct questions. “These days, girls go out dressed like this and then cry later.”
“Then it is a good thing I do not cry easily.”
“Everybody cries.”
“Not in front of you.”
That almost made her laugh. Almost. Instead she muttered something under her breath about modern girls and their pride, then disappeared back into the flat. The door stayed open a crack, because in Delhi even privacy had to keep an ear on the staircase.
I went down the stairs and out into the lane.
The rain had stopped, but the road was still wet, reflecting the jaundiced light from the chai stall and the blue blink of the metro line beyond. A tea seller was wiping down his counter with a rag that had lost all claim to cleanliness years ago. He looked up, recognized me, and gave the tiny nod men give women they have decided not to objectify too openly. The lane smelled of damp concrete, fried batter, sewer water, and the faint sweet smoke of incense from somebody’s evening prayer. A dog darted across the road with the expression of a thief. Somewhere a pressure cooker hissed. Somewhere else an auto driver was shouting at a customer who had tried to bargain too much.
I walked fast because fastness looked intentional, and intentionality was the poor cousin of courage.
At the corner, I saw Sanjana waiting under the shop awning, exactly where I had told her to meet me if I changed my mind. She stood with one arm folded across her body, the other holding an umbrella she did not need. She was in a pale kurta and jeans, hair tied back, face bare except for the kind of calm that comes from stubbornness and long practice. She looked like a woman who had never once mistaken chaos for charisma.
“You came,” I said.
“You sounded strange.”
“I always sound strange.”
“You sounded frightened.”
I snorted. “You are impossible.”
“And yet here you are.”
She stepped toward me, eyes moving over my bag, my face, the set of my shoulders. Sanjana had never been fooled by the performance of me. That was infuriating and, in a buried corner of my heart, deeply comforting.
“Did you tell him?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Stupid.”
“Thank you.”
“I am not insulting you for entertainment. I mean it.”
“I know what you mean.”
“You do not, or you would not be standing in this lane with a bag like a woman in a bad film.”
That made me laugh despite myself. A scooter rattled past, splashing a little dirty water onto my feet. The driver did not apologize because Delhi men rarely apologized unless they had just hit something expensive.
I looked at Sanjana. “You think I should have done this years ago.”
“I think you should have done it before you had to hide your documents like a criminal.”
“I am not a criminal.”
“You are not innocent either.”
“Thank God.”
She gave me a tired look. “Do you have somewhere safe tonight?”
“I told you, yes.”
“With whom?”
“With nobody,” I repeated.
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the answer you are getting.”
She exhaled through her nose, which for her counted as a tantrum. “If you are going to leave him, leave him properly. Not with drama. Not with a performance. Quietly. Cleanly. And not alone.”
I lifted one shoulder. “You sound like an aunt.”
“I sound like someone who does not want your corpse found in a parking lot.”
The words hit harder than they should have. I had spent years laughing at caution because caution had always looked too much like surrender. But tonight, under the wet streetlight, with the smell of frying snacks and wet dust around us, her warning did not sound weak. It sounded like wisdom arriving late to a party where arrogance had already drunk too much.
“I am not going to die,” I said, too quickly.
She looked at me in that long, steady way of hers. “No one plans to.”
The lane behind us was alive with the usual small brutalities. Two boys argued over a bike. A woman in a plastic raincoat dragged a child by the wrist. A monkey sat on a cable box like a corrupt little minister. Above us, the metro thundered across the line, silver windows flashing like a train of indifferent gods. I felt the city in my teeth.
“I have to meet him,” I said.
“Not alone.”
“I can handle him.”
“That is exactly what worries me.”
I wanted to snap back, to tell her she had no idea what handling men required, that she had spent her life being careful while I had learned to be effective. But the truth was uglier. The truth was that I had become very good at handling men who wanted pleasure, vanity, secrecy, and control. I had not yet met the version who wanted revenge.
Before I could answer, my phone buzzed in my bag.
Khanna.
Then again.
Then a message from Monika, which was somehow worse.
Still busy playing kept woman? I thought you were stronger than that. Then another line followed almost immediately. Shame is a chain. Break it.
I stared at the screen and almost laughed. Monika had always had the emotional subtlety of a brick thrown through a window, but even she managed to sound sanctimonious while pretending to be revolutionary. I showed the message to Sanjana.