Chapter 11: Aditi

Aditi arrives at Seaside Fitness in April, when the Mumbai heat has turned the city into a pressure cooker and the gym's air conditioning has become: not a luxury but a survival mechanism.

She is: twenty-eight, employed at a tech startup in BKC that does something with AI and fintech and other words that I nod at without comprehending, and she has joined Seaside specifically for the 6 PM yoga class because her therapist (everyone has a therapist now; this is either progress or a symptom; I choose: progress) told her that "your body is holding trauma in your shoulders" and she'd said "which trauma?" and the therapist had said "all of it" and she'd said "that's not helpful" and the therapist had said "start with yoga."

I know all of this because Aditi tells me within the first fifteen minutes of our acquaintance. She tells me while we're setting up our mats — the mat-setup being a ritual that precedes every yoga class the way tuning precedes a concert, the mats arranged in rows with the precision of people who have Opinions about floor space. Aditi places her mat next to mine and says, without preamble:

"I'm Aditi. I'm new. My therapist sent me. I have anxiety and I cope by oversharing. If that's a problem, I can move my mat."

"It's not a problem," I say. "I'm Mar. I'm divorced. I cope by joining gyms in cities I don't belong to."

"Oh, we're going to get along."

We get along.

Aditi is: the youngest person in our growing circle, which now includes Vandana (forty-three, cheerful, the social glue), Jaya (forty-eight, sharp, the moral compass), Sunaina (thirty-four, serene, the spiritual anchor), Cheryl (sixty-two, widowed, the wise elder), and me (fifty, divorced, the narrator, which is: a role I didn't choose but which chose me when I started paying attention to the stories around me). Adding Aditi is like adding chilli to a dish that was already flavourful — she intensifies everything.

"I broke up with my boyfriend two weeks ago," she tells the group at our first communal vada pav session. We're outside the gym — the vada pav stall has become our post-class gathering point, the six-rupee equivalent of a Parisian salon where ideas are exchanged and lives are examined and green chutney stains: everyone's fingers equally.

"How long were you together?" Vandana asks.

"Three years. He was wonderful. Smart, kind, great with my parents. My mother loved him. My father approved — which, if you know my father, is like getting planning permission from the BMC: bureaucratically impossible."

"So what happened?" Jaya asks.

"He proposed."

Silence. The silence of five women processing the apparent contradiction: wonderful boyfriend proposes, and this is: the problem?

"I said no. And then I panicked. And then he cried. And then I cried. And then my mother called and cried. And then my father called and didn't cry but used the word 'disappointing' in a tone that was worse than crying."

"Why did you say no?" I ask.

Aditi looks at her vada pav. The looking-at-food that people do when the food is easier to face than the question. "Because when he proposed, I felt: nothing. Not happiness. Not excitement. Not even nervousness. Nothing. Like he was proposing to someone standing behind me. And I thought: if marrying this man makes me feel nothing, then marrying this man will make me feel: nothing, for thirty years, and then I'll be fifty and divorced and eating vada pav outside a gym and wondering where my life went."

She looks at me. "No offence."

"Full offence taken and forgiven," I say. "Because you're not wrong."

"I'm not saying your situation —"

"Aditi. You're describing my life. Exactly. Harsh proposed. I felt: nothing. I said yes because saying yes was: expected, and expected is what I did for twenty-seven years. You said no. You said no at twenty-eight. I said yes at twenty-three and spent the next twenty-seven years paying for that yes."

The group is quiet. The quiet that happens when a truth lands in the middle of a conversation and everyone recognises it — the recognition that different women at different ages are fighting the same battle: the battle between what you want and what you're expected to want, and the gap between them being: the space where lives get lost.

"You did the brave thing," Jaya says to Aditi.

"It doesn't feel brave. It feels: terrible. My mother isn't speaking to me. My Instagram DMs are full of aunties sending 'shaadi ke liye taiyaar ho jao beta' messages. My flatmate thinks I'm insane."

"Brave things feel terrible," Jaya says. "If they felt good, everyone would do them."

Aditi joins our circle. She comes to yoga, to Zumba, to the Wednesday spinning class where Arjun has learned to avoid Kesariya (he now plays Arijit Singh, which Jaya tolerates because "at least Arijit can sing, even if he sings about the same three emotions on repeat"). She sits with us at the juice bar. She comes to vada pav. She is: the daughter that the group didn't know it needed — the young one, the one who makes the rest of us feel like we've survived something that she's currently surviving, the something being: the pressure to conform, the pressure that Indian women face at every age but that hits hardest at twenty-eight when twenty-eight is "prime marriage age" and refusing a good proposal is: social suicide.

"Meri maa ko phone kar," I tell her one evening. We're walking on Carter Road, the sunset making the sea look: molten. "I'll speak to your mother."

"You don't know my mother."

"I know every mother. I am a mother. We're all the same species. We want our children to be: safe, and we think safe means: married, and we're wrong, but the wrongness comes from love, and the love is: real even when the advice is: terrible."

"What would you say to her?"

"I'd tell her that her daughter said no to a proposal because her daughter knows herself well enough to know that saying yes would be: a thirty-year mistake. And that knowing yourself at twenty-eight is a gift. And that the gift should be: celebrated, not punished."

"She won't listen."

"She'll listen. She won't agree — agreement takes longer. But she'll listen. Because underneath the disappointment and the aunty-network anxiety and the 'log kya kahenge' — what will people say — underneath all of that is: a mother who wants her daughter to be happy. Even if the mother's definition of happy is: wrong."

Aditi doesn't call her mother that night. But she calls her the following week. And the call goes: badly, then better, then badly again, then: silent for three days, then: a text from her mother that says "beta, khana kha lena" — eat something, child — which is: not forgiveness but: a door left open, the particular door that Indian mothers leave open when Indian mothers are angry but not angry enough to stop worrying about their daughter's meals.

"She texted," Aditi tells me.

"What did she say?"

"Khana kha lena."

"That's an 'I love you.'"

"That's a 'khana kha lena.'"

"In Hindi-mother-speak, they're the same thing."

She smiles. The smile of a twenty-eight-year-old who is beginning to learn what it took me twenty-seven years to learn: that the people who love you will forgive you, eventually, for the crime of: knowing yourself.