You did not know this was what you were learning, of course. At eight, you thought the world was mostly made of your friend’s houses and school corridors and the smell of someone’s lunch being opened at recess. Adults knew things and you couldn’t wait to be one. On Independence Day, your dad would paint the tricolour on your cheeks and make you memorise the second half of Vande Mataram. When he said no to sleepovers and always insisted on coming with you to the park, you couldn’t understand why. He said that you would understand when your hands were as big as his.

You were twelve years old when you learned that sometimes the warning was you.

You had come home upset. Your class teacher had made you stand for an hour because you wore red clips instead of black ones. She had yelled at you in front of everybody. She asked if you were trying to attract the boys. Do boys like red more than black? Don’t they like blue? Do boys even notice hairclips? Unfortunately, no boy could answer those questions of yours because you went to an all-girls school. Mom thought it was safer and your best friend believed that that way you wouldn’t need to “worry about boys.” But that turned out not to be true. You remember asking Mom to buy you black clips.

You were nineteen years old when you understood what they meant by be careful.

By then, you had already learned how to walk faster without looking as though you were walking faster. You knew which areas were better lit and that you shouldn’t wear both earphones at once. You knew that when you were getting into a cab, someone should know the license plate number and the driver’s name, even if you had your best friend with you. You knew that if a man was walking behind you for too long, you could cross the road and pretend you had meant to do it all along. You knew that call me when you reach was a request, an instruction and a prayer.

You were eighteen years old when you began making your college preference list.

Dad asked you to move your dream college down to number two and put an all-girls college at number one. It was a good college too, he’d argued, very reputable and very prestigious. “And the best part is that your mother and I won’t have to worry.” You thought about it for a long time and couldn’t find any argument against it. Once classes began, you settled quite nicely. Within the red gates of your college campus, you felt safer than you ever had in your life. One day, a girl was raped in a nearby park and classes were cancelled. An email from your professor said that classes would be held online for safety reasons. Dad called too. He told you not to leave the hostel after sunset and not to use the college’s back gate. “Always the front gate and always with a friend,” he’d said. You thought about being eight and full of dreams, wanting to be an adult so your world would expand. Now it seemed like it was only shrinking. The world was no longer a place, but some women and very specific men. The world looked like police cars with female constables and CCTV cameras in all the hallways. Your world was smaller than an all-girls college campus.

You were fifteen years old when you first read Tagore.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high.

You were told that this was freedom. You were told that this was the country we were trying to become. You were taught to admire the sentence and to underline it. Teacher said that it would be the ‘thought of the day’ tomorrow but didn’t ask what it meant to you. Your mind had begun to learn the unsaid rules, the ones that went beyond black clips and not leaving after sunset. Even with no boys around, there were certain things you couldn’t do, lest you entice a boy at some nearby school with the sheer power of your wicked female mind. There are certain fruits you shouldn’t eat in public and certain types of candy you shouldn’t give out on your birthday. It’s dirty. You shouldn’t know exactly what it means, just enough to know not to do it. Shame was starting to become the default state of your being, as though you had been born with it. It existed within you so strongly that anything you touched or liked would be tainted by it.

You were sixteen years old when you first saw the photograph of a museum display of clothes that victims had been wearing when they were assaulted.

The gowns. The short skirts. The trousers. The hijab. The onesie.

You had stared at the photograph for a long time, trying to find a pattern. No hemline, no neckline, no fabric, no colour that could explain what had happened to them. No black clips, but no red clips either. No specific time of assault either. You wondered if there was a way to circumvent this. Maybe, just maybe, there was one perfect way to be; one perfect woman who could never be raped. She would be careful, but not fearful. Beautiful, but not provocative. Desirable, but never inviting. She would be soft enough to be loved but distant enough to be safe. And if there were no such woman, you wondered whether safety came at the cost of being desired at all.

It was an ugly thought, but you couldn’t stop thinking it. Perhaps there was a distance between being loved and being safe, and perhaps a woman could only move back and forth along it, never standing in the middle. Too visible and you could be harmed, too hidden and you could disappear entirely. Too desirable and you invited something, too undesirable and perhaps no one would choose you.

You read the story of Satyawati and Rishi Parashara not long after that.

Parashara desired Satyawati. He had approached her, and after she expressed her concerns about what would happen to her reputation and virginity, he granted her boons. She would regain her virginity even after their encounter. The smell of fish that had clung to her would be replaced by an intoxicating floral fragrance. She could experience desire and still return to being untouched.

Was that the perfect woman? Where, then, did freedom fit? Maybe there was a way to exist that protected you from invisibility and danger alike, and you just had to dress and act like that woman—a woman no man could rape. If you dressed like her, all you’d have to do was meet the man’s gaze, and his eyes would skitter away like frightened spiders.

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In one corner of the house, built by my nana’s father many years ago, there is a small prayer room. It is hardly a room at all. On the floor is a cloth, and on it sit the gods and goddesses, and above them is a shelf. The shelf is, for some reason, the cleanest thing in the entire house. It holds thick books, mostly religious texts, their spines faded and their pages yellowed with age. Tucked into one corner is something that has always seemed more mysterious to me: a thick, untidy bundle of papers. They do not appear to belong to the same notebook, or even to one another. Some are small, some large; some ruled, some blank. Their edges are uneven, their paper different shades of white. They look as though someone has gathered them one by one, the way a scrap collector might, keeping each thing because it might be useful. One of them is the back of a brown medicine envelope—the kind my nana would bring home from a nearby store after buying medicines.

On these papers, in my nani’s shaky handwriting, are songs and poems and little stories. She wrote them herself. Some evenings, when the world has lifted the burden of chores a little earlier than usual and the house has become quieter, I have heard her hum them to herself. Most are about Krishna. She sings of his mischief, his beauty, his ink-dark skin. There is a lightness to these songs, a fondness that sounds as though she knew him. But some of the songs grow sombre. In those, Krishna is leaving. Her voice changes when she reaches those verses, the mischief disappears and only grief remains. Sometimes she is sitting on the cot when she sings. Then, from outside, comes the faint, familiar knock of my nana’s umbrella against the ground: tap, tap, tap, each step announcing his return before he has reached the door. My nani hears it and whatever song she had been singing ends where it is–unfinished– and she walks towards the front door.

My nani has a way of doing things. She has not changed her raw mango pickle recipe since she learnt it when she was twelve. Once every winter, she brings out all her utensils into the backyard, onto the little patch of grass where my nana used to sit and relax after a long day, or while away the evenings with his colleagues from the college where he taught. By the time she is done arranging everything, the ground is crowded with large steel plates filled with raw mangoes, little brown pots of spices, knives, spoons and a rusted bottle of oil. Nani sits right there on the ground, her thin cotton sari gathering dust around her ankles, never seeming to care about either. The little stepping stool I would bring out for her would remain unoccupied in some corner, as useless as my repeated insistence that she sit on it. Nani is a stubborn woman.

When I was younger, I would ask her why she could not simply make the pickle inside. The front courtyard was far more convenient, after all, and the backyard had so many little bugs! She would only say that she liked it here. As I grew older, I understood why.

The rest of the family needed the house.

Her sons and daughters-in-law, her daughters and sons-in-law, their children, and then their children’s children would descend upon the house during the winter holidays, filling it with the sort of happy chaos that only a large family can produce. Someone was always calling for someone else from another room. Someone was always looking for a chair. There were children arguing over games and adults arguing over the rules of those games. My cousins would play games that required them to sing or hand over money for ice cream, and the house would echo with laughter and protests and the occasional shriek from someone who had been cheated. And Nani would be making pickle.

She seemed to have an invisible map of the entire house in her head. In the middle of chopping mangoes, she would hear someone call out that something was missing and, without even looking up, immediately give instructions to someone else about what they needed and where exactly they would find it. I often wondered if she had superpowers.

She was always busy and always tired. Even now, when I try to remember her face from those years, what comes back first is a shadow of exhaustion. Her grey eyes were constantly alert, scanning the room for the next thing that needed doing. When the sun began to disappear, nani would finally get up from the ground. She would brush the dirt from her sari, gather the utensils and, if she had not finished, place the little lantern on the stepping stool I had brought for her hours ago.

The house was hers in every way that mattered to everyone else. She had spent her life there. Her husband had grown up in it; later, he built it into a home for the family they raised together. Her children had grown up there, and now her grandchildren ran through its rooms. Every wall seemed to contain some version of her labour, and yet no room belonged to her. On winter nights, when my cousins had quickly packed away their nice toys—especially the limited-edition UNO cards that were treated with the solemnity of family heirlooms—and everyone’s favourite uncle had rolled out the colourful mats on the rooftop, I would sneak downstairs to say goodnight to mom. In what dad told me was the “guest” room, I would find my mother and her sisters chatting together on the bed, their voices low and conspiratorial, a lantern burning on the floor in one corner. At the end of the bed, next to a pile of feet, would usually be my nani. Her small figure would be folded into the edge of the mattress, quietly taking each ankle into her hands, one after another, rubbing oil into tired feet. She would work her fingers into the heels and around the ankles, listening to her daughters talk.

When I look at my mother’s side of the family now, I can see how far the women have come from the lives that were once expected of them.

My nani has daughters and daughters-in-law who are professors and doctors. Women who studied, built careers, earned their own money, travelled, made decisions for themselves. Women who would never accept the restrictions that were placed on their mothers. There is something extraordinary about that, but something unfair too. Because these women have children, and when they leave those children at home, they come to nani. The burden of looking after the grandchildren does not fall equally between their parents. It falls squarely on her. The children come home from school and find her waiting. She makes their meals and watches over their homework. She folds their clothes and packs their bags with expensive notebooks that have smooth white pages and straight lines.

She watched her brothers go off to school and then she watched her own children do the same. Still she remains behind, looking after the grandchildren they leave in her care. Age did not keep its promise of rest, just as the house did not keep its promise of comfort.

My nani spent her childhood in a house where her father saw little use in educating girls. Her wrists still bear the shackles of her father’s tyranny, of the man who believed there was little use in educating a girl when her brothers could be educated instead. But her ankles bear another kind of shackle, one that looks like freedom. Her daughters had the freedom to study and to work. They could build lives outside the home, and yet someone has to remain at home when they do. Someone has to pick up the children and someone has to feed them. Someone has to know where the blankets are and when pickles have to be made for the rest of the family.

Nani has two sons and three daughters. Her daughters live in different cities now, each with a house and family of her own, a life that has slowly moved away from the house where they grew up. My mother, the youngest, calls her every day.

Nani does not have a phone. She uses whichever of her sons happens to be nearby, holding the phone between both hands as she talks to her daughters. Years ago, my mother gave her a small phone of her own, thinking perhaps that nani would like to be able to call whenever she wanted. But the grandchildren carried it around more often than she did, and nani eventually declared that she could not understand how to use it anyway.

I wonder what it means to need someone else even to hear the voice of your own daughter.

Nani is very old now. She still wears the same thin, threadbare cotton saris. She still refuses a chair and lowers herself onto the floor as though her knees have not spent a lifetime carrying the weight of her and all the things she could have been. Her eyelids have grown heavy with age, folding over her eyes in a way that makes her look older than the rest of her face. Sometimes when she looks at me, it is as though I have to wait for her eyes to arrive. Death has become an ordinary word for her. She speaks of it in the same cadence as she does of mustard seeds. Acceptance is too gentle a word for it and resignation is too cruel.

Some days, horribly, a thought comes to me, sudden and shameful.

I hope she passes.

I hope she is reborn somewhere else. Somewhere with a quiet room of her own, with shelves full of paper; so much paper that she never has to turn over a medicine envelope to find a blank corner. She would be able to leave her notebooks open without having to clear them away for somebody else. Somewhere, perhaps, her father looks at her and sees a daughter before he sees a girl to be given away.

Then the guilt comes.

I push the thought away because one should not have to die to become free. She should not. Freedom should not be another name for the life after this one. She deserves a room now. She deserves paper now. She deserves to rest without having to wait for death. She deserves, even at this age, the strange and almost extravagant possibility of wanting something simply because she wants it.

But what would that look like? And would she want it? I don’t know.

Would she listen if I told her that she did not have to spend her days this way? Would she even understand what I was asking her to leave behind? How do you offer someone freedom when the cage has become indistinguishable from home? Perhaps I was the one who did not understand. If I decide that nani must be freed, if I begin pulling at every thread of the life she has woven around herself, am I freeing her, or simply replacing her choices with mine? Would I be any different from everyone else who has decided what is best for her?

My feet had fallen asleep by then, and I kept shifting them beneath me, unable to sit still the way nani could. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with the end of her sari and reached for the glass jars, ready to fill them to the brim with pickle so I could take them home and give some to my friends. Just then, her younger son—everyone’s favourite uncle—came hurrying into the backyard, the phone held out in front of him, his eyebrows raised and his whole face arranged into an exaggerated pantomime that meant his older sister was calling. Nani looked up at him, annoyed for half a second at being interrupted, and then her face softened almost immediately. She wiped her small hands against her sari, leaving oily fingerprints in the cotton, and took the phone carefully in both hands. For a moment she simply looked at it, the corners of her mouth lifting into a soft smile. Then she pressed it to her ear and straightened herself, a little grunt escaping as she pushed herself up from the ground. I watched her listen first—the tiny nod and the faint hum of recognition. And then, in that wavering voice that had once sung to Krishna in the quiet evenings of my childhood, she gave her blessing: “Putravati bhava”—may you be blessed with a son.

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I think I would spend the whole time moving things a little out of place. I would leave the house a few minutes later on a certain morning and miss my train on purpose. I would stop to pet stray cats so I arrive somewhere just a little too late. I would pretend to forget my umbrella somewhere and walk back upstairs to get it. I would decide, at the very last second, not to go to parties I barely wanted to attend in the first place. I would become someone who is always just slightly delayed, someone who is always a few moments away from her destiny.

Just enough to miss you every single time.

Summers in my city are very humid, but the sky turns a different shade every evening. Sometimes I open the wooden door and leave the mesh screen shut. Then I sit on the floor right in front of it and watch the light change. The apartment smells faintly of the mangoes kept under the table so they can ripen. The wooden frame swells in the heat and refuses to shut properly. Above the mesh screen is a glass window with cracks running from every corner. They meet somewhere near the center, and it looks like the whole thing has been slowly collapsing toward a single point for years.

I dream about you all the time these days.

Even in my dreams, you are painfully easy to love. You always have something funny to say and I laugh so hard that the sound surprises me. Junior climbs into my lap, demanding to be petted. I scratch behind his ears and stare through the mesh screen. I think about you again, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t. My mind keeps reaching for you the way a tongue keeps finding the place where a tooth used to be. I know it would be healthier to stop. But knowing what is good for me and wanting it seem to be two separate things.

It startles me how a person I haven’t spoken to in years can still arrive so effortlessly in my thoughts. It’s funny because I struggle to even remember your face sometimes. The details keep slipping away from me, and yet, I am still completely certain that I love it deeply. I love your face and how you make sweetcorn soup and the way you always look into the distance when you explain something you care about. I love your hands and your unexplained disdain for truffle oil. I love the strange collection of facts that make you you; how quickly I learned them and how stubbornly they have remained.

Love. Present tense.

I close my eyes and lean my head against the doorframe. Somewhere upstairs, two people are arguing, or maybe just talking very loudly. A pressure cooker whistles from another apartment. Moving on is hard work. People talk about it as though it is a decision, but it feels more like a skill; something learned through repetition. you practice it poorly for a long, long time before you learn to do it well. The cruel part is that no matter how many times you have done it before, heartbreak demands that you learn it all over again.

It was raining last night. When I woke up, it was half past two and the first thought in my mind was you.

You.

You.

For no reason at all.

The room was dark as rain tapped softly against the window. I turned over and tried to fall back asleep.

Fuck this. You don’t even care much for rain.

Every article I have read tells me the same thing– that I should distract myself. I should get busier and think about other things, and so I try. I thought about the unread book on my bedside table and what I might have for breakfast in a few hours. I thought about unread emails and Star Wars and the new pair of yellow socks in the drawer. There are so many things that deserve my attention, and the strange thing is that they get it. For a few seconds- a minute, maybe‐then my thoughts drift. It is humiliating because most things have nothing to do with you at all. The unread books are just books. Sweetcorn soup is just soup. The evening sky is only the evening sky. And yet I keep finding my way back to you anyway.

I think moving on would be easier if you haunted everything, because at least then I could blame the world for my inability to let go.

When I open my eyes again, the light has gone soft and playful. The last of the sun is caught between the buildings, turning the windows opposite mine the colour of old gold, and then that disappears too. One by one, the street lamps flicker on below, their glacial white light spilling onto the road beneath them. My phone lights up beside me and I stare at it for a moment.

Weather alert: There is a chance of thunderstorms in the next few hours.

Nothing here belongs to you.

Worlds change, whole futures disappear because someone stayed too long or left too early. I think there are versions of me scattered everywhere who never met you at all. Somewhere, one of them is sleeping peacefully, her dreams unplagued. On warm evenings, she goes for walks without that small, involuntary thought that you would have liked this. She lets the breeze belong entirely to the summer, her world untouched by your callused fingers.

Maybe she exists somewhere, and sometimes I envy her very much. I just don’t think I would trade places.

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may 5, 2011.

dad didn’t even let me walk up to the main gate of my school. he ran in, frantic and his glasses a little foggy, and picked me up before running back out towards the car.

“you’re going to be a didi.”

most of what happened that day has faded, though I do remember one particular moment.

“do you want a baby brother or a baby sister?” one of the nurses had asked, handing me a little box of juice.

i’d been thinking about that ever since i found out i was going to have a younger sibling. i asked all my friends in class. my best friend was an only child, so she didn’t really know but every girl in my class either had a younger or an older brother. when i asked them what it was like, i got similar responses: brothers are annoying, brothers steal your things, brothers hide their toys and pull at your hair. brothers bite and scratch and kick. all my friends wished they had a sister.

so i decided that i wanted a sister.

i don’t recall how long i had to wait before i could finally go inside, but i remember feeling curious and excited and nervous. i was expecting to see someone my size, someone i would immediately understand. instead, i got someone i would spend my entire life getting to know. i saw the tiniest, softest bundle i had ever seen.

i really wanted to know what her eyes looked like, but she won’t open them in the light. my dad and i would shut the blinds of the hospital room and turn off the lights, just so i could see her open her eyes. it wasn’t until she looked directly at me when i felt a massive rush of big sister-ness in my chest. from that moment, she was my best friend and the person who’d eventually pull at my hair and steal my things.

the 5 years of life spent without knowing her seem so strange now. when i think about those years, i wonder how i possibly managed to just... be in the same world without her. growing up alongside her was as lovely as it was messy. my sister absolutely hated salt and vinegar chips, until she tasted them for the first time, and then i always had to share. when i wanted the chocolate ice-cream, i’d say i wanted something else so she would pick that, and i could have chocolate. and when someone troubled her, i made sure they regretted it.

because that’s what sisters do.

we fought over the stupidest things and then forgot what we were fighting about five minutes later. we know exactly which buttons to push and, somehow, exactly when to stop. we grew up together, even when we were not growing at the same pace.

somewhere along the way, she stopped being the little girl who followed me around the house and became someone i could talk to; someone whose opinion i actually wanted to hear. she developed her own personality and her own way of thinking, and i adored how brilliant her mind was.

i have memories of her that she can’t even recall. i remember the things she was afraid of before she knew how to explain them. i remember the silly things she used to say and the things she used to believe. she kept changing, shedding one version of herself for another, and i kept collecting the pieces.

so much of my childhood belongs to her, so much of it playing hide and seek with someone who truly believed (and somehow still does) that i am the coolest person in the world. i knew her when she was small enough to fit into my own little arms and when all she wanted was to be wherever i was.

there is something so magical about being sisters, the innate knowing that someone has got your back even at your worst. the shared understanding that there is nothing we couldn’t tell each other. we know about the most imperfect versions of each other. i have seen her with drool on her chin in the morning and she knows how snippy i get when i’m hungry. we team up against dad and hide mother’s day gifts in the strangest places so mum can’t find them.

i don’t know what the next few years will look like. i don’t know where either of us will go or what our lives will become. i don’t know what parts of my life she will miss and what parts of hers i will miss. maybe we will live in different time zones and call once a week, or maybe we will be in our 90s and in a retirement home watching old hindi films.

but i know that somewhere inside me there will always be a five year old girl who was excited to see her baby sister’s eyes for the first time and somewhere inside her, i hope, there is still the little girl who thought i was the coolest person in the world.

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“It is my right to ask my daughter-in-law.”

These words were spoken by Giribala Singh, a former judge and one of the principal accused in the recent Twisha Sharma case. Twisha was found dead under suspicious circumstances at her in-laws’ home. Giribala is Twisha’s mother-in-law. At the time of writing, the case remains under investigation.

The question is: how did we get here?

The most surprising aspect of the case was not the allegations themselves, or the reports of abuse. It was not even the leaked messages between Twisha and her mother, in which she described the verbal and mental abuse she was facing. What shocked the public was something else entirely.

At the centre of the story was not Twisha’s husband, but her mother-in-law.

“How could a woman do this?”

“Does she not have a heart?”

“What woman would compare her own bahu to a prostitute?”

Why should this be shocking? Why does it astonish us when a woman becomes an active participant in the subjugation of another woman, when the entire ecosystem of arranged marriages in India is built upon the gradual isolation of the bride?

Chapter 1: Anticipate

No matter how old you are, chances are you have heard of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. If not, you are certainly familiar with the broader saas-bahu phenomenon– one of the most enduring fixtures of Indian popular culture. In fact, the dynamic is so deeply embedded in our imagination that it has transcended its original context altogether. Two women arguing? Saas-bahu. A disagreement between neighbours? Somehow, also saas-bahu.

From an astonishingly young age, Indian girls are socialised into the belief that there exists a fundamental and immutable friction between a woman and her future female in-laws. If not through the hundreds of run-of-the-mill soap operas produced every decade, then this conditioning is done through advertisements. You’ve seen them:

Don’t be fooled. The daughter-in-law is still expected to perform domestic competence to earn approval. She is still navigating a household in which her value is decided on the basis of service. The only difference is that now she possesses the correct brand of dishwashing liquid. By the time an average Indian girl reaches adulthood, she has been instructed to anticipate and even accept this dynamic.

Another thing I noticed while writing this essay was how rarely we see an advertisement or TV show where it is the son-in-law trying to “win over” his mother-in-law. In fact, the only example that came to mind was an insurance advertisement in which a husband succeeds in impressing his wife’s perpetually grumpy father by informing him that he has secured health/life insurance. The subtext, of course, is impossible to miss. He wins approval through his capacity as a provider. More amusingly, the conversation is directed exclusively toward the father-in-law. Apparently the mother-in-law’s opinion is either assumed to be already secured (through the approval of the father-in-law) or entirely irrelevant. After all, what would she know about insurance?

For all the cultural anxiety surrounding in-laws, men are rarely expected to perform for their wives’ families in the same way women are expected to perform for their husbands’ . The son-in-law may be evaluated once, but the daughter-in-law is scrutinised forever. One enters the family as an individual. The other enters a role.

Chapter 2: Beti Padhao, Fir Shaadi Karwao

1. How does patriarchy impact the position of a middle-class working woman in India?

2. What are the continued challenges for women in India across time and space?

3. “Though women in post-Independence India have excelled in various fields, the social attitude towards women and the feminist movement has remained patriarchal.” Apart from women’s education and women’s empowerment schemes, what interventions can help change this milieu?

These are among the many questions that have appeared in the Civil Services Examination conducted by the Union Public Service Commission of India. Every year, thousands of candidates devote months of their lives to studying social inequalities and writing eloquent answers on gender justice. They are expected to demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of the barriers faced by women in Indian society.

Yet an IAS officer remains one of the most expensive grooms in the Indian marriage market.

Across large parts of India, the value of a groom continues to rise in direct proportion to his educational qualifications, income, occupation, and social status. Nor is this phenomenon confined to the civil services. Government employment of almost any kind carries a substantial premium in marriage negotiations. Whether it is the railways, banks, state services, or teaching positions, a secure government job is viewed as an asset that can be converted into greater bargaining power during marriage discussions. The successful candidate is congratulated for obtaining employment and also for the enhanced value that accompanies the result.

Value, in this context, does not refer to character, integrity, or personal virtue. It refers to the amount of money, gold, property, vehicles, wedding expenditure, and other transfers that a groom’s family can reasonably expect to demand.

The tier of your engineering college will determine the tier in the dowry rate card. How much can you demand without getting laughed out of the room? Are you an IIT graduate? An IIM graduate? An NRI? No? Then perhaps UPSC is worth a shot. Become the crème de la crème of the Indian marriage market.

I personally know someone whose father encouraged her to pursue medicine just so that the family would not have to pay an absurd amount of dowry when she eventually got married. Whether she continued practising after marriage was, apparently, a separate question- one that her future in-laws would answer.

For decades, Indians have been told that education is the solution. Educate your daughters. Send them to good schools. Give them professional degrees. Make them financially independent. Yet every year, educated women continue to be harassed, abused and killed over financial demands by their educated husbands and in-laws. The uncomfortable truth is that Indian middle class families have modernised their language far more successfully than they have modernised their beliefs. A daughter with a degree is celebrated and admired. But too often, these achievements are treated less as markers of her independence, and more as tools to secure a more favourable marriage.

Chapter 3: The Great Indian Kanyadaan

Where does the subjugation start? Sociologist Dipankar Gupta explains it perfectly:

“In the north, the bride-giver’s family is considered to be of lower social status than that of the bride-taker. The bride in this case is the beginning of gift-giving between these two families. The woman is the first gift, a supreme gift.”

The bride is the dowry. Once the kanyadaan—the “gift of the virgin”—has been performed by the male relatives of the bride’s family, nothing is off limits.

As Gupta further notes:

“This is not unusual and it solidifies, with multiple iterations, the asymmetrical relationship between bride-giver and bride-taker. The latter believe it is their ritually sanctioned right to demand gifts from the bride’s side in perpetuity. Consequently, the bride is vulnerable in her wedded home and must bend as a subject member of the household.”

This asymmetrical relationship manifests in several ways. The first, of course, is abuse—verbal, emotional, and, in many cases, physical.

“Could your mother not afford gold instead of silver?”

“Can’t you ask your father to pay off my loans?”

“Your family didn’t spend enough on the wedding.”

Since the bride-givers are considered inferior and are deeply aware of their status, they are often reluctant to bring their daughter back home even when they know she is being abused. In India, despite what we claim, a dead daughter is often easier for a family to bear than a divorced one. At the very least, the status as “bride-giver” remains in its place. Nobody wants to be the “parent of a woman who got divorced,” which would only reduce their standing in society.

The second manifestation, is language. In Hindi, language explicitly strips status from the wife’s family while heavily stratifying and elevating the husband’s family. When a woman addresses her husband’s family, she cannot just use any generic terms. Her husband’s older brother is her jeth. His younger brother is her devar. Each relationship comes with its expectations and code of conduct. By contrast, a woman’s elder brother is, if not addressed by name, often simply bhaisahab—a moderately respectful term that could just as easily be used for an unrelated man. While the wife must navigate this minefield of age, hierarchy, and power–showing particular respect to her jeth while treating her husband’s younger brother as her own younger brother—the husband is expected to do no such thing. In many families, there is a sense of superiority, if not outright contempt, within the husband’s side towards the wife’s family. A man is not expected to memorise the same complex kinship structure, nor is he discouraged from maintaining his own family ties after marriage in the way women often are. He does not carry the burden of constantly proving that he belongs.

There is a reason why saala is not merely a kinship term but also one of the most common street insults in India. (The same cannot be said of, say, jeeja/sister’s husband). As the bride’s brother, the saala belongs to the subordinate, bride-giving lineage. In the social structure, he occupies a lower position than the groom (aka the bride-taker). Terms such as jeth and devar also never evolved into street insults. The husband’s family occupies the higher position in the social hierarchy. As a result, calling someone a saala—even when they are completely unrelated to you—-carries an implicit suggestion of inferiority. It is meant to belittle and humiliate.

Chapter 4: The Patriarchal Bargain

By this point, the pattern should be clear. Isolation of the Indian woman is a process, one that begins long before marriage. She is taught to anticipate conflict with her future in-laws. She is taught that marriage requires “adjustment” and “sacrifice”. Education may improve her prospects, but it does not necessarily protect her from this system. Once married, she belongs to the subordinate, bride-giving side of an unequal relationship. Even her parents, who should serve as her strongest source of support, are often constrained by the social costs of bringing her back home.

Yet this raises an obvious question. If the Indian marriage system is so disadvantageous to women, why do so many women participate in maintaining it? Why do the mothers-in-law like Giribala Singh, who were once a bride, so often become an enforcer of the very hierarchy that once constrained them?

Sociologist Dipankar Gupta offers an explanation.

“If she should, unluckily, give birth to girls, she faces endless acrimony, for now her married family will accuse her of being responsible for pushing them down to accept a lower status when these girls have to be married. She has now debased the whole family.

Contrarily, if a boy is born, this woman becomes a bride taker and joins her husband’s patriarchal family as a near-equal member. In many ways, the mother of the boy transforms into a sociological male. This establishes her position in her husband’s household, which age alone cannot accomplish. As a newly morphed bride-taker, she has all the symbolic energy of the men in her husband’s family.”

The mother-in-law is not simply a former victim who has forgotten her own suffering. For years, her status in the household may have been uncertain, but the birth of a son changes that. Through him, she gains access to power, security, and recognition within the family structure.

The daughter-in-law then arrives at a peculiar moment, into a hierarchy in which another woman has spent decades acquiring status. The tragedy is that it converts potential allies into adversaries. While the daughter-in-law is looking for support, her mother-in-law is protecting status. And so the isolation continues.

Chapter 5: The Agony and How It Ends

“Gone are the days when this was a very public crime,” says women’s rights activist Donna Fernandes. “Now it is subtle and hidden.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, dowry deaths in India were often dismissed as “kitchen accidents.” In-laws would claim that the gas stove had exploded, that her clothes had accidentally caught fire, or sometimes even that she had set herself ablaze. Women’s rights groups responded with the slogan, “Brides are not for burning,” drawing attention to a form of violence that had long been concealed behind the language of domestic misfortune.

Their campaigns, protests and public pressure eventually led to important changes in the law. Yet for many victims, justice remained elusive.

Not much has changed since then. Setting the bride ablaze may no longer be the preferred method anymore, but there are plenty of other ways to get rid of an inconvenient daughter-in-law. She can be harassed for years or pushed off the roof. She can be subjected to such relentless humiliation and anguish that ending her own life begins to seem like the only escape.

It’s been about two months since Twisha Sharma died. The story now surfaces occasionally as a headline or brief update before the news cycle moves on. Mainstream media have found newer things to discuss, newer controversies to dissect. Her case has already begun its slow and predictable journey from national outrage to background noise.

What strikes me most is how easily these stories coexist with everything else. A report about a young woman found dead in her marital home can be followed almost immediately by one of those advertisements in which a daughter-in-law has to win her mother-in-law’s approval.

And perhaps that is why so little changes. We are willing to condemn the most extreme outcomes, but far less willing to examine how we encourage them. Twisha Sharma may eventually become another statistic, another name remembered only by those who loved her, along with names like Akriti Sutar and Nikki Bhati. Another woman dies, another family mourns, and another young girl learns how to be a good daughter-in-law between commercial breaks.

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Then the signs start to show up.

“AIR 1 THIS YEAR.”

“JOIN OUR CRASH COURSE.”

“FOUNDATION BATCH – START FROM CLASS 6.”

“NEET. JEE. CUET. OLYMPIADS. RESULT GUARANTEED.”

Posters, pamphlets, hoardings—pasted over one another—crowd my vision. They’re everywhere, coaching ads stacked over older coaching ads, each claiming certainty. They are nailed into electric poles or draped across buildings like banners of war. Big neon fonts, identical grinning faces in green institute T-shirts (airbrushed so you don’t see their dark circles.) After a point, the sentences lose their meaning, and I stop reading. It’s just printed noise.

I keep walking, but the street begins to feel heavier. Every board is selling the same promise: control over an uncertain future. Every institute claims it has cracked the code of the exam, and it is accessible behind a “limited batch offer” you couldn’t buy early enough.

And “early enough” keeps getting earlier.

A child in a neatly pressed uniform walks past, her backpack almost the size of her torso. She can’t be older than nine or ten. Outside one of the coaching centres, a poster announces admissions open for “Class 6 Foundation Batch.”

Sixth grade—not for curiosity, not for learning or play or mischief, but for preparation. Preparation for an exam she won’t take for years, but is already expected to orbit her life. School starts at 8 in the morning and ends at 2 in the afternoon, but there is no time to rest or play. No time for self-discovery. She would head to her coaching centre for the rest of the evening. Schooling stops being about education and, in fact, becomes a hurdle to your selection. If you prioritise school and ignore your competitive exam prep, you will fall behind all your friends and cousins. Parents walk in and out of glass doors with quiet urgency. Conversations revolve around ranks, cutoffs, attempts, number of gap years, negative marking, mock exam scores. Children become future results; they become potential rank-holders.

Children become investments.

Maybe one day, you’ll be on one of these billboards, smiling down in a green (or blue or black) t-shirt at all the losers who wish to be like you.

Maybe one day, you’ll be the one being interviewed about exam tips and tricks.

Maybe one day, you’ll get into... AIIMS? IIT?

So you find yourself in your room. 17, alone, stressed and filled with endless regret. There’s a word for that. Aspirant.

In India, “aspirant” isn’t a phase, but a category of existence. You’re no longer a student—not really. You’re not learning in the traditional sense, not exploring, not even failing in any meaningful way. You’re preparing. Always preparing and preparing and preparing. For something that is always just a few months away, sometimes even years away.

Other countries have exams. Competitive ones, even brutal ones. But they don’t build entire parallel childhoods around them. They don’t industrialise adolescence into a pipeline of coaching modules and performance graphs. Here, you wake up and your “mentors” tell you to measure your worth in hours spent sitting at your desk, head buried in textbooks (or the modules that they make you pay extra for.) You sit through classes where concepts are watered down to “most probable questions.” You take mock tests so frequently that the word “mock” starts to feel ironic—because nothing about them feels fake. The anxiety is real. The consequences feel real. The comparison is always, always real. Sunday is the day of verdict. Every score is a “diagnosis.” Every mistake is an evidence of being unworthy. Your mistakes decide if you are worthy of being with the top batch students, of having the privilege of getting the better mentors.

Better teachers and resources for students who are already doing well. Perfectly logical.

When you are an aspirant, you are constantly falling behind. Falling behind whom? It doesn’t matter. There is always someone; this imaginary character that is studying 30 hours a day and will take your place on the billboard if you don’t strive enough. The aspirant’s life runs on a loop: test, analyse, repeat. Post-test analysis are a post-mortem of the self. Where did you lose time? Why did you panic? Why didn’t you start with the easier questions first? Why didn’t you start with the more difficult questions first? Why are you making “silly mistakes”? Every mark counts! Every single question you get wrong is a good college slipping through your fingers. The most dangerous part is that it becomes normal. You begin to think in ranks. You begin to dream in cutoffs. You forget you were human once.

And then, about 2 weeks before the exam that is supposed to decide everything, the National Testing Agency decides to say the quiet part out loud (not in an official document, but on X, with the help of ChatGPT.)

“It’s not just you vs questions. It’s you vs the system.”

Most students read that and probably felt a spike of panic. Would this be as bad as the previous years? would it be worse, more difficult? Many called it insensitive and tone-deaf, and they’re not wrong. But the shock is a little strange to me.

Because what exactly is new here?

The system has always behaved like an opponent. It has never presented itself as something designed to nurture or guide. It creates scarcity and then the survivors are called “meritorious.” Think about what that statement implies. If it’s you versus the system, then the system is not on your side. And if you fail, the logic is simple: the system held, you didn’t. NTA tries to frame this as a test of “readiness.” But readiness for what? Not for learning. Not for thinking. For endurance.

“You think it’s just a question paper?”

Uh-

After years of coaching centres turning childhood into preparation, after reducing intelligence to ranks and percentiles, after normalising a life where your worth is “diagnosed” every Sunday—it would have been stranger if the system still pretended to be benevolent.

And then comes the patriotism—”A better Bharat.” NTA tries positioning the entire process as some kind of national duty, as if sitting through a high-pressure, elimination-style test is an act of service.

There is nothing inherently nation-building about forcing millions of students through a single, high-stakes bottleneck. A system that prides itself on scale but ignores the human cost isn’t building anything.

On a single day, NTA conducts the National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) for nearly 28 lakh students. One day. One exam window. In a country that struggles to provide consistent infrastructure even under normal conditions, this becomes a logistical nightmare. Test centres are overcrowded or unevenly distributed, forcing students to travel across cities—or sometimes states—just to sit for a paper that will supposedly measure their “readiness.” Public transport strains under the surge and yet, the expectation remains absolute: show up on time and perform well. The system demands precision from students while operating within conditions that are anything but precise.

There is also no clear line between solving hundreds of questions under time pressure and contributing meaningfully to society. If anything, the process rewards a very narrow skill set—speed and pattern recognition—while sidelining curiosity and creativity. NTA tries to use the idea of Bharat as an insulation. If you struggle, it’s not just a personal shortcoming, you’re failing to rise to a national expectation. If you question the system, you are questioning the idea of progress itself.

And that’s the sleight of hand.

A better Bharat isn’t built by making its students more anxious or more replaceable, where they are conditioned to compete endlessly against each other. It’s not this constant narrowing of young lives into ranks.

Yes, the supply-demand problem is real. Too many candidates, too few high-quality institutions. But scarcity doesn’t justify everything that follows from it. It doesn’t justify designing a system where a single day can outweigh years, where access depends on geography, infrastructure and money as much as ability.

A better Bharat would not ask its students to survive the system. It would build a system worth participating in.

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There was no sunlight in that corner of my room. From the dip in my mattress—formed after months of sitting in the same place—I looked toward my desk and chair. Stacks of textbooks leaned against each other as if they had no strength left to stand on their own. An empty glass sat there too, a thin, cloudy residue of milk, turmeric, and sugar clinging stubbornly to the bottom. My hair had grown far past how I liked it, brushing against my hips in a way that felt unfamiliar, almost irritating. The skin beneath my eyes had darkened into something bruise-like, catching the light in a way that made it impossible to ignore.

There was a circular patch on my desk, distinctly cleaner than everything around it. The wood there was a shade lighter, smooth and faintly glossy compared to the surrounding surface, which had collected a thin film of dust and fine scratches over time. The edges of the circle were soft but noticeable, a pale outline where the small idol of Shiv had shielded the surface from settling dirt. Only a few minutes ago, in a rush of desperation—my cheeks hot with tears and sweat—I had thrown it out of my room. Thrown Him out. I knew I couldn’t force Him out of my life, but at least I could remove Him from my room. The logic felt airtight in that moment: if He was real and still letting this happen, then He had no place here. And if He wasn’t real, then He never did. At 17, that was all it took for me to collapse into a heap of sobs again.

Failure after failure after failure—especially when you’ve never really known it before—feels like betrayal. The hours blurred into something unmoving, and the air had given up circulating. The walls seemed to close in. Dust gathered in corners I stopped noticing, and the mirror—once something I glanced at without thinking—became an object I avoided. Time didn’t pass; it accumulated, heavy and suffocating, pressing down on me with the certainty that nothing was waiting on the other side of it. Not relief or change, just more of this, stretched endlessly forward, a future that felt already decided and already empty.

Because of that certainty, I treated my own life with a kind of strictness that, at the time, felt justified. I held myself back deliberately, as if my early years were something to be endured. I postponed joy, convincing myself that it would come later—after I achieved the one thing that mattered. Small moments of happiness felt like risks, like distractions that could weaken my focus. I told myself I would earn them eventually, that I would deserve them more once I had something concrete to show for my effort.

There was also a quieter fear underneath it all: what if I failed? And if I did, what would I blame? I didn’t want to look back and see laughter or comfort and wonder if those were the reasons I fell short. So I eliminated them where I could. I chose restraint over indulgence, believing that if I gave everything to this one goal, then at least I would have the right to say I tried without compromise. But standing there in my room without that achievement, I had nothing. No vivid memories of joy, no moments I allowed myself to fully inhabit. Just long stretches of effort, controlled and carefully measured, leading to a place where there is nothing to hold onto—neither success nor the comfort of a life that was lived along the way.

What made it worse was not just the failure itself, but the fact that life had continued for everyone else. People I had once sat beside in classrooms, shared notes with, laughed with in between lectures, were moving forward. Their lives seemed to gather momentum, unfolding into new places and new versions of themselves. And I had fallen out of sync somewhere along the way. I had been the only one who stayed loyal to the plan. I was the one who chose discipline, who gave up ease for effort, who believed that if I committed fully, it would lead somewhere. And yet, I was the one left behind.

What do you do then? What do you do when you're gloriously, irrevocably lost?

The question itself felt unbearably heavy. Because the truth is that the expectation of greatness wasn't placed upon me by other people. And lying there that night, staring into the dark, I wondered if one day I would look back at my life and realize that the extraordinary future I once imagined had diminished into something painfully... unremarkable.

And then, almost gently, a different thought appeared.

What if my ambitions were never the problem?

For years I had treated them like something dangerous—something that needed to be controlled, disciplined, constantly guarded so that I would not fall short of them. But what if ambition did not need fear to survive? What if what it had been asking for all along was something softer?

Love.

I had spent so long believing that fear was necessary—that without it I would become lazy or careless or mediocre. Fear was the thing that kept me moving. Could I simply stop being afraid?

The answer, of course, was no. Fear is stubborn. It does not disappear just because you ask it to. It lingers in corners of the mind, returning when the room is dark and the future feels too large to understand. So instead of trying to silence it, I did the only thing that felt possible in that moment. I got out of bed, reached for my journal, and began to write.

At first the words came slowly, uncertainly, and then all at once they began to spill across the page. I wrote about time, about expectations, about the painful longing to live a different kind of life. I wrote about feeling out of sync with my peers. The page became a place where I could finally be honest. And somewhere in the middle of all that messy, hurried writing, I realized that maybe what I needed was not less ambition. Maybe what I needed was more love.

I should pour more love into myself. By me, I meant my dreams, my hopes, my ambitions, and all the fragile, beautiful things inside me that had spent years being pushed forward by fear when what they truly needed was patience and kindness.

Once that thought settled in my mind, it became impossible to ignore something else: love, if it was real, had to show up in the small, ordinary ways I treated myself every day. It could not remain a comforting idea written in the pages of a journal at midnight. If I truly meant what I had written, then it had to become something I practiced. I began to realize that showing love to my ambitions meant showing up for myself in the same way I would show up for the people I care about. If a friend asked me to be somewhere at six in the morning because she needed me, I would not hesitate. I would wake up, even if I was tired, even if it was inconvenient, because she mattered to me. Her request would feel important simply because it came from someone I loved.

Why shouldn’t I treat my own promises with the same sincerity?

If I could wake up early for a friend, I could wake up early for the version of myself who was trying to build a meaningful life. If I could listen patiently to someone else’s worries, I could also sit with my own hopes and take them seriously.

Love, I realized, is not always a grand feeling. More often, it is a form of respect. Respect meant keeping the promises I made to myself, even when no one else was watching. It meant studying not because I was terrified of falling behind, but because the girl I hoped to become deserved my effort. It meant resting when I needed rest, without punishing myself for it. It meant allowing joy to exist alongside ambition, instead of treating happiness like a distraction from it.

If I cared about someone deeply, would I constantly frighten them into working harder? Would I remind them every day that they might fail, that they might disappoint everyone who believed in them? Of course not. I would encourage them. I would be patient with them. I would remind them that they had time, that growth was rarely graceful. I deserved that same gentleness.

So the changes I decided to make were not dramatic, but little acts of loyalty toward myself. Waking up when I said I would. Finishing the things I promised myself I would start. Allowing moments of rest without immediately turning them into guilt. In other words, I began to treat my future not like something fragile that could shatter with one mistake, but like something alive that deserved tenderness.

Ambition, I am learning, is a little like a child. You cannot frighten it into becoming something beautiful. You have to sit with it, play with it, nurture it patiently. Discipline still matters, of course, but the kind that lasts is the one that grows from love. Fear may push you forward for a while, but it is love that allows you to keep going.

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Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's party colleague and the Minority Welfare Minister Zama Khan said, "Nitish-ji just showed love to a Muslim daughter. He wanted society to see the face of the girl after she became successful in life". Khan said those criticising him must know that he gives daughters the utmost respect.

Would a senior politician have reached out, without invitation, to adjust a male journalist’s clothing or touch something that carries personal or symbolic significance?

The answer matters because public figures are rarely careless about physical boundaries. They may be reckless and hostile in speech and evasive in accountability, but they are precise readers of power. They know when touch will be read as camaraderie and when it will provoke consequence.

That precision tends to disappear around women.

When Nitish Kumar reached out and pulled at a young woman’s hijab, the act was quickly reframed as benign. “Fatherly,” we were told. “Well-intentioned.” As though the absence of malice were sufficient to negate a breach of bodily autonomy.

What is striking is not simply that the act occurred, but that it occurred so easily. Without hesitation or apparent awareness that a line was being crossed. This ease suggests not accident, but familiarity with a social order in which women’s bodies—and, by extension, what they wear—are open to unsolicited intervention.

In Kozhikode, BJP MP Suresh Gopi touched a female journalist on the shoulder during a media interaction. When she physically pushed his hand away, he repeated the gesture. Following harassment charges, he issued a public apology on Facebook, explaining that the touch had been affectionate and paternal, and that it had been misunderstood.

In another instance, the governor of Tamil Nadu patted journalist Lakshmi Subramania on the cheek. He later clarified that he had acted with affection, seeing her as his granddaughter.

These incidents follow a familiar script: the act is reframed as care and the woman’s response is displaced by a narrative centered on male intention.

This is not the brief, reciprocal contact common between men—a handshake, a pat on the back, gestures that affirms parity. It is corrective in a way that presumes authority and communicates entitlement. Men rarely engage in this form of touch with other men because its meaning would be unmistakable. Adjusting another man’s clothing, touching his face, or interfering with a symbol he wears would be read as insulting or confrontational.

This is where the defense of “fatherliness” becomes useful. Fatherhood, in Indian context, suspends the need for consent. A father is imagined as benevolent by definition, corrective by right, and innocent of ulterior motive. When invoked in political contexts, it collapses a professional woman into a childlike position.

Some have argued that Kumar would have disregarded any woman’s personal space, regardless of religion. That may well be true. Sexism does not require communal specificity. But it would be disingenuous to ignore the symbolic dimension of the hijab in this interaction. The question remains: would he have reached for a Hindu woman’s ghoonghat in the same way?

NDA ally and minister Sanjay Nishad, speaking to a local news channel, said this:

“He is a man after all. One should not hound him like this. If touching the ‘hijab’ caused such an uproar, what would have happened if he had touched elsewhere.”

The hesitation many feel in answering that question points to an uneven distribution of bodily sanctity. Certain markers—certain bodies—are treated as politically sensitive terrain, while others are treated as available for adjustment and commentary. Women who are perceived as belonging to the dominant social group are often protected as extensions of collective honor—what is commonly referred to as “our women.” This protection does not necessarily confer autonomy, but it does create boundaries that outsiders are expected to respect.

Women who fall outside that circle of identification—Muslim women in particular—are less likely to receive even this conditional protection. This makes intervention feel permissible rather than transgressive. Seen in this light, the hijab offers a visible point of entry for a gesture that might otherwise feel socially risky.

“If anyone goes to take an appointment letter, should they not show their face? Is this an Islamic nation? Nitish ji was acting as a guardian... If you go to take your passport, or go to the airport, do you not show your face? You talk about Pakistan and ‘Englishtan’. This is India and only Indian laws will work here. Nitish Kumar did nothing wrong,” Union minister Giriraj Singh told journalists.

Asked what if the girl had refused to take the job, Singh shot back, “Woh refuse kare yaah jahannum mein jaye (She can refuse or go to hell)” before stalking off.

What allows these moments to pass with minimal consequence is not confusion about consent, but the persistent centering of male intention over female experience. Public discussion lingers on what the man meant and what he felt in the moment. The woman’s physical resistance, discomfort, or refusal is treated as secondary, if it is acknowledged at all.

In India, we are comfortable talking about women’s bodies as symbols—of family, community, culture, even the nation. We are far less comfortable treating them as simply people with autonomy. If bodily autonomy is to mean anything here, it cannot depend on who the woman is, what she wears, or how gently the man describes himself afterward. It has to apply in public spaces, to powerful men, and in moments where “no harm was meant.”

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https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/movies/actor-politician-suresh-gopi-apologises-to-woman-journo-for-misbehaviour/article67469452.ece

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/tn-governor-apologises-to-journalist-for-patting-her-cheek-at-press-conference/article61865390.ece

I sit on the floor facing the bed. I don’t remember deciding to do it. I just remember lowering myself down, the way you do when you’re tired of standing but not ready to lie down. The rug is thin where my legs fold under me. We bought it at the market three summers ago, rolled up and tied with twine. You insisted it would look fine once it “settled.” I remember you tripping on the edge of it the first night, laughing like that was proof you were right. It still bunches slightly near the door. I smooth it with my hand anyway.

You’re on the bed, leaning back against the headboard. There’s a cigarette between your fingers, glowing like a tiny sun in eclipse, the filter darkened where your mouth keeps finding it. You don’t smoke often. You say my name the way you did when you first brought me here, and you smile after, small and crooked. I remember thinking then that I could get used to being called like that. You pat the space beside you—an open gesture. I grow more aware of the door behind me. Hallway light seeps under it; the stairs lead straight to the car. I breathe out.

But the pit in my chest gapes. It’s immediate and deep and familiar. It’s full of other rooms, other beds, other moments where I thought I was safe because nothing bad had happened yet. I should leave now, it tell me, before I want more than I can carry. It tells me how this goes. It remembers not crying until the door clicked shut. I sit very still and let it pass through me. Please, not now. I beg. Let me stay. Let me look at him the way he deserves to be looked at.

My chest tightens. I feel small in a way I haven’t felt in years. My mother’s voice surfaces, and I’m eight again, sitting on the edge of my bed, crying. Okay, she said, tell me three things you can see.

I see your hands, one holding the cigarette, one resting open on the sheet. I see the frayed corner of the carpet and remember how you carried it on your shoulder the whole way home even though I offered to help. I see the way the light from the lamp softens your face.

Three things you can smell, she said.

Smoke. My cucumber and green tea soap (I realize you’ve used it again). Something warm and familiar—from another time, another life.

Three things you can hear.

That indie guy you like, playing softly from your phone on the dresser. Your breathing. The clock ticking.

It doesn’t fix anything. It just brings me back.

I open my eyes fully and meet your gaze. You once told me how it makes sense that Orpheus looked back. “Love is a constant terror of loss,” you said. It feels like the longest night of the year. The rug warms under me. Outside, the neighbour’s dog barks once at nothing. I do the bravest thing I have ever done. I stay.

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It has been three months since I got into university—three months and thirteen days, if we’re being exact. These have been some of the most physically and emotionally demanding weeks of my life, in ways I didn’t expect. Part of it is that the three years before this were the opposite of “busy.” I barely went out, spent all my days studying, had no real social life, and lived mostly inside my own head. Then suddenly, I was catapulted to the liveliest campus in the country, surrounded by noise, energy, and more people than I’d spoken to in years. It was… a lot.

Three months isn’t a long time, I know. I’m still figuring things out, still getting used to this place, and still learning how to be a functioning version of myself outside the safety of my room. But even in this short stretch, I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve learned—not just about the university, but about myself, friendships, independence, and what happens when your life suddenly widens.

This isn’t a coming-of-age declaration or a list of “how to survive college” rules, because I’m not in any position to teach anyone anything. It’s simply a collection of the little realizations these months gave me that shifted how I see people, how I understand connection, and how I’m learning to exist in a space much bigger than the life I had before.

1. It’s nice to have a friend. Or two. Or three. Before university, I was essentially on mute socially and I didn’t mind it. Being alone felt natural and easy; it still does. I still need quiet days and solo walks. I still genuinely enjoy being by myself, and I don’t need a crowd to feel okay. But now I get why people say friendships matter. Last Tuesday, I spent the entire day wandering around campus with the two friends I’ve made. We had lunch at a popular spot, browsed the bookstalls, complained about the weather, and talked about nothing important. It was ordinary in a way I hadn’t experienced in a long time, and I loved it. Somewhere between orientation week and midterms, I realized that having a couple of people to exist beside—not perform for, not impress, just be with—can make life softer.

2. Patience. Patience. Patience. You’re (likely) not going to meet your closest people in the first week. I didn’t. I got accepted a few weeks late, and by the time I showed up, everyone had already formed groups. I did make a friend right away—another latecomer. We got along fine, and we still do. But the people I actually feel comfortable with, the ones I genuinely click with, showed up a little later. That’s how it goes. A lot of early friendships are based on who sits next to you, not who really gets you. It’s not a failure if you don’t have a set group by the first month. Your closest person by graduation might be someone you haven’t even said hello to yet.

3. Being open-minded will change your life. I came here with a lot of unnecessary rules in my head—don’t be friends with extroverts, don’t get close to people with big groups, don’t talk to guys, and so on. It wasn’t deep or philosophical; I just assumed I wouldn’t get along with certain types of people. Three months in, I’ve realized how limiting that was. Some of the nicest, loveliest, and most grounded people I’ve met are the exact people I used to automatically write off. I would’ve missed out on good conversations and good company if I’d stuck to those silent “no” lists. You don’t have to force yourself to like everyone, but don’t decide who someone is before you’ve even said a sentence to them. Give people a fair chance to be themselves.

   

   4. Make a personal curriculum. Yes, the university has its own syllabus, and yes, it already feels like enough work. But having a small, self-made set of things you want to learn outside your degree changes the experience in a good way. I recently started learning a new language and seriously studying modern Indian history, mostly out of curiosity for things I always said I’d get to “someday.” It’s not about becoming hyper-productive or reinventing your entire schedule. It’s just a way to keep your interests from shrinking down to whatever the semester dictates. Even a tiny list counts: twenty minutes of reading before bed, a page of writing a day, ten vocabulary words, one documentary a week.
   
   I’ll probably write a separate essay on how to make a manageable personal curriculum—one that doesn’t sabotage your actual coursework or turn into another self-imposed pressure system. For now, all I’ll say is: pick one thing you genuinely want to learn and start small. That’s enough.
   

   5. Fall in love with the world a little bit. I really have. Somewhere between rushing to class and checking deadlines, I’ve started to believe that people are mostly good and mostly kind. Maybe that sounds naïve, but I don’t mind. It feels much better than the years when I was always expecting the worst. I’ve started enjoying things I never used to—like sitting in the sun. I always found sunny days annoying, but now I like sitting in the lawn with my friends between classes, not talking at all, letting the day be slow. I used to avoid the sun entirely; now it feels like a part of the day I look forward to.
   
   And I’ve begun talking to people I normally would’ve just observed from a distance. Two compliments so far. It probably didn’t change their life, but it changed something in mine. One was a girl in my class whose earrings I liked. I just said so, and she smiled. The other was someone I don’t actually know. I’d seen parts of her interview for a club on campus, and when she came out afterward, I told her I knew she’d get in because she absolutely nailed it. I wasn’t trying to be motivational; I just genuinely thought she did well. She looked so happy and so genuinely touched that it stayed with me the rest of the day. I used to be terrified of approaching people (still am), but it’s starting to feel less intimidating.
   
   The world isn’t perfect, but there are parts of it worth paying attention to. A warm bench in the sun. Friends laughing about nothing. Someone you’ll never meet again smiling because you said something kind. All of it counts, even if it’s small. It makes your life feel a little more open, and other people’s days, even briefly, a little lighter.

6. There will be exhausting days. Some will drain you physically, others will crowd your mind until it aches. There will be moments when your chest feels heavy for no clear reason, and you might find yourself tearing up in the middle of a practical examination simply because everything feels too loud and too much. People will let you down, even when they don’t mean to. And you’ll probably do the same at some point; bruise their heart without intending harm. You’ll fall in love. You’ll fall out of it. You’ll make friends who feel permanent, and then one day you might slip out of each other’s orbit. You’ll miss the library for days on end and then when you finally return, it feels different and you’ll decide to just head to class instead.
   
   There will be days when campus feels like the center of your universe, when ten hours pass without you checking the time because you’re exactly where you should be. And then the reverse: days when three hours feel endless, when the chatter around you grates, when all you want is quiet and Mom. I’m not sure, but I think this is what growing up actually looks like: slow, uneven days that change you in increments. I guess I’m not supposed to have control of the plot yet. Maybe that’s the whole point of this strange, luminous age I’m in: everything matters and nothing is permanent and I’ll figure it out.
   
   Everything will be okay. All of this counts. You’re not failing and you’re not falling apart. Life can feel uneven and unpredictable, but you’re growing through it. Things don’t have to make sense yet. Just live well. Just live.

I don’t have a thesis to defend or a sweeping insight to end with, just a handful of weeks that felt livelier and brighter than I expected. University hasn’t turned me into a new person, but it has nudged me—gently, inconsistently—into knowing myself more, into becoming someone a little more open and a little less afraid. I know I still have years ahead, and those years will probably undo half of what I think I’ve figured out. But for now, three months and thirteen days have been enough to show me that I can love people, love this place, and love myself in a way I didn’t expect. I’m here, I’m learning, I’m living. And that is enough.

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“We need more films like that,” my dad said as he unlocked the car. He sounded genuinely thoughtful. “People forget how many families only have daughters. There’s nothing incomplete about it.”

My mother adjusted the dupatta on her shoulder as she replied, almost contemplative. “Absolutely. Look at Indira Gandhi—she was an only child. And, um, I can’t recall her name, but–”

“Sushma Swaraj,” I reminded my mother seamlessly, not even looking up from my phone, though my mind was absorbing every word. We’d had this conversation before.

“Sushma Swaraj ji, yes!” she exclaimed. “She had no sons either. Her daughters performed her last rites. As did Manmohan Singh ji’s daughters perform his. That should have ended the notion that only sons can do certain things.”

I felt an inexplicable wave of—not anger, no—irritation wash over me. Why were we even talking about this? Why was this so novel, so cool and unique that names had to be remembered and films had to be made? They sounded like they were trying to convince themselves. The rather petulant streak in me wanted to retort, “Yes, Ma, you’re stuck with me. No need to self-soothe by recounting names like multiplication tables. When the time comes, it will be me by the pyre, doing the final rites, even if Swaraj and Singh only had sons and no daughters.”

A 2022 Pew opinion poll shows the strong gender norms for these familial roles, though without being specific about birth order. 63% of respondents said that sons should have the primary responsibility for parents’ funeral rites, while only 1% said daughters should; the remaining 35% said responsibility should be shared (Pew Research Center, 2022).

I started noticing this pattern when I was old enough to count.

Two or three or four or five daughters. One son. Always the son at the end.

He arrives last, but he isn’t just the youngest. He’s the finish line. He is the reason the others exist. You can almost feel the house exhale when he’s born; a sigh that follows years of quiet disappointment. He will sit on father’s lap at dinner, while the others clear the table. It is an unspoken confession. Nobody says: “We kept trying until we had a son.” They say: “We’re finally complete.” They say: “God blessed us.” They say: “Lucky.” Lucky for whom? Not for the daughters who fill the line before him. Lucky for the parents who can finally stop wanting, who no longer have to awkwardly smile to a “God will surely bless you with a boy next time.”

The skewed sex ratio is concentrated at last births in the family, in cases where the previous children are daughters (Jayachandran, 2015). A family that wants two children might have two daughters, try again, and use sex selection to ensure their third child is a boy. Indian parents articulate their stronger preference to keep having children to obtain a son than a daughter.

In Indian families, daughters are born, but sons are achieved.

The girls before him are obedient and helpful. They know how to braid each other’s hair, how to keep quiet when the grown-ups are talking, how to balance multiple teacups on a single tray, how to disappear without leaving the room. They raise themselves and one another. They learn to stay small, accommodating before they even learn to want. Father is always stressed, fretting over how he can earn enough to eventually get them married off. Mother experiments with strange recipes, insisting it will help her have a baby brother for them.

The boy arrives, and suddenly the world brightens again. The air feels different around him. There is not enough space in the house for sweets anymore. The music blares, and the girls have never seen their father smile so wide before—he has a gummy grin and hopes his son inherits it too. The calls keep coming, so much that sometimes the phones and landline ring at the same time. There are talks of a big party, everyone they know invited. It is not often that you see a lifelong curse—a continual murder of dreams—celebrated with such all-consuming joy.

Another phenomenon, shown by Jayachandran and Kuziemko (2011), is that because women in India want to and are more likely to become pregnant again after a daughter is born, they stop breastfeeding girls sooner to regain their fecundity or because of the new pregnancy. This is detrimental to girls because of the health benefits of breastfeeding. In this case, the gap arises without parents having an explicit preference to provide more health inputs to sons.

It isn’t only the girls who suffer. The little boy does too, carrying the sidelined dreams of his sisters. He gets everything he could ever ask for, but every gift has a hook in it. The boy is privileged, but he is also predestined. He becomes the family’s proof of redemption, the living justification for all those years of trying. He is expected to be the light, the guide, and the fulcrum. He must secure a respectable job, marry the “right” woman, uphold the family name, keep the honor, keep the lineage intact. He must be strong without faltering and successful without rest. He must be grateful. He must not complain. He must look after his sisters, protect them, provide for them, and care for his aging parents when they grow frail. He must never fail, because his entire existence was framed as the reward for not giving up. This is what he was born into. This is what all that waiting was for.

The last son is a celebration. The last son is a funeral.

Part of the collateral damage to girls’ health is that they are in larger families and competing with their favored brother for resources (Jayachandran and Pande, 2017). Given fixed financial resources, girls will grow up in families that have fewer resources to spend on each child. Thus, even if, within the family, boys and girls receive equal inputs, because of cross-family differences, girls will receive fewer resources (Yamaguchi, 1989; Clark, 2000).

The thing is, there’s always a son at the end of the line—even in families like mine, with no sons at all. I feel the ghost of a brother I never had in the offhand words of strangers and loved ones alike. I sense him in those late-night questions that gnaw at me: Are my ambitions truly mine, or just a desperate bid to prove to the world that my parents didn’t “fail” by having only daughters? I sense him in the relentless drive to become something bigger, something beyond the woman I am right now. A brother would have been worthy from his first breath—why must I, then, aim for prime minister or Olympic gold just to earn the right to this life?

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https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/clicklit/we-mourn-only-sons-among-many-daughters-not-the-reverse/

https://www.populationfoundation.in/three-daughters-then-have-two-sons-at-least/

When I love someone, my first instinct isn’t to reach for them. Instead, in fact, the first instinct is to never reach for them again. It’s to start preparing for the moment they’ll leave. Not consciously, at first. It starts as a small voice reminding me that nothing good lasts, that closeness always comes with a cost. So I start making room for the ending while a bond is only starting to form. It is, now I realize, a kind of betrayal.

The more I care, the more I retreat. The deeper I fall, the colder I seem. I think it’s a form of self-preservation. I convince myself that distance is mercy, that pulling back early will save us both from the inevitable collapse. I tell myself that love shouldn’t feel this dangerous, that if being close hurts this much, maybe it’s better to stop before it gets worse. It sounds logical in my head. It even feels responsible. This is how I show love—by pulling away. But it causes so much pain to the people I care about. So. Much. Pain.

When someone loves me, I can feel it pressing against me—a warmth I don’t know how to hold without burning. I want to let it in, but it makes me restless. I start noticing the little things and panic because, oh no, they’re getting too close. I think of all the ways things could go wrong. Every tender word, every sweet gesture, every moment of closeness feels like a debt I won’t be able to afford. I start rationing my affection, cutting it into smaller and smaller pieces, hoping that if I give less, it’ll hurt less when it’s gone.

I know what I’m doing. I know when I go quiet, when I say “I’m fine” instead of “I’m scared,” when I withdraw instead of asking for reassurance, when I want to say, “I want to lay on the grass and watch planes land with you,” but I blurt out, “I have to go”—I know it looks like I don’t care. I know it hurts them. I can see it happening in real time: the confusion, the slow resignation that settles in when someone realizes you won’t meet them halfway. And I still can’t stop.

There’s a point where the distance stops feeling protective and starts feeling like punishment—but by then, I’m too far gone. I’ve already convinced myself it’s better this way. Better to feel the ache of absence than the humiliation of need.

That’s what love does to me. It wakes up every defense mechanism I’ve spent years building, and then dares me to dismantle them while someone’s watching. I never can. So instead, I keep my hands at my sides, my words to myself, and I watch something beautiful quietly die—all because I was too afraid to let it live.

It’s not their fault. That’s the first thing I always tell myself when things start falling apart—when I see the disappointment in their eyes, the hurt they try to hide when I go quiet again. The people I love don’t deserve to wonder if they did something wrong. They don’t deserve the silence I give them.

It’s me. It’s always me.

It takes a long, long time to come to the realization that you’re going through a case of chronic emotional failure. The moment someone says something loving, something soft and unguarded—that’s when the paralysis sets in. Their words hang in the air, trembling with sincerity, and my mind goes blank. All alarms go off. I feel the urge to say it back, to mirror that tenderness, to meet them halfway in their vulnerability. But the words clog in my throat.

The silence stretches, and in that silence, my loved ones die a little.

I hate that about myself. I hate the the way my body betrays what my heart actually feels. I hate the way my love becomes invisible—something I feel deeply but express in ways no one can recognize. I do small things: I remember details, I anticipate needs, I stay steady. But it doesn’t translate. I leave no evidence of my affections. From the outside, it looks detached. From the inside, it’s all-consuming. I don’t mean to seem distant. I don’t mean to withhold. Inside, I’m screaming the same words they just said to me, louder, more desperate, but I can’t get them out. It’s like I’m living behind a glass wall—close enough to see and understand every expression, every attempt at connection, but unable to reach through. If I try to break it, I’ll bleed.

And it’s infuriating. The guilt is constant; a static hum under everything I do. I replay moments in my head for hours afterward: Why didn’t I just say it back? Why couldn’t I move, just once? Why am I such a fucking coward? I think of their face falling, the warmth fading, the subtle closing-off that happens when someone finally gives up on getting more from you. And I know I caused it. I know I’m the reason they feel unwanted.

But knowing doesn’t help. Knowing just deepens the rot. I can dissect the problem, read and write a hundred million essays on it, label every part of it—avoidant attachment, fear of intimacy, hypervigilance—and it still doesn’t fix the fact that I can’t do the one thing that would change it. I can’t express love without feeling like I’m walking into a trap. I can’t be soft without hearing the echo of all the times softness got me hurt.

The self-hate that follows is exhausting. It builds up in quiet, invisible ways. People see restraint, or coldness, or nonchalance—but what it really is, is a cage: loving too much to let go, but too afraid to let anyone see it. And the cruelest part is that I built it myself.

I want to be able to love people the way they deserve to be loved—out loud and unhesitating and visible. I want to be the person who can meet affection with affection instead of trying to look for ways to escape. But every time I try, the fear swallows the impulse whole. I keep the distance. I say less, show less, give less. Silence becomes safer than sincerity, even though it costs me everything—connection, understanding, love.

And then they leave anyway, not because they stopped caring, but because they never got the chance to see how much I did.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s because you’re perpetually alone.

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200+ messages.

390+ messages.

500+ messages.

Your group chat notifications keep pinging. Maybe you have friends—lots of them. You stare at their texts. Really stare. And it’s so, so easy for them. So effortless—the way their words tumble into each other, the way the jokes land without any awkward pauses. They just get each other. And you wonder if you’re the anomaly. Maybe there’s something wrong with you, right? How is it possible for someone to never quite click with anyone they’ve ever met? How is it possible that every time you open yourself up to someone, one of you ends up quietly disappointed? You’re the common denominator, after all. They can’t all be shallow. And everyone around you seems to have a soul tribe—an orbit of people who feel like family. So why don’t you?

For once, take a long look at those unread bundles of group‑chat texts, gentle reader. Do you understand what they’re talking about? Does the punchline make you laugh the way it makes them double over? Do you think they yearn as hard as you do? Do you think they lie awake replaying every conversation, dissecting where they might have erred? Do you still believe this endless pattern is nothing but a dark little cosmic joke?

Maybe, just maybe, they’re... normal.

You want friends. God, you want friends. A small constellation of people with different lives but one gravitational pull. Actually—scratch that. You want one friend. One. A single person who just gets you. Someone you can trust completely. Someone who feels like a soulmate. You want a Marshall Eriksen in your life. You want an Inej Ghafa. You want an Ann Perkins. You want a Sam Wilson.

The past week has not been very merciful. Losing the only two friends I’ve ever had all at once—combined with the million other little things that, though entirely futile, occupy my mind and make me bleed—has been rough. I’ve always been the type of person who never learned or understood how to actually make friends. With the crushing weight of expectations and dreams on my shoulders, I try to keep myself inhibited—only revealing what’s necessary.

I create my own insular world in the books I read. I decline every offer to hang out because, despite their best efforts, I know I’ll end up feeling emptier than ever. Life is a swing between wanting to give myself freely when I find someone my heart fervently wishes to trust and wanting to hide all of me until the other person feels abandoned and injured.

I make a friend. I click with them. We talk and banter and cry together. And in the middle of the night, when my cheeks still hurt from smiling about that innocent little joke and my chest hums with warmth, the suffocating thought creeps in: it’s about time they figure me out and go.

I haven’t completely unpacked the idea yet, and I still struggle to articulate it, but here it is: we imagine this brilliant, mythical person who doesn’t just understand us but never misunderstands us. We wish to be kissed even when we are marred by blood, sweat, and scars. We dream of bigger and better places—because we’re all profoundly, unbearably lonely. We want, and we want, and we want, constantly, because the act of wanting—though sometimes blisteringly painful—makes us feel less alone for a while. Maybe that’s why it’s a human trait: to want.

But I have another, rather audacious idea.

Be that person.

Be weird for a while, and let them be weird. Let someone get to know you—the true you; the raw, unvarnished, and rather uncharming you. Of course, we are only truly ourselves when we are alone, but we can at least reveal a sliver, right? So do that. The people who leave can leave. The people who stay will stay.

So what if you always say that word wrong, or if you secretly wish things were a little different with your mother? So what if sometimes sulk, despite being the chill and “mature” one, because the world feels frustrating? So what if you’re usually a joy to be around but sobbed for hours because someone said something hurtful? So what if you still have nightmares sometimes? So what if you’re a little insecure about that peculiar scar on your right arm when you were seven? So what if you’re still mad at your childhood friends? So what if some nights, your head is too loud and just cannot sleep? So what if your dad think you think too much? So what if you don’t like birthday parties? So what if you kinda want to scream into your pillow today? So what if the people you hang out with don’t know the real you? I do. You’re my best friend and my soulmate. And I love you. All of you.

You’ll find your person. And you will also, by pouring love out into the world, find yourself.

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My mother’s voice came without looking at me. Her eyes were closed in meditation, legs folded facing the southern corner of our ancestral home. In most Hindu households, the south is avoided—the seat of Yama, lord of death, a dark shadow on the compass point. But in the Shakta tradition, south belongs to Kali. She is its guardian, its mother. And nothing is more sacred than a door she keeps.

We don’t call her Kali. We call her Matari. Mother.

Her idol had sat there for four centuries, though you could barely see what it was made of. Most of her form was drowned in liquid vermillion, thick and dark as blood. Her bare breasts shone faintly beneath the red, her trident in one hand. Around her feet: coins, a few conch shells, exactly three vivid red mandara blooms, their petals crumpled from the day’s heat.

I stood before her and felt safe, and I wondered what she really looked like. I wondered what her abode looked like—the crematorial grounds. It is her true home—the mango-wood pyres, the sunlight on the faces of the newly dead, the firstborn child bending with the flame. When the ashes lift into the wind, she wears them on her skin. She dances there, in the place the living call unholy—hair knotted and wild, skin dark as midnight, her slender neck garlanded with skulls, her beauty so marvelous and terrible that if I saw her, I would never look at anything else again.

“Fear isn’t real,” my mother said softly, opening her eyes now to look at me. “The world is Shakti’s play, shona. And when she ends it, she will do so with the tip of her trident.”

I found comfort in that, and underneath it slept heartache.

I remember the day everything went wrong—the dull, animal thud of the ground meeting my chest, the violent bloom of pain as air fled my body. The world turned white around the edges, and for one appalling instant I thought, so this is how it ends. I couldn’t draw a single breath. My mouth opened and closed like a fish stranded on the bank.

With the air finally returning in shuddering gasps, the tears followed—unstoppable and hysterical and humiliating. I sobbed until my face felt raw, until salt stung my lips. My mind hissed at Her, you did this. I was furious that I could hurt so much and still be here; that my body still wanted to live after such betrayal. Furious that She had watched—if She watched at all—and done nothing.

Nothingness.

She never answered, and that silence metastasized. Grief. Hurt. Rage. Grief. Hurt. Rage. I remember staggering upright, lungs heaving, knees trembling, the world smeared and tainted forever now. Running home on legs that didn’t feel like mine, terror shaking inside my throat, salt and iron on my tongue. I slipped past my mother like a shadow, biting down on my own breath so she wouldn’t hear. Upstairs, door closed, I pressed my forehead to the cool wood of my little desk and finally let it out.

Blaming Her. Hissing at Her through tears. Crying because She was the only one who felt safe enough to cry to—even as I accused Her. Because I couldn’t tell my mother. Because I couldn’t tell anyone. Because I had nobody. Because there was no one left but Her. It was childish naïveté that made me sneer at Her. You did this. You watched me fall. You could have stopped it.

And it was childish naïveté that still believed: Please tell me I’ll be okay.

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Looking back, I think She heard me that day. She is everywhere, after all—in my small lungs when the air left them, in the earth that marred my knees, in the salt of my tears. She existed within the friends I trusted who brought me to that moment. She was there in the fall, in the recovery, and in the screaming silence that followed. She was the soothing cool of the wood of my desk. She was in my heart—red and resplendent—when it crumpled like a mandara blossom.

Nothingness.

There is a word for this in Hindu philosophy: śūnyatā—nothingness. It is not absence, or emptiness, or a void. It is the infinite field before creation, the moment between death and rebirth, the stillness in which all things dissolve and reappear. It is Her truest form—unmoving and undivided. She is not the one who speaks; She is the one who is.

It is that vast ground from which everything rises and to which everything must return. Nothingness is not empty; it is overflowing, dense with unspoken potential. Everything that exists—joy, pain, betrayal, faith—emerges for a moment from the boundless depth that is Her, shines briefly in the light of our consciousness, and then vanishes back into Her. It is endless becoming and un-becoming. What we call “nothing” is, in truth, everything.

My faith lives inside this nothingness. When I speak and She does not answer, when the prayers vanish into the wind and the wind gives nothing back, that is nothingness. When my lungs burn and my heart hammers and my tears fall, and the only one I feel safe with does not intervene, that is nothingness. It is terrifying, yes—but it is not cruel. It is the infinite space in which my devotion is made and tested. To have faith is to offer your rage, your grief, your love, and find no answer—and to continue anyway. To love without answer, to trust without confirmation.

Even now, when I kneel before Matari, I see no face beneath the vermillion, only the sheen of red. She does not comfort. She does not console. She simply waits. And I, child no longer, bow. I speak, I rage, I plead, I weep—and I keep speaking, keep pleading, keep weeping, because this is how faith exists. Not because She will answer, but because the nothingness itself is sacred, and She is the sacred silence in which I live.

When the end comes, when my body is laid upon the pyre, I will not resist. Because when have we Shaktas ever feared death? My firstborn will walk the final circle around me, and when the earthen pot falls—when the water spills and the last bond breaks—I will feel the world release me. And when the flame catches, when the smoke rises to meet the wind, I will see Her: hair knotted wild, face honeyed and untamed, eyes like the sun at dusk. I will know then that I was never separate from Her—not in birth, not in faith, not in doubt, not in death.

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Let’s start from the beginning.

I’m waiting. Waiting becomes the shape of my days. Waiting for the right moment, the right kind of courage. Waiting for someone with kind eyes. Waiting until I can unlace the parts of myself I have always been ashamed of—until I can show the crooked edges and the habits that scare me—and still be held. Waiting to reveal the part of me that is dark and hungry, the thing that says: I will love so fiercely I am almost not human. Waiting to show that I carry, beneath the quiet, a will that would gladly consume you—and then sit, licking its fingers afterwards, satisfied and ashamed in equal measure.

Waiting is discipline. Waiting is cruelty. It has taught me restraint, or perhaps forced me to impose it upon myself—I rehearse sentences in my head, linger over the moments that made you laugh, carry them quietly with me. There is a slow corrosion of self in the patience. Day by day, I sacrifice pieces of spontaneity, tuck away reactions that feel too raw. I tell myself I’m preparing, not hiding. I tell myself I will reveal only when the conditions are right. I tell myself I am being wise.

But as I grew up, I realized things were only getting worse.

The madness of love is so delightfully obscene and so easily misstated as pathology when it is actually a kind of fierce loyalty. Don’t get me wrong, domesticity is beautiful—sharing a toothbrush cup, folding shirts still warm from the dryer, arguing over how long rice should be soaked. There is joy in the stillness of love, but there’s divinity in the gore of it. The way my eyes trace every single inch of you because my imagination is greedy. I imagine all the names you’ve ever said from that lovely mouth of yours—especially my own. I imagine the arc of your shoulder in photographs that I didn’t take, the way your jaw looks softer in golden lights.

I live in a time where romantic appetite is unsophisticated. Affection is a commodity found on every other app. Hall passes are praised as honesty, hookups are framed as freedom. The world scrolls for novelty and swipes for excitement and claps for the bravery of being unmoored. When friends tell me, breathless and proud, about their “open” arrangements and their “situationships,” my chest tightens with something like grief. Not for their choices—who am I to instruct adults on how to love—but for how normal substitution has become. And while all of this becomes more and more normalized, the small, shameful animal inside me does not accept this as the only language for desire. That animal still believes in love as a kind of sacrament. It believes what you love should not be so easily consumable.

The gore of love is nothing but the burning need to know your beloved completely. At first glance, this may seem tender, even admirable. But in truth, it is a form of violence. It demands more than is reasonable, more than any one person can truly give, and in this way it is barbaric. To want someone entirely, to be able to trace the contour of their habits, the architecture of their mind—it is a hunger that cannot be sated. This is the relentless, unrepentant side of love: the desire to merge completely, to render yourself inseparable from the object of your affection, even when it is impossible and perhaps inappropriate.

Nobody taught me how to do this. Perhaps the monster was already inside me, even as I floated in the amniotic fluid—suspended and unfinished. For the longest time, I believed there was something wrong with me. I learned, as the world does, that attention can be rented. People around me mastered the art of divided devotion, while I watched like a child hiding under the bed, wide-eyed and unwilling to crawl into the noise.

To rage in this climate feels decadent. It makes you look primitive, animalistic, violent. I rage anyway. I rage because there is cruelty in being casual: it implies that you, my beloved, are merely one permutation among many, interchangeable and available. That you aren’t precious or sacred or worthy of being worshipped. To me, it is sacrilege.

I want to eat you, I told myself, in a language that is both grotesque and tender. Not to punish, but to make your heart a part of my own body—sure and known and impossible for anyone else to see. When you are inside me, metaphorically consumed, you become unknowable to everyone else. I am not naïve; I understand the impossibility. Still, there is an odd tenderness in this hunger: if I can absorb your presence into me—and not merely get drunk on it when I want—then, and only then, have I truly loved.

But some days, this hunger makes me bleed. I bury my face in the pillow and let the tears soak through until I cannot breathe. The questions come like a chant: Why did I have to meet you? Why did you have to walk into my life with that shy smile and that unbearable kindness? Why did you have to awaken this savage, ugly beast and make me face my worst fears? It is not rage that grips me then, but grief—grief for the life I lived before you, when everything was simpler, and my heart was quieter, and I did not know that I was a cannibal.

I do not want to be this way. But I will not, out of politeness, deny the part of me that wants to keep you. My hunger is sometimes unreasonable. It is messy, luminous, tender, and dangerous. It is the price of loving me.

So here’s the deal: I will try to be softer. I know I am hard to love in the little ways that rarely make it into poetry. My emotions can be graceless and sordid and embarrassingly human. But they are mine, and they will sometimes spill out in the ordinary days between us. I will not ask you to bleed for me, or accept my flaws as they are. I want to learn from you. I want to be taught mercy, so meet me in the small rituals where love proves itself. Save a joke for my ears alone. Slip a note into the book you borrowed. Let your hand brush mine when no one is looking. Remind me that even when I am loathsome and misshapen, I am still tethered to you by something gentle and survivable.

And sometimes I will want monstrous things. Sometimes the animal will crawl out from my ribs with its ravenous appetite and jagged teeth. I will imagine ripping your heart out and eating it, not to destroy you, but to know the anatomy of you so precisely that we become inseparable. I want to memorize you until you are as familiar as the socks in my drawer. I want to see what the world looks like when you make tea in my kitchen, your back facing the soft yellow walls. I want to know what your earth-coloured fingers look like when you slide anklets onto my feet. I will practice letting you be bright and desired and admired—so long as, in the small hours, you come home and we dissolve into each other. I do not expect absolution, or for anyone to endorse the barbarities sleeping in my chest. I only want to witness this hunger without shame; to let you tame the terrible beast that lives within me.

If I could offer you anything other than appetite it would be this: a promise to choose tenderness even when hunger rises. To know when to set down the knife. To keep you fed and also free in the ways that matter. To build with you a world so sweet it resists the pornographic noise outside.

And if I fail—if I allow the monster to run too long—then know this: my worst is still an attempt to make you part of me, not to erase you. That I would let you sink your teeth into me too.

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My grandmother would often say this, especially when all the women in our family were gathered together in the open-roof courtyard after dinner, oiling and braiding each other’s hair. It’s strange, though, how she would first compliment my complexion and call me chaand ka tukra (a drop of moonlight), despite having dark skin herself, before muttering those words. It was almost as if she knew, deep down, that the resentment she held toward melanin wasn’t entirely her own. It had been passed down—generation after generation—through idle comments passed on the rooftops and in the kitchen, until she adopted it without a fight.

Or maybe, she did put up a fight. You did too, didn't you?

"How to get rid of dark inner thighs?"

"How to remove pigmentation from lips?"

"How to get pink nipples?"

"Is it possible to manifest hazel eyes if I have dark brown ones?"

"Can Vaseline lighten skin?"

"Soaps that will lighten my knees."

"Will kojic acid and glycolic acid and alpha arbutin really fix the dark spots on my thighs in six weeks?

These are some of the questions that flood beauty forums for Indian women and ‘tips’ are often shared in glossy fashion magazines. It took me a long, long time to notice the violence in them. The need to "get rid of," to "remove," to "fix," is so heartbreakingly desperate. Like you would do anything—anything—to make it happen. The coming of age for brown girls is nothing short of a war. A war we wage against our bodies to please the ghost the white man left behind. The ghost that has made its home in the brown man's mind. It looks at you. It’s always looking at you. For us, blooming into womanhood is never about discovering our bodies, finding out what makes us tingle, or searching for products that love and nourish our skin. It’s about fixing what’s been marked as damaged. You scrub your skin raw every single morning in the shower. You wonder if you’re using the right kind of brush because your elbows still don’t look light enough. You scrub harder. You are irreparably brown, and the ghost wants you to fix it—even if it makes you bleed.

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If you’re an average brown woman, you will likely spend your entire life catering to that ghost. Like my grandmother, you will bend a knee to it, even when you know better. It will ask of you things that make you look less and less like yourself. It doesn’t like the rich, dark brown of your eyes, so you wear contacts. Not the blue ones—you must not look like an impostor. No, you lighten your flowing black hair just enough so you forget what you truly are.

Your mother asks you to stop drinking chai because it will make you darker. You know it’s a stupid myth. You stop drinking anyway. You press the maroon bangles back into the box because you’ve been told they make your hands look dull. You bleach the fine hair on your body even though it leaves your skin itchy for days. You rub homemade scrubs over your lips until they’re raw, hoping to wake with a pink softness that was never yours to begin with. Despite probably coming from a lineage of sun-worshippers, you stop going out in the sun. The sun may love you, but the ghost loves you pale.

You pull your sleeves down in the heat, sweat prickling at your underarms, because your skin has tanned unevenly and someone might notice. You scrub the back of your neck with soap until it draws out a wince, hoping to erase the “dirt” that is only your skin tone. You reach for gold jewellery instead of silver, because silver “doesn’t suit darker girls.” You return a bright lipstick you loved in the store because someone told you it’s “only for fair skin.” Each choice is small enough to pass without comment, yet each one is another offering to the ghost.

The ghost is no longer content to watch. It has hands now. They trace your face at night, pausing at the places it wants erased—the bridge of your nose, the thick and bushy arch of your brows, the curve of your hips, the dusky skin on your elbows. They pinch and pull and measure. They guide your own fingers to pluck, bleach, squeeze, and tear. And you obey, just like your ancestors did. You press whitening creams into your pores until they sting; you smear acids across your thighs until they burn under your skirts. You smell faintly of antiseptic and blood.

Maybe the ghost doesn’t just live in the brown man’s mind. Maybe it has taken residence inside you too—pressing against the back of your eyes, whispering in your ear while you look in the mirror. Always watching. Always taunting. Are you exhausted yet, my love?

Is there even a cure? Is there no way to live a life free from this haunting?

This is what you do, gentle reader. You kill violence with violence. Mock that ghost. Spit at it. Let it cry out under the heel of your jooti. You are loved and wise and brilliantly brown. Go out and let every drop of sunlight make love to your skin until it glows like pure jaggery. Slip on the loveliest sari you own and pretend you’re Sridevi while you dance wildly in the rain, the fabric heavy and cold against your thighs. Drink your chai as you hum to your favorite song. Bite into a ripe mango with juice running down your chin. Laugh with your whole mouth open. Fill the air with your noise, your scent, your colour.

And when one day the ghost tries to sneak up on you again—when you can no longer take its gross presence, and I assure you that day will come—I want you to grab it by the neck. Strangle it. Let it gasp for air the way you did every living second under its tyranny. And when it’s near the end, whimpering pathetically, tip your head back and laugh. Laugh so loudly it echoes through every daughter yet to come. Let everyone hear you. Let the gods hear you. Let your great-great-grandmother know you’ve healed. Let your father know you love the nose you got from him, and his strong shoulders. Let the little girl inside you know she’s won. And when the ghost hits the ground, burn it to ashes and toss it in the wind so it can never settle on brown skin again.

“I’d go hunting in the day and kill a fine stag. I’d bring it back to our hidden castle and dress it and cook it over a fire and then I’d sit you on my lap and feed you, morsel by morsel. All your sustenance would be by my hand and mine alone.”

She laughed then, for she knew he didn’t truly want such a biddable doll. She squirmed and turned in a sudden movement so that she lay facing him. “No, I’d hunt with you by your side,” she said as she reached up to pull his face down to hers. “I am your equal, my lord. Your equal and mate.”

“So you are,” he breathed.1

When I say, “how can I love when I’ve read so much?”—I don't just refer to the heartache inducing books, or phenomenally written fanfictions I’ve read over the years. It also includes the harrowing articles, the social media posts, the endless stream of screenshots and confessions I come across daily—each one testing my faith a little more. I’ve read the research. I’ve read the venting. I’ve read the stories of women who once thought they were lucky. And no, we can’t keep pretending that the internet isn’t "real life." It’s where people go when they have nowhere else to say it. When they don’t need to pretend as long as they have the shield of anonymity. So yes, I’ve read too much. I’ve seen too much. And it has reshaped the question from “How will I find love?” to “Why should I go looking for it at all?”

A while ago, I asked my friends what they were looking for in a partner. Not their “dream guy.” Just a man they could imagine building a life with. The list we came up with was short, almost embarrassingly simple:

• Not emotionally stunted.
• Knows how to do basic household chores.
• Has a decent job.
• Wouldn’t remain attracted to 19-year-olds while growing older with me.

That last one shouldn’t even need to be said. But it does.

Because time and time again, I’ve seen men insist it’s not possible. That aging with your partner is unnatural. That youth, specifically young female youth, is inherently more attractive, more desirable, more sexually valid. The only things stopping them, apparently, are public humiliation and the law. I’ve read the forums. I’ve seen the posts. The ones that debate the age of consent like it’s a technicality, as if 16 or 17 is some ethical gray area or just a matter of what the law states in that region. How it's just "male biology" and the only people who have a problem with it are "bitter old women." I’ve seen the porn site data—how teen and barely legal are still the most popular search terms across platforms. When men are taught to view women as symbols of status, a girlfriend becomes a social ladder. What happens when the shine wears off? What happens when she gains weight, gets sick, grows older? He leaves. She’s not useful anymore. She was never really loved, only possessed.

And I wonder, what does it mean to grow older in a world like this? What does romantic love look like when even the most basic expectations of emotional maturity, shared labor, and simple decency are met with resistance and mockery? That’s where this began for me, with the growing realization that what I’ve been taught to want—a man to grow with, to build with, to be safe with—might not exist in the world I actually live in.

The patriarchy’s plan is simple: keep women so busy managing everyone else’s lives that they forget to have one of their own. Romance, in its current form, is just another tool. Once inside a relationship, the labor begins. She works all day at her paid job, then comes home to cook, clean, shop, plan, and soothe. She decorates the flat, keeps track of birthdays, notices when the milk is low. She reads articles about better sex, better communication, better date nights. She researches recipes so he doesn’t get bored. She does all the emotional stretching, just to keep the connection.

This is not always the case. But it is common enough that it can no longer be dismissed as “bad luck.” It’s not just individual behavior either. When men move in with women, their quality of life skyrockets. When women move in with men, they start to drown and their needs become dispensable. Being in a relationship doesn’t mean being safe. It doesn’t mean being seen. It doesn’t mean being loved in the way women dream of love; with attention, with care, with softness.

And then there’s the rage. I read a few articles about men who repaired used sex dolls.2 They were horrified by what they saw: mutilated silicone women with their eyes gouged out, faces beaten, hair ripped off, bodies harmed and scrawled over with words like whore and bitch. These weren’t sex acts. They were rehearsals for violence. Practice rounds.

I came across a few videos on AI girlfriends recently. The comment section was flooded with men cheering. Not for the technology, but for what it meant: that real women would have to “try harder” now, or be obsolete by 2050. That the ON/OFF switch would be the real game changer. That these robots wouldn’t claim they have a headache. That they’d always say, “yes, sir" and get on their knees when asked.

These weren’t jokes. This is what they’ve wanted to say all along and now they don’t have to hide it. It’s not just about sex. It’s about control and total compliance. About manufacturing something that won’t need, won’t protest, won’t ever say no. Women take comfort in it, hoping that maybe, finally, men like that will leave us alone. Move on. Stop hurting us. But it doesn’t undo the damage. Not because of the robots, but because of the reactions. The way men cheer for a version of womanhood that doesn’t speak, doesn’t refuse, doesn’t feel. What they want isn’t love. And now they can say it out loud.

There’s an entire market now for AI tools that digitally undress women3. Some of them advertise themselves as “entertainment,” while others do it more bluntly. One is literally called UndressHer. Another, more horrifically, calls itself UndressBaby. Men and even young boys are using these. On their classmates. Colleagues. Strangers. Even family.

I truly do not know if men created in the minds of Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Leigh Bardugo, Elizabeth Hoyt, actually exist. But this exists4:

And so, I step back. I opt out.

It came gradually, then all at once: I will not try. I will not look. I will not participate. This isn’t bitterness, but self-protection. This isn't because I think every man is broken, but because I have seen enough. Because too many women feel resigned instead of cherished. Because I refuse to spend my twenties moulding myself into something “easier to love” by a man who doesn’t even know how to love himself. Honestly, the relief surprised me. At first, there was hesitation, because I was stepping away from something I was always told I was supposed to want. But once it settled, I felt lighter. Freer. Happier. I no longer have to perform—not flirt, not attract, not anticipate, not make myself small or charming or manageable. Not even subconsciously. That part of my mind could finally rest.

I will read my books. I will write my essays. I will go on long walks and stretch out in bed without waiting for someone to text back. I will hold space for a different kind of intimacy, one that doesn’t cost me my autonomy or my softness. I will love my family and my friends, my cat and my plants, my notebooks and my pens. I will love Rome as much as I love my almond tea, and maybe even as much as I love Alphonso mangoes. Because if romantic love is quickly turning into an endurance sport, a thankless job, a performance with no applause, then I'd rather stay home, and be whole.

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"O bestower of honours, may my husband be restored to life! Deprived of my husband, I am as one dead! Without my husband, I do not wish for happiness. Without my husband, I do not wish for heaven itself. Without my husband, I do not wish for prosperity. Without my husband, I cannot make up my mind to live! Thou thyself hast bestowed on me the boon, namely, of a century of sons; yet thou takest away my husband! I ask for this boon, May he be restored to life, for by that thy words will be made true." —Savitri speaking to Yama, the God of Death.

For centuries, Indian women have been raised on this story, told and retold like scripture. Savitri is the ideal we are taught to aspire to: beautiful, flawless, and above all, obedient. The perfect woman is one who prioritizes the men in her life above herself. Savitri asked for her father to have a hundred sons, for her blind father-in-law to regain his sight and kingdom, and finally, for her husband to father a hundred sons with her.

Oh, and the ideal woman? She bears a son. Always.

On the 17th of March 1979, Satyarani found her daughter, Shashi, unconscious with burns at her matrimonial home. When she was later taken to the hospital, she was reported dead due to '100 percent burns.' Shashi was twenty years old and six months pregnant. Her husband had continued to pressurize her for additional dowry and warned of dire consequences if the demands were not met. She was burnt to death following harassment for more dowry in her marital home.

"I have decided not to rest until my cause gets a fair hearing, until those who reduced my daughter to scraps of charred bones and flaking skin are adequately punished. I will go on fighting, and if I lose, my ghost will haunt those who have oppressed me."

It's been over four decades. Shashi's murderer is free. Shashi's mother passed away in 2014, having spent the second half of her life looking for justice.

A major reason dowry-related deaths persist is the deeply rooted view of women as financial burdens. To offset this perceived liability, families often provide dowries—cash, valuables, or “gifts”—to the groom’s family. But the demands often don’t end with the wedding. Husbands and in-laws frequently continue to pressure the bride’s family for more, and when these demands go unmet, the bride faces coercion, abuse, or even deadly violence. Through the 1980s, dowry burnings were routinely passed off as kitchen accidents. A 1979 report stated that “bride burning had become a cognizable blood sport in the nation's capital."

What about now?

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, dowry-related issues alone accounted for 28% of marriage-related suicides. 93% of the victims were women.

That's not it. In India, marital rape is legal.

Since childhood, I've spent every summer at my grandmother's place. Tucked near the forests was her cottage. The soft green of the walls had faded over time, but the mango trees and hibiscus flowers remained, as did the lingering scent of sandalwood in the air. During meals, we'd sit together and eat, talking about everything under the sun—from her pickles ripening nicely on the rooftop to my college acceptance letter. The conversations changed, the dinner table gained and lost people over the years, but there is one person I simply cannot forget.

Kamala.

She'd been married when she was fifteen to a man in his late sixties. The man died four years later, making her a widow. For many women in India, widowhood is a sentence to lifelong isolation. Kamala had to wear white, at all times, to symbolize the death of her husband. She wasn't allowed to wear jewelry, makeup or even colored clothing. Kamala couldn't eat with us during meals. She would sit on the floor in one corner of the room, waiting for us to finish so she could eat the leftovers. Because losing her husband meant losing all sense of personhood.

Widows in India can't attend weddings. It's a bad omen. People believe that inviting a widow to your wedding would lead to the groom dying within a couple of years of the marriage. On the other hand, men who lost their wives simply remarried, often within months. There was no social stigma attached.

To be a person in India, you have to be a man. That's non-negotiable. In several states, widows aren't even allowed to enter a kitchen, attend festive gatherings of any kind or participate in auspicious rituals. A widow is inauspicious. She isn't allowed to even pretend to be happy. Things aren't much better in the cities either. "What type of woman must she be?" muttered a group of middle aged women when they saw that a widow in our neighborhood had ordered a pizza, four months after her husband's funeral.

An excerpt from an article I read recently:

During her time in the women’s homes, {journalist} became conscious of her own privilege. “Once, I asked a group of women about their hobbies and they couldn’t stop giggling about my interest in their lives,” she says. Why did a stranger want to know what they did in their spare time? Or what they liked to eat? Or what made their heart beat faster? “When I asked one of them, who was going to get married soon, if she’d always had an idea of what kind of husband she wanted, she paused. And then told me, slowly, that all she ever wanted was a husband who wouldn’t hit her. No one giggled.”

Obey and Suffer. Or Disappear.

Despite all of this, the expectation remains. If you're a woman, you must marry. Otherwise, you're “fallen.” Unwanted. Defective. "Must be the negative affliction of Mars," someone had said to my mother when she refused to marry before completing her education. From early childhood, little girls are taught that they must be like Savitri. A very popular Bollywood song goes:

"...good or terrible, whatever he might be, my husband is my god. He is my world; my life, my devotion, my worship. I have no one else but him."

This is what Indian girls are expected to aspire to. You are not a person. You will be burnt to death, but there will be no justice. You will be raped by the man who vowed to protect you, but that is legal and consent is immaterial anyway. If your husband dies, you will be an outcast, but that's just "culture." And throughout it all, you must be like Savitri—beautiful, flawless, and above all, obedient.

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