It was my second day. The bus from Delhi Cantt to Dwarka was a long ride. The girls in the seat next to me were turned backwards, discussing something among themselves. Then suddenly a shout came from behind “You are a b****.”

I peeked back, almost too scared. Two girls were standing facing each other. One had short curly hair, socks to the ankle, pink and orange bobby pins clipped into her hair. The boring school uniform had been pushed as far as it could go without inviting a wrath of nuns.

“I am a b****, you are a w****,” the other one shot back. Her entire look was the opposite, a skirt a full two inches lower than the length listed in our rulebook. I could not believe the words coming out of their mouths. I had never heard women swear, let alone swear in English.

God, they were classy.

I came home carrying that. Finished lunch. Then I turned on my little portable radio, a small black box, an antenna you could extend, earphones you could plug in, buttons to switch between stations. This was my ipod. Before this I had been more of an Atif Aslam girl. But in this school, girls swore in English. So I had better start listening to songs in the same language.

I would switch it on. A brief burst of static, and then,
“Hi, I am Abish Mathew, you are listening to HIT 95 FM, Radio One.”
(P.S. This is me writing from memory, so I am unsure if I am getting the frequency right)

This was long before he became a famous stand-up comic. Back then, Abish Mathew was just a butter-smooth voice coming out of a little radio set, introducing me to English songs. If there was a playlist from my teenage years, it would be the songs on that station. Need You Now by Lady Antebellum. I’m Yours by Jason Mraz. Wake me up when September ends by Green Day. I would make up my own lyrics based on whatever I could decipher. Half the English didn’t make any sense to me, but somehow, it didn’t matter.

Then one day a song came on that stopped me. A little guitar, and a word that sounded like juliet. For the next week I used every second of the thirty minutes of internet I had each day trying to find it.
Juleer I am…This is juliet…
YouTube mostly returned no results, so I would wait. Day would go by. I would listen hard every time the station played the song again, catching whatever I could, adding it to the search. After three weeks I had a full sentence – marry me juliet – and still nothing came up. Then one afternoon, Mr Matthew instead of just playing the song, he announced it first.

“Next song will be Love Story by Taylor Swift.” I barely caught the artist’s name. But I had the title. I typed it in. And there it was.

The next day the song played in my head the whole ride. The girl with the curly hair and I got down at the same stop. After weeks of going our own ways, I shared my newly found music knowledge with her that afternoon. She stopped for a moment, surprised. Tilted her head, like I was an indie dog she was considering adopting. Slowly we started talking on those little walks. She introduced me to her friends.

I did eventually learn to swear in English. But first, there was a song. And before that, a radio station.

I love that Delhi does not have a single nonchalant bone in its body. Nowhere is this more visible than in its fashion. A kurta paired with low-rise jeans, thick stacks of resin bangles, and puff-sleeved milkmaid top with jorts, all in a single frame at Khan Market: the city tries, and it tries loudly. People here dress to impress themselves. While Navratri in Kolkata or Gujarat plays out like a nine-day Coachella, Delhi stages its own, more Sunburn-ish version. Nevertheless, the full catalogue of blouse styles, perfect puff sleeves, and sarees from craft districts across India can only be seen at the many Durga Puja pandals of CR Park.

The Purist
They arrived before you did. They’re the reason any of this exists. The aunties’ Jamdani announcing that they are here for the culture.

But even the culture-keepers like to stand out a little. So when the band flown in from Kolkata launches into a rock medley of ‘Ma Durga’, watch for her entrance: lanyard around her neck (she’s on the committee, obviously), a bindi the size of a two-rupee coin, and a bandha ikat saree so densely woven that every thread seems to be a different colour. The threads shift colours as she walks. It’s the kind of design people in Goa take acid to see.

Pandal to Protest
The haircut is either a manic pixie crop or a clean shaved head; take your pick. She has the cheekbones of someone who could be modelling, but her tote bag hints at her intellectual pursuits. The outfit is a western cotton tank top paired with a skirt that stops a couple of inches above the ankle, covered in Rajasthani print motifs. Her PhD is a work in progress. So is her mental health. She has the easy cool I think I give off. Except I don’t, because I overshare about my mental health to every stranger.

The Lehariya Boy
If you have spent enough of your precious time on this planet scrolling. I have. Between those random tarot card readings asking you to ‘claim this energy’ and that man with a moustache in his sarso khet talking about Dostoevsky, this kurta shirt’s ad has come up on your feed. You thought, I’ll buy this for my boyfriend. Or, if you’re normal, I’ll buy this for my boyfriend once I have one, and he’ll be the kind of man who’ll wear it.

Yet there he is. Green base with white lehariya stripes, semi transparent shirt. In the Uniqlo wasteland of men’s fashion, a revolution. Plus a silver ear cuff. 10 on 10, no notes.

Midsummer Night’s Dream
If Lehariya Boy is Gen Z men’s poster boy, the Bengali men are the originals: off-white dhoti with contrasting borders, red or yellow kurta with an angrakha yoke and intricate embroidery, paired with the perfect leather chappals. After this pandal he has a private gathering to go to, where a modern rendition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set in Kolkata, is being staged. He has written it, of course.

Punjabis aa gaye oye
She is in loose-fitted Pakistani-style pants and kurta. Her hair was recently highlighted in a warm caramel colour. There are more rings on her hands than fingers. If it’s not a Pakistani suit, then she might be in a shimmery saree, giving just-came-back-from-a-cousin’s-cocktail. Trailing behind her is her dedicated photographer, urf husband, whom she likes to tell “Angad, ek picture yahan par.” Oh, Angad is trained. He knows the angles.

This might be garba
She is neither Bengali nor Gujarati. Kutchi mirror work. A flared lehenga. Oxidised jewellery up to the elbows. Minimal Rabari-style tattoo dots along her chin, delicate in a way that made my own eyeliner look like a cry for help.
Is this the right pandal for this outfit? Philosophically, yes.

And the regulars, who are the actual point. The women in thick sindoor and red, magenta, and firozi sarees. Some in bright silk with matching blouses and zari work. Others in georgette with sequin embroidery. Adorned with the perfect gold necklaces and earrings. The uncles in their linen-cotton co-ord sets, beige shirts with pockets, pants ironed straight, pen in the pocket to complete the look. The entire family, kids to parents to grandparents, all here on their day out. The progressive-bookstore uncles in khadi kurtas and thick glasses. They have been doing this since before the reels and the Twitter maps marking all the pandals. If you were there too, I hope you took as many pictures of your look. I know I did.

P.S. It was a lot of walking, and by pandal four I was being unpleasant to everyone I love. Then a girl (Srishti, if I remember right) stopped me and asked, “Are you sabhyata.design? Girl you gave me the energy that made me go, “I love community, I love the people, and I love the street.” I was insufferable for the next two hours. My friends can confirm. Thank you.

My parents when I was fourteen decided to switch our household daily. They felt the old newspaper was filled with advertisements and nonsense that can corrode young impressionable minds.

The new newspaper was a research report. It is so painful to have your adolescence robbed by a paper with no photographs. While my friends in school discussed the sexpert section they read about in The Times of India. I had an opinion of the fiscal deficit, based on an editorial my parents circled in The Hindu. The only thing with colour arrived on weekends – a special edition. And if you’re thinking Bollywood gossip, you’re wrong. For The Hindu peak mainstream celebrity was Arundhati Roy. It didn’t have reviews of movies, it had reviews of plays. It didn’t even have a section for Horoscopes. How will I know that ‘I should be beware of my close friends this week’? If a Khadi saree, mota bindi wearing newspaper was a woman, it would have been this arts supplement.

So, I decided it was my destiny to read Chetan Bhagat. A boy in my society, on whom I had a crush, lent me a copy. Sadly, he gave me the most read Chetan Bhagat of all: The 3 Mistakes of My Life. I finished it in a day and returned it the next.

He looked at me and said, “Did you read that part?”

“What part?”

“You know. That part.”

“Oh it’s interesting,” I told him. “Backdrop of riots. Papa says masala fiction is more democratic than some book by, like, a Columbia PhD. And the ending broke me everything with Ali and Omi –”

“I mean the part where he unhooks her bra.”

That’s how fast my crush vanished. Suddenly this pubescent boy, with his cracking voice, became unbearable. His chin, with its sparsely sprouted beard, made me want to throw up. I don’t think it was the sex. In the group of girls I hung out in the bus, one of them got her hands on Fifty Shades of Grey. How she did that is still a mystery to me. She’d read paragraphs aloud and we’d all discuss them. None of those discussions were ever, ‘ohhh sex’. They were more like teenage virgin girls who have never kissed a boy or a girl breaking down kinks, themes, metaphors. And here was this boy, thrilled about unhooking a bra. That was his only takeaway. I didn’t have the vocabulary for it then, but now I do: I got the ick. I turned and walked back to my house.

That was the moment I realised I would never have a boyfriend. My parents had ruined me for every teenage boy’s allure. Fuck that stupid-black-white newspaper.

There were four weddings in six weeks. Somewhere between the second and third, I found myself on my phone at midnight, scrolling through outfits I did not need. I had to really stop myself and ask why. I already own a lot of clothes. They fit me perfectly. I have a wardrobe full of my mother’s sarees. Then why this madness to buy a corset saree. I realised it’s the internet.

You start following content creators early in their journey. The backdrop of their videos feels familiar, wohi chatkele se curtains aur deewaron pe seelan. They make videos about these nuanced observations that mimic your upbringing or life. You see yourself in them. But of course, things shift. They grow as creators. The gap between you and their life widens.

There is a fundamental difference between a celebrity and an influencer, even though they’re pretty much the same now. We already consider Janhvi Kapoor’s lifestyle unattainable. But what a creator like a rebel kid shows feels very much possible. You celebrate their wins because you feel like a part of their journey. And somewhere along the way, you stop feeling like your own life is enough. That one-week vacation to Vietnam, after busting your ass at work, flying economy, spending hard-earned money, stops feeling like a win. Multiple international vacations, concerts, five-star stays, wearing designer outfits to every event, house out of a Pinterest board all of this starts feeling like the baseline.

This extends to careers too. There was an understanding, not so long ago, that your twenties were for figuring it out. You’d spend the first half lost, the second half finding some footing, and if something stuck by thirty you were doing just fine. That was the timeline. Nobody questioned it. Now that timeline feels shameful. The internet has produced enough 25-year-olds with their own businesses, their own podcasts, their own “how I made my first crore” videos that a 28-year-old in a regular job starts doing math that doesn’t make sense. You feel behind.

Personally, I have started to get the ick. Three reels in and I have already clocked two ads. The fourth one opens and I think okay, finally, just a funny video, nope, it’s an ad too. Everyone is selling something. The Mumbai apartment of your favourite creator? Their agency arranged it. Half the clothes they wore to that event? Returned the next morning. The more famous you get, the more free shit arrives at your door, things you no longer need to pay for precisely because you can now afford to. Their lifestyle is not just unattainable. If you think about it is not even theirs.

This is not a dig at creators. This is their career. But we need to actively remind ourselves that the lifestyle you see on your screen is someone’s job. Your lifestyle is your life. How much of what we want is something we truly need, and how much is just an outcome of link culture? Anyways, I didn’t get that corset saree. I just wore my mom’s simple yellow bandhej saree, the one that is twenty years old. Turns out if you keep switching up the drape, it becomes a completely new outfit every time.

For your typical upper-middle-class Hindu Jain family, my parents were strangely non-religious.

When I was twelve, I asked my mom if I could eat the chicken lollipop being served at a friend’s birthday party. She looked at me and said, “Go ahead if you want to.” A year before that, at a beautiful abandoned Jain temple near Jabalpur, a monk told my father I couldn’t enter because I was wearing shorts. My father ignored him. “She is a kid,” he said, “and we are going inside.” Our faith showed up in the small things, the little puja ghar in the corner, the food we didn’t eat, but it was never forced on the kids.

Yet secretly, I was fascinated by the gods.

Around the age of eleven, Lord Krishna captured my imagination. I read a comic about his life and was smitten. It sounds silly, but it was closer to a crush than a spiritual connection. Back then, my father was posted in J&K, and the rest of our family lived by ourselves in Delhi. I was riddled with anxiety, in constant fear for them. So I would pray to him every night. I would thank him first, then go down my list of everyone I needed him to keep safe: my mom, my papa, my sister.

Once, I asked Papa, “Is God real?” Instead of answering, he told me the story of Gautam Buddha. How he was a prince, how he stepped out of his palace one day and saw poverty and suffering for the first time, and how he gave it all up to go and find the meaning of life. By the end I had forgotten my own question; I was busy taking notes on this new god. While I sat there imagining him, my father added, “So, is God real? You’ll have to find that out yourself. Even Gautam Buddha did. Even your father has to.” I thanked him for the new god he had handed me and completely ignored that my question was never answered. Which was a simple “yes” or “no”.

By now I had a small counsel of gods, and like any sensible employer, I gave each of them a portfolio. Krishna kept his old job, fear. To Buddha I handed my personal troubles: how my best friend had suddenly gone cold to me, how I hated my unibrow and couldn’t wait to be rid of it and if my husband will be the first man I kiss then how will I know how to kiss him.

My academics, naturally, went to Jesus Christ. I was at a convent school, so he clearly had the best view of what was going on there. Every time before exams, I would enter the school, stand next to the statue of the Virgin Mary, and pray to her in English, because she didn’t understand Hindi the way Lord Krishna and Gautam Buddha could. “Dear Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ’s lovely mother, Virgin Mary. I have my Maths exam today. I have worked very hard. Please make sure I finish it and get a good grade, and please make sure that after I solve the whole equation correctly, I don’t copy the answer 701 down as 107. Pleeeease.” Then I would mimic the girl next to me drawing a little cross across her chest.

Mimicking religious antics was a personal pleasure of mine. When I saw a girl pick a book up off the floor, press it to her forehead, I was floored. I asked why she did that, and she said, “Book mein Saraswati hoti hai.” I thought that was cool, so after that, every time a book of mine fell, I made sure Goddess Saraswati knew I was her girl.

I would envy the kids whose families were more religious than mine. Why don’t we go to church on Saturday like Nancy? Why doesn’t our family keep the Navratri fast like Shreya’s? I felt they were in on a secret that my parents were not.

The only festival celebrated in our household was Diwali. My mother would bring out the bronze and silver god statues, locked away in some cupboard. I would make rangoli around the house. I loved every moment of it. In the evening during pooja, we would all sit around the little altar, and Mom would read the aartis from a book.

One Diwali, though, my mother decided it was strange that she was the only one praying. After the aarti, she announced that everyone would take a turn. When it came to me and my sister, we realised we didn’t know a single one. So we ran to our hymnal. My sister sang “Shepherd of My Soul.” I sang Michael Jackson’s “We Are the World.” My parents stared. Then they started laughing, and because what else could they do, joined in. Then we found the one Hindi prayer we all knew, “Ae Malik Tere Bande Hum,” and sang it together. I thanked my Council of Gods.

Throughout my childhood despite being good at subjects like science and math, I would debunk that idea of a career in STEM. I would associate myself with my creative side. I’d tell people, “I will be a designer,” with very little understanding of what that word actually meant.

At 15, moving to Delhi introduced me to Delhi Times. Where I saw Prabal Gurung dressing up the Avatar actress, I got hooked to the idea of being a fashion designer, the only prefix to the word “designer” I knew back then. That brought me to the rat race of getting into a design school, and when I finally did, I believed that was it. Success was waiting for me.

Within the first two weeks of college, I realised being the best artist in your school amounts to being mediocre in a room full of a hundred other best artists from their own schools. Visual composition, illustration, typography, advertisement, research. I was never bad. Just not good enough. I remember vividly, at my third-year jury, I had returned from an exchange semester with what I believed was my best work. A panel of four jury members told me, “You are good, Sabhyata. You will do good under a great designer. But you won’t be one yourself.” I thanked the panel, walked across the library wall, and went into the furthest bathroom from the jury room, and bawled like a five-year-old suddenly realising they can’t find their mother in a supermarket.

The incident ignited this desire to prove people wrong. To get internships and jobs I associated with only the truly talented. I remember, on my first day at the design studio I had so badly wanted to be part of, the founder asked me which designers I looked up to and why. I didn’t have an answer. Every name I could think of was someone whose portfolio or Instagram I had found myself staring at on a Saturday night, laptop plopped on my bed. I could recognise great work. I just couldn’t tell you why I wanted to make it, or what I would make if left entirely alone.

When I started my career, in the corporate tech world, I benefited from being the new kid with fresh ideas. Corporate was this weird space, but with some zeal and enthusiasm I carved out a little niche for myself. I would show up to work with a strawberry earring and a mismatched sweater, making sure I held my space as a creative individual rather than a cog in the wheel. Then it fizzled out. Six years in, you are no longer that doe-eyed kid. Corporate slowly sucks the creative out of creative roles. All the middle management and senior designers with a lack of visual skills I used to scoff at, I was becoming that. There I was again, not skilled enough to be a creative pioneer, not sharp enough to navigate and grow in the political landscape of corporate work.

In my attempt to detach my creative aspirations from the nine-to-five, I started putting my art out into the world. The internet rewarded me in numbers that gave me a strange sense of achievement without much radical change in my life. And I enjoyed it, genuinely. But I am not a real artist with an exhibition and a focused practice. I am barely a writer. I am doing so many things, none of them good enough to compete with the best in those fields. I am a designer on LinkedIn, but my portfolio is a graveyard of projects that never saw the light of the day.

When I find myself spiralling, which I often do, and I reach for “I get to define my own success” or “You are being too harsh on yourself,” I think it’s a cop-out. A way to tell myself it’s alright to waste my potential away. Maybe it didn’t exist in the first place. Not everyone gets to live out the stupid, delusional fantasy they’re having at 12am, pacing across their room.

I am scared, I’m good at a lot of things, but great at nothing.

Around when I was thirteen, fourteen, I developed a hate towards our family’s first car. Bought when I was nine months old, it stayed with us until I left for college. The hate was not dramatic. It was quiet, festering, I would say closer to embarrassment.

At every red light I would run a survey. Big SUV’s. Big brands. Becoming acutely aware of how small and old my car was in comparison.

It was Delhi in the 2000s and Ambience Mall was basically what we had to replace personality. I begged my parents to take me out over the weekend. They finally agreed. I was excited. The place the girls talked about at lunch was finally going to be real. We pulled up to its shining reflective glass facade. We parked. I stepped out. And my first thought was: I hope no one saw us arrive.

And then there were the school days, when the bus service was suspended and parents had to come pick us up, I would dread it. Because sometimes it was my mom’s turn to carpool, to collect the girls from our society, and she would show up in that little white car and we would all pile in. Tightly packed, the A/C making a sound louder than its ability to actually cool us down. I could feel embarrassment every time the gear changed. At the time of course I didn’t have the self awareness to know that other girls were also 13. They were also suffering in their own entirely self-invented way.

All through my adolescence, I couldn’t wait for it to be replaced. When my dad finally bought a new car, another humble little hatchback, I was overtaken with joy. Finally a car that didn’t add to the burden of my teenage suffering. We kept the old car, though it was rarely used. When we sold it some years later, it had clocked nearly a lakh in kilometers.

These days, when I see a Maruti 800 parked somewhere, a rare thing, I feel a pull. That little car drove us around India for years. Multi-day road trips, mountains, highways, roads that were more of a suggestion than an actual road. Late nights returning from a party, my parents playing old Hindi music while my sister and I dozed in the backseat. I never thanked it while it was mine. This, I suppose, is me trying.