Chapter 7: Awaazein

The voices started on a Tuesday.

Not real voices — I was not psychotic, I was not hearing disembodied commands from the walls or the ceiling or the radio. The voices were mine. All mine. But they had split — the single internal monologue that had accompanied me through twenty-seven years of life, the familiar running commentary of a mind talking to itself, had fractured into distinct speakers, each with a different tone, a different agenda, a different opinion on how I should feel and what I should do and who I was.

The first voice was the Prosecutor. The Prosecutor was sharp, cold, forensic — the internal voice that presented evidence of my failures with the particular relentlessness of a lawyer who did not need to win because the case was already won. The Prosecutor said things like: You drove him away. You were too intense. You ran across the platform like a desperate fool and he saw the desperation and the desperation repelled him. You cooked dal-chawal for a man who didn't ask for it and you thought the dal was love but the dal was pressure and the pressure was the reason he left. The Prosecutor did not shout. The Prosecutor was calm, measured, the particular calm of a person who was so certain of their position that volume was unnecessary.

The second voice was the Defender. The Defender was raw, wounded, the voice that fought back — not with logic but with pain. He said he loved spending time with you. He wrote in a book for you. He came to Pune every weekend. Those were not the actions of a man who was being pressured. Those were the actions of a man who was choosing to be with you. He left because of something inside him, not because of something you did. The Defender was emotional where the Prosecutor was analytical, the two voices arguing in my head with the particular exhausting rhythm of a debate that could never be resolved because both sides had evidence and neither side had the complete truth.

The third voice was the Committee. The Committee was not a single voice but a chorus — Amma's voice, Papa's voice, the voice of every auntie who had ever commented on my life, the collective Indian voice that lived inside every Indian woman's head whether she wanted it there or not. The Committee said: What will people think? A twenty-seven-year-old woman who can't keep a man. A woman who sent seven messages without a reply. Log kya kahenge. Your father will say you should have been more careful. Your mother will say she knew this would happen because love is a trap. The aunties at the last family wedding who asked "when is your turn, beta" — what will they say now?

The Committee was the worst. The Committee was not interested in the truth or in my pain or in the particular nuances of what had happened between Manav and me. The Committee was interested in appearance, in narrative, in the version of events that could be presented to the world without bringing shame. The Committee wanted me to be fine — not to feel fine, but to appear fine, to perform recovery for an audience, to put on kajal and go to work and smile and say "it didn't work out, these things happen" with the particular breezy resignation that Indian society demanded of women who had been left, the resignation that said "I am unbothered" when the unbothered was the biggest lie of all.

I went back to work on the second Monday. Fourteen days after Manav left. Maitreyi drove me — not because I couldn't drive, but because the driving required a level of attention that I could not guarantee, the particular focus that operating a vehicle demanded and that the voices disrupted by interjecting at random intervals, the Prosecutor presenting a new exhibit — remember the way he looked at his phone during dinner? that was the moment he decided, right there, scrolling while you talked about your day, your day wasn't interesting enough to compete with his screen — the Defender objecting — he looked at his phone because he's a man in his twenties and they all look at their phones, it meant nothing — the Committee weighing in — a man who looks at his phone during dinner is a man who doesn't respect you, why didn't you say something, a stronger woman would have said something.

The office was unchanged. The desks, the files, the particular smell of an Indian office — dust, coffee from the vending machine that tasted like brown water, the air freshener that someone had plugged in near the photocopier and that emitted a chemical approximation of lavender that smelled nothing like lavender and everything like corporate anxiety. Nikhil greeted me with the casual concern of a man who had been inconvenienced by my absence and who disguised the inconvenience as worry.

"Anu! You're back! Feeling better?"

"Much better," I said. The performance began. The smile that was not a smile but a mask — the particular facial configuration that Indian women learned early, the arrangement of lips and cheeks and eyes that communicated "I am fine" with enough conviction to satisfy casual inquiry while concealing the reality beneath, the reality being that I was a walking catastrophe who had not slept properly in two weeks and who was hearing three distinct voices in her head and who was holding herself together with the particular glue of willpower and Maitreyi's paranthas.

"Great. Because the Mehta property — remember the Mehtas? — they've come back with a counter-offer and Kamala-ma'am wants it closed by Friday."

"I'll handle it."

I sat at my desk. I opened my laptop. The screen glowed with emails — forty-seven unread, the accumulated correspondence of two weeks of absence, the particular deluge of information that Indian offices generated through the combined forces of bureaucracy and the CC culture, every email copied to everyone, every decision requiring consultation with people who had no stake in the outcome, the democratic process of Indian corporate communication that was efficient in theory and exhausting in practice.

I worked. I responded to emails. I called the Mehtas — a retired couple who wanted to buy a flat in Baner and who negotiated with the particular tenacity of people who had survived decades of Indian economics and who were not going to be overcharged for a 2BHK by a woman half their age. I prepared spreadsheets. I attended a meeting in which Kamala-ma'am spoke for forty minutes about quarterly targets and market positioning and the importance of "client-centric thinking," which was a phrase that meant nothing and that she repeated with the particular frequency of a person who believed that repetition created meaning.

The surface held. The performance was convincing. Lavanya at reception said "You look well, Anu" and I said "Thank you" and the exchange was the kind of micro-interaction that held days together, the social adhesive that kept the structure upright even when the foundation was crumbling.

But beneath the surface — beneath the emails and the phone calls and the Mehta negotiation and the meeting and the smile — beneath all of it, the voices continued.

The Prosecutor: He's in Mumbai right now. Three hours away. Three hours by train. You could go. You could show up at his office. You could stand in the lobby of his glass building in Lower Parel and wait for him and when he came down you could say the things you didn't say, the things that might change his mind, the speech you've been rehearsing in your head for two weeks.

The Defender: Don't. Don't go. Going would confirm everything he thought — that you're too intense, too desperate, too much. The best thing you can do is nothing. Let him come to you. If he wants you, he knows where you are.

The Committee: A woman who shows up at a man's office uninvited is a woman who has lost her dignity. Where is your izzat? Where is the self-respect that your mother taught you? He left. Accept it. Move on. Find another boy. There are many boys. The world is full of boys.

The Committee was wrong about many things but it was especially wrong about this: the world was not full of boys. The world was full of people, but the particular person whose absence was destroying me was not interchangeable, was not replaceable, was not a unit in a supply chain that could be substituted with an equivalent model. Manav was not "a boy." Manav was the specific, irreplaceable, particular human being who had listened to the sounds of my kitchen and who had said "I understand furniture like that" and who had made me feel, for five weeks, that the world was a place worth being in. You could not replace that with "another boy" the way you could not replace a favourite song with "another song." The song mattered because it was that song. The boy mattered because he was that boy.

By Wednesday, the voices were louder. Not in volume — they did not shout, they did not scream, they maintained the measured tone of rational discussion — but in frequency. They interrupted more often. They commented on smaller things. The Prosecutor noted that I had ordered the same cutting chai that Manav drank — you're imitating him, you're absorbing his habits because you can't absorb his presence, the chai is a substitute for the man — the Defender countered — you ordered cutting chai because you like cutting chai, not everything is about him — and the Committee added — a woman who drinks cutting chai from a tapri should be drinking green tea from a kettle, cutting chai is a man's drink, where is your femininity.

I did not tell Maitreyi about the voices. This was a deliberate decision — not because I was ashamed, though the shame was there, the particular Indian shame of mental disturbance, the "pagal" label that hovered over every Indian person who admitted to hearing things or thinking things that deviated from the acceptable script — but because telling Maitreyi would make the voices real. The voices existed in the space between thinking and speaking, the liminal territory of the unsaid, and as long as they stayed there, they were thoughts, and thoughts were normal, and normal was the thing I was desperately trying to be.

On Thursday, the phone rang. My personal phone. In the middle of the Mehta negotiation. I glanced at the screen.

Manav.

The name on the screen — five letters, the same five letters I had saved at 1:47 AM five weeks ago — the name was an electric shock. My body responded before my brain could process: heart rate spiking, palms sweating, the particular physiological cascade of a person who was experiencing hope and fear simultaneously, the two emotions fused into a single, overpowering sensation that was neither excitement nor dread but both, the emotional equivalent of an earthquake and a sunrise happening at the same time.

I excused myself from the Mehtas. I stepped into the corridor. I answered on the fourth ring — not strategy, not paralysis, but the fumbling of fingers that were shaking too much to hit the green button cleanly.

"Hello?"

"Anu. Hi. It's Manav."

His voice. His voice in my ear. The voice that had been silent for seventeen days and that was now here, inside my head, occupying the space that the three voices had colonized, displacing them instantly, the way a landlord displaced tenants, the original occupant reclaiming the property.

"Hi," I said. My voice was steady. I was astonished by its steadiness. Inside me, a civil war was being waged — the Prosecutor screaming hang up, don't give him the satisfaction, the Defender pleading listen, listen to what he has to say, the Committee advising be cool, be casual, don't let him know you've been destroyed — but my voice was steady. The performance of a lifetime.

"I know I haven't been in touch," he said. "I'm sorry. I've been — I've been trying to figure things out."

"And have you?"

A pause. The pause was long enough for me to die in, long enough for every possible outcome to present itself and be evaluated, long enough for the Prosecutor to say he's calling to officially end it and for the Defender to say he's calling because he misses you and for the Committee to say whatever he says, don't cry on the phone, for God's sake don't cry on the phone.

"I don't know," he said. "I miss you. I think about you. But I'm still — I'm still not sure what I want."

"You miss me but you're not sure what you want."

"I know how that sounds."

"It sounds like you want me to wait. Without a commitment. Without a timeline. Without anything except the knowledge that you think about me sometimes. It sounds like you want me to be available without being with me. Like a tab you've left open in a browser but haven't read."

The words came from somewhere. Not from the voices — from somewhere deeper, somewhere that the voices had not reached, the part of me that was still lucid, still sharp, still the Ananya who had sold properties and negotiated with Mehtas and who understood, professionally, the difference between an offer and a waste of time.

"That's not what I—"

"What are you asking me, Manav? Are you asking me back? Are you asking for more time? Are you asking for permission to think about me while being free to do whatever else you want?"

Another pause. Shorter. The pause of a man who had not expected this, who had expected the soft, pleading Ananya of the breakup conversation, who had expected tears and gratitude and the particular emotional generosity of a woman in love who would accept any terms rather than no terms.

"I just wanted to hear your voice," he said. "I didn't — I don't have an answer. I just wanted to hear you."

The sentence broke me. Not in the way the breakup had broken me — that was a shattering, explosive, loud. This was different. This was a cracking — a single, precise, surgical crack down the centre of the repair that had barely begun, Maitreyi's paranthas and Jhanvi's gulab jamun and the plastic chair on the balcony, all of it cracked open by seven words: I just wanted to hear your voice.

Because the words were love. The words were love without commitment. The words were the cruelest form of affection — the affection that acknowledged the feeling and refused to act on it, the love that said "I feel this" and also "I won't do anything about it," the particular emotional halfway-house that kept the other person suspended between hope and despair, never fully released, never fully held.

"Then you've heard it," I said. "Goodbye, Manav."

I hung up. I stood in the corridor — white walls, fluorescent light, the particular industrial corridor that connected the offices, the corridor that no one lingered in — and I shook. The shaking was violent this time. Not micro-tremors. Earthquake.

The voices exploded.

Why did you hang up? He called. He reached out. He said he misses you. Why would you —

Because hearing his voice will kill you faster than his silence—

What will people think if they see you shaking in a corridor—

I pressed my back against the wall. I slid down until I was sitting on the floor. The fluorescent light hummed above me. My phone was in my hand. His name was on the screen. The call had lasted two minutes and forty-one seconds.

Two minutes and forty-one seconds to undo two weeks of paranthas and gulab jamun and plastic chairs. Two minutes and forty-one seconds to prove that the rope I had been climbing was made of sand.

The Prosecutor was right. The Defender was right. The Committee was right.

Everyone was right and everyone was wrong and I was sitting on the floor of a corridor in a real estate office in Pune and I was broken and the voices would not stop.