Chapter 18: Earrings Ka Business

## Chapter 18: Earrings Ka Business

ZARA

The earring business starts by accident.

Most things in my life start by accident. The chai job (I walked into Rustom's looking for directions and walked out with an apron), the flat in Deccan (I was visiting Lavanya and the landlord was standing outside with a TO-LET sign and I said yes before I knew the rent), Badshah (he followed me home from the market and I said yes before I knew the vet bills), Omkar (I drew a smiley face on his cup and he looked at me like I'd invented gravity and I said yes before I knew what I was saying yes to).

I say yes to things. The things become my life. My life is a series of yeses that have accumulated into something that looks, from the outside, like a plan but is, from the inside, a beautiful mess.

The earrings started three years ago, in Jaipur, in the flat I shared with Lavanya before she moved to Nagpur. I was bored. Lavanya was at work. I had a block of polymer clay that I'd bought from an art supply shop because the colour, terracotta, the colour of Jaipur itself; had caught my eye. I shaped it into two tiny jalebis. Baked them. Attached ear hooks. Wore them to work the next day.

Three customers asked where I got them. I said I made them. They asked if I could make more. I said yes.

Yes, yes, yes. The currency of my existence.

Now, three years later, I have, and I'm going to use Omkar's word here, because he's rubbed off on me, an inventory. Tiny chai cups. Tiny samosas. Tiny vada pavs. Tiny rickshaws. Tiny books. Tiny cats (inspired by Gauri; Gauri has not been informed and would probably demand royalties). Tiny dogs (inspired by Badshah; Badshah has been informed and was enthusiastic). Tiny diyas. Tiny mangoes. Tiny parrots. And, since the spy missions, tiny magnifying glasses and tiny binoculars, which sell particularly well to women who describe themselves as "nosy" and mean it as a compliment.

I sell them at Rustom's; a small display near the counter, a cardboard sign that says "Zara's Earrings: Handmade, Hand-painted, Handled with Love." The sign was written by Omkar, who insisted on proofreading it for grammatical accuracy and who added a QR code that links to the Instagram page he set up for me, because Omkar's idea of romance is building spreadsheets and his idea of support is building infrastructure.

The Instagram page, @zarasearrings — has, as of this morning, 4,237 followers. The dawn smelled of wet earth and the faint sweetness of neem flowers opening. This number is significant because:

1. I did not expect any followers. I expected my mother, Lavanya, and possibly Pushpa Auntie (who would follow anything I asked her to and who would comment "Beautiful beta!" on every post regardless of content).

2. Omkar tracks the follower count daily. He has a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet includes follower growth rate, engagement metrics, peak posting times, and a column he's labelled "Viral Potential" that uses a formula I don't understand but that he assures me is "statistically robust."

3. 4,237 followers means orders. Real orders. Not friends-and-family orders but stranger-orders, people-I've-never-met orders, the kind of orders that arrive in my DMs with shipping addresses in Mumbai and Bangalore and Delhi and, once, inexplicably, Reykjavik.

"You need a website," Omkar says. We're at the dining table, the table that has become my evening workspace, covered in polymer clay and paint and tiny ear hooks and the specific creative chaos that Omkar has learned to coexist with the way one learns to coexist with weather. "Instagram is good for visibility, but you're losing sales because there's no checkout process. People DM you, you respond, they pay via UPI, you ship. That's not a business; that's a conversation with a cash register."

"I like conversations."

"I know you do. But conversations don't scale. A website does."

"I don't know how to make a website."

"I do. Or rather, I know someone who does. Jai's tech person, the one who set up the encrypted communications; she moonlights as a web developer. She owes me a favour."

"A spy tech person is going to build my earring website?"

"She's very good. Her code is, according to Jai, 'unhackable,' which is probably overkill for an earring shop but which means your customer data will be more secure than most banks'."

The website goes live two weeks later. It's beautiful, clean design, the photos taken by Omkar (who borrowed a camera from a colleague and spent an entire Sunday photographing earrings with the meticulous attention he brings to photographing evidence, now transferred those skills to photographing tiny polymer clay samosas). The checkout process works. The shipping calculator works. The inventory management system, built by the spy tech person, who has an enthusiasm for database architecture that borders on spiritual — works.

Orders arrive. Five the first day. Twelve the second. Twenty-three the third.

I sit on the floor of the second bedroom, the earring studio, the room that contains my craft table and Omkar's overflow files and Gauri's secondary napping station: and I make earrings. Tiny chai cups for a woman in Andheri. Tiny rickshaws for a man in Indiranagar (the Bangalore one, not the Pune one; Pune does not have an Indiranagar, which is one of the few things Pune does not have). Tiny books for a librarian in Kolkata who wants matching earrings for her entire staff and who has ordered fourteen pairs.

"Zara." Omkar stands in the doorway. Gauri is draped over his shoulder — the distinct drape Gauri adopts when she decides shoulders are superior to laps and who has colonised this new territory with imperial feline confidence. "You need to consider this seriously."

"I am considering it seriously. I'm making earrings."

"I mean the business. The numbers are—" He pauses. The pause of a man who is about to deploy a spreadsheet and who knows that the deployment will be met with the exact resistance that I offer to all spreadsheets, which is not hostility but amused tolerance. "The numbers are good. Your margins are strong. Your material costs are low; polymer clay, paint, ear hooks, packaging. Your labour cost is zero because you don't pay yourself, which is a problem we need to address but which, for now, means your profit margin is approximately eighty-two percent."

"Eighty-two percent?"

"Eighty-two percent. For reference, Apple's profit margin is approximately twenty-five percent. You are more profitable than Apple."

"I'm more profitable than Apple."

"Per unit. Not in absolute terms. But per unit, yes."

I look at the earrings spread across my work table. The tiny chai cups and rickshaws and samosas. The things I make with my hands, from clay and paint and imagination, the things that started as boredom in a Jaipur flat and have become, according to the man who counts numbers for a living — a business with an eighty-two percent profit margin.

"What are you suggesting?"

"I'm suggesting that you consider this as a career. Not a hobby. Not a side project. A career. You have a product that people want, a brand that's growing, and a market that's, according to my analysis, significantly underserved. Handmade, India-inspired jewellery with personality. There's nothing else like it."

"You want me to quit Rustom's?"

The question lands between us. The weight of it, the saffron chai, the morning routine, the smiley faces, the brass samovar, the place where we met and fell in love: is heavy.

"I don't want you to quit Rustom's," Omkar says carefully. "I want you to choose what makes you happy. If Rustom's makes you happy, stay. If the earrings make you happy, grow them. If both make you happy, do both. But I want you to know that the numbers support any choice you make."

"The numbers support me."

"The numbers always support you. You're the best investment I've ever made."

"That's either very romantic or very financial."

"In my world, they're the same thing."

---

I don't quit Rustom's. Not yet. Instead, I do what I always do — I say yes to both. Morning shifts at Rustom's, making chai, drawing smiley faces, talking to customers. Afternoons and evenings in the studio, making earrings, filling orders, building the thing that Omkar calls a business and that I call a joy.

The joy grows. The orders grow. The Instagram grows. 5,000 followers, then 7,000, then 10,000, the numbers climbing with that acceleration of something that has found its audience and is being carried by the algorithm (which Omkar monitors with the same intensity he monitors financial transactions and which he describes as "a black box with the temperament of a toddler").

Rustom's notices. Nisha notices first, "Zara, you look tired. Are you sleeping?", and then the owner, Feroze Irani, grandson of the original Rustom, a man who has inherited both the business and a Parsi directness that his grandfather was famous for.

"Zara," Feroze says. He's behind the counter, inspecting the samovar with the critical eye he has been turning on samovars since he could walk. "I've been watching your earring business. It's doing well."

"Thank you, Feroze bhai."

"Don't thank me. I'm not complimenting you. I'm making an observation." He turns the samovar's valve, a precise quarter-turn that adjusts the flow rate by a margin that only he can detect. "You're working too hard. Two jobs. I can see it. Your chai is still perfect. Rustom's chai is always perfect, because the samovar is perfect — but you're tired. And tired people make mistakes."

"I'm not making mistakes."

"Not yet. But you will. Everyone does. And when you do, it'll be because you're trying to be two people, a barista and a businesswoman; and no one can be two people without one of them suffering."

"Are you asking me to choose?"

"I'm asking you to think. I've been in this business for forty years. I took over from my father, who took over from his father, who started Rustom's in 1952 with one samovar and a belief that chai should be perfect. I didn't choose this business, it chose me. But I said yes to it. And saying yes to one thing means saying no to others. That's not a limitation. That's focus."

He adjusts the samovar again. The steam rises: the perpetual, unchanging steam of Rustom's, the visible signature of a business that has been running for seventy years and that has never deviated from its founding principle: make perfect chai.

"Think about it," Feroze says.

I think about it.

I think about it while making chai, while painting earrings, while walking Badshah, while lying in bed with Omkar's arm around me and Gauri at our feet and the Pune night pressing against the windows of the flat in Baner.

I think about the kite and the string. About being untethered and being held. About saying yes and the cost of yes. About Lavanya, who said yes to Sachin and Nagpur and a life she didn't plan. About Omkar, who said yes to espionage and me and a flat with two bedrooms.

About my parents, who said yes to everything and no to nothing and who are, at this moment, somewhere in Portugal, making ceramics and eating pastéis de nata and sending me photos of sunsets that are beautiful and distant and that carry, in their golden light, the message of people who chose freedom over staying.

I don't want freedom over staying.

I want freedom AND staying.

I want the earrings and the chai and the flat and the man and the cat and the dog and the city.

I want everything.

And I'm beginning to think, with the unmistakable optimism of a twenty-four-year-old woman in Pune who has an eighty-two percent profit margin and a partner who believes in her and a sister who approves; that I can have it.