Rimi Bhasthi
Part 1: The Silence in the Hallway
It was always the hallway where she first heard herself disappear. The long, echoing corridor of the Sharma household carried more than footsteps and scoldings—it carried absence. Asha, seventeen, was the kind of girl people described in passing as “quiet but clever,” the kind whose achievements were applauded just enough to not feel threatening. She had learned early that noise—especially from girls—was suspicious.
The house had three women and five men, and even the walls seemed to know who mattered. Her mother, Meenakshi, moved like a shadow behind her husband, wiping every trace of herself as she passed. Her grandmother, all bones and bangles, remembered the Partition vividly but forgot Asha’s birthday every year. Her aunt, Rupa, was a schoolteacher who wrote poetry in secret and laughed with the door shut.
Asha had always followed the rules: knees together, voice low, eyes down. But inside, a rebellion brewed—not of fire, but of ink. She wrote. In margins of notebooks, on the back of grocery lists, inside her own sleeves. She wrote stories where girls roared, where silence cracked, where the kitchen wasn’t destiny.
The rebellion had a name now: college. She had secured admission to a university in Delhi—miles away from her hometown of Bareilly. But permission was another matter. Baba said the same thing every time: “Girls don’t need degrees, they need dowries.”
That night, as the family sat around the dining table, Asha cleared her throat. Her pulse mimicked a dholak in her chest.
“I got admission,” she said softly. “Delhi University. English Literature.”
A clink of a spoon, a half-choked cough. Rupa Maashi’s eyes lit up, but she said nothing. Her father stared.
“And who will pay for your stay? The sky?”
“I got a full scholarship.”
“And safety? Who will guard your character in a city of wolves?”
Meenakshi flinched.
“I will guard myself,” Asha said.
It was Rupa who broke the silence. “Let her go,” she said, voice calm but firm. “Let her make something that doesn’t end in marriage.”
There was shouting, of course. Threats. Asha was called ungrateful, foolish, arrogant. But the seed was sown. That night, Meenakshi slipped into her daughter’s room and sat beside her. She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no. She just placed a crisp ₹500 note on Asha’s diary and left.
It was the first yes Asha had ever been handed.
Three months later, the window seat on the Bareilly-Delhi express became her sanctuary. She watched the mustard fields blur into towers, watched her reflection sharpen in the city’s glass. In her bag were two kurtas, one battered copy of Jane Eyre, and a notebook with Rupa’s final advice scrawled across the front:
“Write your voice before they teach you how to whisper again.”
Part 2: The Classroom and the City
Delhi did not welcome her with open arms. It shoved her through humid buses, shoved her into crowds that didn’t look back, into rickshaws where elbows grazed too close and drivers glanced too long. It wasn’t home. It was a battlefield. And yet, Asha loved it.
Her first night in the hostel was a mess of unpacked bags and muffled sobs. She had never been alone in a room, and now the silence of four beige walls made her long for even her grandmother’s complaints about gas cylinders. But in the morning, she woke to laughter outside the window—three girls brushing teeth on the balcony, giggling over a cockroach. Something softened. She wasn’t alone. Not really.
Miranda House was less like a college and more like a village of women—curious, loud, political, tired, brilliant women. Girls with kajal-darkened eyes and protest badges. Girls who quoted Audre Lorde between bites of samosa. Girls who weren’t afraid to take up space, to walk in pairs on the street after sunset, to speak in English and in rage.
Asha felt like she had walked into a novel no one back home would believe.
Her roommate, Gauri, was from Assam and had hair down to her knees. She was studying Political Science and had a poster of Simone de Beauvoir above her bed that said, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Asha stared at it every night before sleeping, wondering when she would feel like she had become anything at all.
The English department felt like an ocean. The professors wore handloom sarees and talked about Woolf and Mahasweta Devi like they were distant cousins. Asha sat in the second row of every class, taking notes furiously. But something in her still hesitated to speak. These girls debated like they were born to be heard. She was still learning how not to flinch when she raised her hand.
One afternoon, Professor Kamath asked a question in Feminist Literature class: “Who decides what makes a woman ‘good’?”
Silence. Then laughter. Then voices.
“It’s society.”
“It’s men.”
“It’s religion.”
“It’s family.”
Asha raised her hand.
“Yes?” the professor asked.
“It’s fear,” she said. “Fear decides.”
The room went still. Gauri looked at her with a grin. The professor nodded, scribbled the word FEAR on the board, underlined it twice.
That was the day Asha felt her voice stand up for the first time.
From then on, something inside her refused to sit back down.
She joined the college magazine. She started writing pieces about home, about women who poured their stories into rice grains and washing soap. She wrote about her mother—how strength could look like surrender and still be sacred. She wrote about a neighbor back in Bareilly who named her goats after heroines in myth, because she said goats had more freedom than women in her house.
One of her essays—titled “The Politics of Quiet Women”—went viral across campus. People started stopping her in the corridor. “Are you the one who wrote the piece about mothers who eat last?” “Can you help with our zine?” “Will you read at the Open Mic?”
She began reading her pieces aloud. At first her voice trembled, her paper rustled like a dead leaf. But each reading made her taller. Each applause made the girl in the hallway of her past shrink a little more.
But college wasn’t a utopia. Feminism here was loud, yes—but it was also fractured. One evening, a group of seniors were arguing over whether feminism needed to include caste, whether upper-caste women were ignoring the realities of the rest. Asha listened, unsure. Back in Bareilly, caste was something her family never discussed but always practiced. In Delhi, she was being forced to see her privilege.
It was uncomfortable. It was necessary.
That night, she wrote a new piece: “Where Does My Voice Come From?” In it, she traced her own access to education, to scholarships, to support—and how many girls with the same surname in her town were still scrubbing floors. She read it aloud at the next Open Mic. Some people clapped slowly. Some just nodded. Gauri hugged her after.
“This is why you came here,” she said. “Not just to speak. To listen.”
Another lesson.
In the winter of that year, the city erupted. A law had passed that many believed was discriminatory toward minorities. Protests lit the capital. Students, professors, citizens—all took to the streets. Asha went too.
At Shaheen Bagh, she saw grandmothers in hijabs holding up the Constitution. At Jantar Mantar, she saw students get lathi-charged for reading poetry. She held a placard that read: My Silence Will Not Protect Me.
That night, she was arrested with fifty others. The jail was cold, the floor harder than she imagined. Gauri held her hand the whole time. The next morning, they were released. Her photo had made it to The Indian Express. Her father called.
“This is what you went for? To sit in jail?”
“No, Baba,” she said. “I went to sit with history.”
Click.
He didn’t call again for weeks. But Meenakshi texted two words: “I’m proud.”
And that was enough.
The city wasn’t easy. There were nights she cried. Nights she felt like an impostor. Nights she feared being followed on the way home. But for the first time in her life, she knew the fear had a counterweight—solidarity. Knowledge. Voice.
She had stopped shrinking. Her words were not apologies anymore. They were protest. Celebration. Survival.
Back home, they still told neighbors she was “studying to be a teacher.” Let them. She wasn’t studying to be anything anymore. She was already something. Someone.
She was the girl who once whispered stories into her diary. Now, she wrote essays that questioned patriarchies, poems that undid shame, fiction that dared to imagine joy for women like her.
In the final semester, she was offered a fellowship to study abroad. She turned it down.
Instead, she applied for a PhD in Delhi—on regional women’s literature. She wanted to study voices like her aunt’s. Like her mother’s. Like her own.
She chose to stay. To teach here. To write here.
Because sometimes the most radical act is not escape, but return.
Part 3: In Rooms with No Name
By the time Asha began her MPhil, the city had already claimed her in a thousand small ways. The way she swore under her breath at traffic, the way she folded her shawl around her like armor on buses, the way she could now argue with auto drivers without blinking. Delhi was not just a setting anymore—it had become a language she had learned to speak fluently, accent and all.
She lived in a rented room above a printing press in Kamla Nagar now. The room had peeling blue walls, a single window that refused to shut completely, and a bed she had bargained for at second-hand furniture lane. She loved it fiercely. It was hers—earned, not given. No one had ever barged in. No one had ever told her to lower her voice.
Every Sunday, she’d walk to the local library where she was helping digitize a forgotten archive of regional women writers—names lost in the footnotes of history, their works unpublished, unpreserved, unread. These were women who wrote in the margins of existence—in dialects considered impure, in notebooks that no university had cited. Some wrote erotica. Some wrote about childbirth. Some wrote prayers disguised as poems.
The first time Asha touched one of those brittle pages, it felt like touching the shoulder of an ancestor who had been screaming into a void.
She was reading a diary by a woman named Gangavva, a domestic worker from rural Karnataka who had kept thirty years of handwritten entries in a school notebook. Gangavva had written about everything—from how long rice takes to cook to the sensation of her first menstrual cramp. She had no formal education, but her language was sharp, cutting, rhythmic.
One line stayed with Asha for days:
“I wanted to write a song, but I only knew how to scream.”
Asha typed it out, pinned it above her desk. Every time she sat down to work on her thesis, she read it like a prayer.
Meanwhile, life continued—laundry that never dried in winter, job applications that vanished into portals, WhatsApp forwards from relatives suggesting marriage proposals. Her father still didn’t call. Her mother still sent money from secret savings—Rs. 500 every two months, always with a note: “For books, not boys.”
At the university, she started conducting writing workshops for first-year girls—sessions titled “Write Like a Woman,” “How to Disagree Without Apologizing,” and “Anger Is Not Ugly.” The first time, only three girls showed up. One sat quietly and drew flowers in the margin. Another said she wanted to write but only in Hindi. The third asked, “Can I write about sex?”
Asha smiled. “That’s exactly what you should write about.”
Word spread. By the third month, they had twenty girls—some in hijab, some with pixie cuts, some who whispered, some who yelled. One wrote a short story about a girl who ran away from her wedding in her bridal lehenga. Another wrote an essay about how her brother had more freedom despite being younger. The quietest one wrote a poem that ended with:
“I stitched my mouth with gold thread, they called it grace.”
That line went viral on Instagram. It was painted on a hostel wall three days later.
Asha’s inbox flooded. She started getting invited to panels, interviews, podcasts. But she turned down most of them. She wasn’t interested in becoming a token face for “successful feminist from small-town India.” Her success, she knew, wasn’t hers alone. It belonged to Gangavva. To her aunt Rupa. To the woman in Shaheen Bagh who fed her oranges during the protest. To every girl who stayed back after the workshop just to ask, “Is it okay if I’m still scared?”
She always answered the same:
“Yes. But write anyway.”
Then came the university festival. The theme that year was “Inheritance and Insurgence.” Asha was asked to deliver the keynote address.
She almost said no. The idea of speaking on a stage, under lights, to a sea of students with phones poised to record her felt terrifying. But then she remembered the window seat—the girl who had dared to whisper “I got in” over dinner. She owed her this.
The auditorium was packed. She stood behind the mic in a cotton saree and broken sandals, no makeup, her hair tied loosely in a bun. She carried no paper. Only Gangavva’s diary.
“I want to speak to you,” she began, “about the women we do not remember.”
She told them about Gangavva. About the essays written on kitchen scraps. About her mother who never called herself a feminist but taught her how to hold a room without apology. About how silence is not always absence—sometimes it’s resistance.
She ended with a story about the time, years ago, when she had dared to write “I will live alone one day” in the back of her school diary and then torn the page out, terrified someone would find it.
“I still have that page,” she said. “Framed. Because I did.”
The applause was thunderous. Some girls wept. Some stood. A boy in the front row clapped so hard his palms turned red.
Later, in the green room, a faculty member said, “You’ve come a long way, Asha.”
She smiled. “Not yet. But I’ve stopped walking in circles.”
She took the bus home that night, holding her bag close. A group of boys got on at Kashmiri Gate and started laughing loudly, pushing each other, crowding the aisle. Her old self would’ve gotten off, pretended it was her stop. But she didn’t flinch. She stared back. Straight. One of them looked away first.
That was victory enough.
Back in her room, she opened her diary and wrote:
“Today, I was not small. I did not shrink.”
Then, she did something she hadn’t done in a long time—called her mother.
“Ma?”
“Yes, beta?”
“Do you ever regret not doing this? Writing?”
A long pause.
“No,” said Meenakshi. “I’m doing it through you.”
The line went silent again. But this time, it didn’t feel empty. It felt full. Like something passed down, like a thread tied across generations—one stitch, one scream, one sentence at a time.
Part 4: The Price of Saying No
The winter that Asha turned twenty-five arrived with an ache in her knees and a hundred unopened emails marked “urgent.” She was teaching part-time now—Introduction to Gender Studies at a nearby college—while juggling her own thesis, weekend workshops, and copyediting work that barely paid for her rice and rent. Some days she forgot to eat. Most nights she forgot to sleep. But not once did she forget why she was doing this.
One such night, she walked home after a lecture on intersectionality, her throat raw from hours of speaking, her mind buzzing. As she passed the juice stall near her lane, the owner—a kind man with missing teeth—smiled and handed her a warm glass of milk. “Your mother called again,” he said, chuckling. “Asked if you’re still too busy to get married.”
Asha laughed politely. “Tell her I’m married to my footnotes.”
But the comment stayed with her.
That week, her family sent a proposal. This wasn’t new—they had been doing it for years, like throwing darts in the dark and hoping one would land. But this time, the boy’s family was “modern,” “liberal,” and “understanding.” The boy was a banker in Gurgaon, had studied abroad, and—her mother added in a hushed voice—had “no issues” if Asha continued working after marriage.
That evening, Meenakshi called.
“You don’t have to say yes,” she began, “but just speak to him. Once.”
“No,” Asha said. Calm. Firm. “Ma, I’m not a project that needs a buyer.”
There was silence. Then, as always, her mother sighed. “Do you know how many of my friends ask if you’re ‘settled’? What do I say?”
“Tell them I’ve found a voice. Tell them I’m not a question mark anymore.”
Her mother didn’t respond. Asha understood. There are generations of women who never got the luxury of saying no. Who turned themselves into yes-women because that was survival.
But she wouldn’t inherit that silence.
A few days later, she was invited to a wedding of an old classmate—Neha, who had once sat behind Asha in English Lit and copied her Tennyson notes. The wedding was in Noida, a grand affair with chandeliers and choreographed dances. Asha hesitated but went anyway, dressed in a borrowed lehenga and wearing a necklace that had belonged to Rupa Maashi.
At the reception, she ran into Neha near the buffet. The girl looked radiant, tired, and oddly absent. As they exchanged pleasantries, Neha leaned closer and whispered, “You know, I envy you.”
Asha blinked. “Me?”
“You look like someone who doesn’t need anyone’s permission. I had to get approval for the shade of lipstick I wore tonight.”
Asha didn’t know what to say.
Later that night, she walked away from the noise, found a quiet bench outside the banquet hall, and sat down. The stars were faint. Her feet ached. She took off her heels and remembered a line she had read earlier that week in Gangavva’s diary:
“The cost of obedience is always more than the cost of defiance. But only one leaves your back unbent.”
That night, Asha made a decision.
She would stop apologizing for wanting to be alone.
Not lonely—alone.
There was a difference. One was absence. The other was autonomy.
She moved to a new room the following month—closer to the archive, quieter, with better light. She bought herself a single bed with a red quilt, a writing desk, and a small gas stove. She framed three things for the wall above her bed:
1. Her first college ID.
2. The line from Gangavva.
3. A photo of her mother holding baby Asha, both of them smiling with teeth.
She began working on a book. Not her thesis, not a research paper—an actual book. It was titled Her Room Had a Lock. It wove together stories from women she had met, interviewed, remembered, imagined. A fiction that smelled of truth. She wrote about girls who said no to weddings, who opened bookstores instead of salons, who lived with other women, who raised children without fathers, who chose a secondhand bed over a secondhand life.
It was hard.
Publishers hesitated.
“It’s too angry.”
“It’s too quiet.”
“Can she make it funnier?”
“Less political?”
But one small independent press said yes.
The night the contract arrived, Asha stood in front of her mirror holding the envelope like a trophy. She didn’t tell anyone at home. Not yet. Some joys must bloom in private.
That same week, she got an email from a young girl named Saloni who had attended one of her workshops months ago. The subject line read: “You saved me.”
The body of the email was short:
“I was engaged at 19. I didn’t want it. I told my parents no after hearing you talk. They didn’t take it well. But now I’m in college. Studying Sociology. And I’m writing again. Thank you.”
Asha cried.
Not the soft movie kind of crying—but full, ugly, cathartic sobs. Because she remembered being seventeen. Remembered thinking she needed permission. Remembered wondering if her voice would ever echo beyond the walls of her old house.
It had.
The book came out in winter. She organized a small launch in a book café where she had once worked part-time. The audience was mostly students, fellow writers, a few professors, and strangers who had read her essays online.
Her mother didn’t come.
But she sent a message.
A photo of her reading the book, glasses perched awkwardly on her nose, captioned: “I read it twice. You wrote my heart.”
Asha saved it.
In her speech, she said:
“This is not just my book. It belongs to every woman who ever said ‘I don’t want this’ and was told ‘you must.’ To every girl who dared to believe she could be more than someone’s shadow. To every mother who wanted freedom for her daughters, even if she never got any for herself.”
Applause followed. But what stayed with her was the silence that came after. A silence full of agreement, understanding, grief, hope.
That night, Asha went home to her little red-quilted room, made herself chai, and sat by the window. She watched the streetlight flicker. Somewhere, a song played from a distant radio.
And in the stillness, she whispered: “I’m not afraid of being alone.”
Not anymore.
Part 5: What They Don’t Teach You in School
By the time her book crossed a thousand copies in circulation, Asha had stopped checking the sales figures. She didn’t write it for the market. She wrote it like she wrote in her childhood notebooks—honest, necessary, unsupervised. But now, with every message from a reader, she felt a responsibility weigh on her—like she was being handed not applause, but trust. And trust, she knew, needed to be earned over and over again.
That year, she began teaching full-time at a women’s college in South Delhi. The corridors echoed with bright voices, but Asha noticed the silences too—the first-year girls who wore sleeves down to their wrists even in summer, who spoke only when called on, who wrote essays that started with “Sorry if this is wrong.” She recognized them. They were versions of her past self.
In her first class, she walked in wearing a faded cotton kurta and jhumkas that clicked gently every time she moved. She didn’t say “Good morning.” She didn’t take attendance. She wrote three words on the board in block letters:
What is Freedom?
A few girls blinked. One whispered to her neighbor. Another reached for her pen.
“I’m not looking for right answers,” Asha said. “Just real ones. Write for ten minutes.”
The pages filled slowly.
One girl wrote: “Freedom is walking to the market without my brother.”
Another: “Saying ‘no’ without shaking.”
Another: “Not having to explain why I don’t want to marry yet.”
And one: “Eating first.”
That afternoon, she didn’t teach feminism through theorists or frameworks. She taught it through lives.
In the weeks that followed, she noticed one student—Fatima—always arriving late, always tired, always silent. One day, after class, Asha asked gently, “Everything okay at home?”
Fatima looked at her for a long second and said, “Home is a classroom too. One where I’m always failing.”
Asha didn’t push further. She just said, “My office is open anytime.”
Fatima began staying back after class. Slowly, she shared pieces of her story: an overbearing father, three brothers, a mother who once aspired to be a singer and now wasn’t allowed to hum. She showed Asha poems she had written in Urdu—verses about hunger, about stitched mouths, about dreams folded like hijabs in a drawer.
“Can I publish these?” Fatima asked one day, voice barely audible. “Even if they get me into trouble?”
Asha smiled. “Especially if they do.”
She translated them herself. The first poem was titled “My Body Is Not a Negotiation.” It went viral on feminist pages across India. Fatima’s brothers found out. There were fights. Threats. But Fatima didn’t back down.
That week, she moved into the hostel, helped by a scholarship Asha had quietly arranged.
When the college principal questioned her involvement, Asha responded, “I didn’t break a rule. I built a future.”
It earned her a warning. It also earned her respect.
She began designing her own syllabus—blending poetry with protest, memoirs with manifestos. She taught Mahadevi Verma next to Audre Lorde, Bama beside bell hooks. The students responded with enthusiasm—and resistance. Some were uncomfortable. “Why do we have to read about menstruation?” “Why does everything have to be about gender?” “Can’t we read love stories instead?”
To them, Asha said: “All stories are love stories. Even the ones where we learn to love ourselves.”
In one class, she assigned a project: “Interview a woman in your family who never had a chance to be heard.”
The results poured in. A grandmother who had once stolen her brother’s shoes to secretly go to school. An aunt who carved secret poetry into the wooden frames of her mirror. A mother who had never said the word “desire” out loud but cried while cutting onions when Silsila played on TV.
The students wept. And laughed. And understood that feminism didn’t come from textbooks alone. It came from dinner tables, sewing machines, and songs interrupted mid-verse.
Still, Asha wasn’t untouched by loneliness.
In the quiet of her room, on nights when her phone didn’t ring and the city became too large, she sometimes longed for softness. For someone who knew how many spoons she liked in her chai. For someone who could hold her silence without trying to fix it.
But when people asked, “Don’t you want someone?” she responded with: “I already have myself.”
They often scoffed. “That’s not the same.”
She agreed. It wasn’t. It was deeper. It was harder. It was chosen.
Her publisher invited her to a panel on “Modern Women and Marriage.” The host asked, “So are you anti-marriage?”
She laughed. “I’m anti-compromise dressed as love.”
The room went quiet.
The clip made its way to YouTube. Within days, her inbox was split between trolls and admirers. Men called her “angry,” “man-hater,” “unmarriageable.” Women wrote, “Thank you for saying what we couldn’t.”
She didn’t reply to the trolls. But to the women, she sent one line back:
“It’s not bravery. It’s memory.”
One afternoon, while revisiting her old Bareilly diary, she found a note she had forgotten. A line scribbled in her slanted schoolgirl script:
“What if I’m never enough for the world?”
She underlined it, then wrote beneath it, in the pen she now carried like a weapon:
“Then let the world shrink.”
She mailed a copy of her book to Rupa Maashi, with a handwritten letter:
“You lit the match. I carried the flame.”
A month later, a letter came back. It had no greeting. Just a poem:
“They called us whispers
We became thunder.
They called us daughters
We became mothers of revolution.”
Asha cried again. Alone, by the window. Not from grief. But from recognition.
Because the revolution wasn’t a slogan anymore. It was her classroom. It was her poetry. It was a girl like Fatima choosing herself. It was every young woman who walked into her lecture not knowing she could say no—and walked out realizing she didn’t need permission.
And sometimes, it was just sitting in a window seat on a dusty bus, hands ink-stained, watching a city move forward, and knowing:
She was not waiting to be rescued.
She was writing her own rescue.
Part 6: The Day the Door Didn’t Close
It was a Sunday in March when the door of Asha’s classroom jammed mid-lecture. A broken hinge, a gust of wind, and suddenly thirty girls were trapped inside a room with peeling walls, dusty fans, and a woman who had just asked, “What makes you feel most unsafe in your own skin?”
They laughed, awkwardly. Some took out their phones. A few rattled the handle. “The watchman will come,” someone said. “Eventually.” Asha smiled and sat down on the floor, her cotton saree folding into neat pleats around her. “Well then,” she said, “let’s talk.”
So they did.
Not about syllabus or exams or attendance.
But about everything else.
Sneha, who always wore full sleeves even in forty degrees, spoke first. “I hate the way shopkeepers call me madam and still stare at my breasts like they’re counting something.”
A murmur of agreement. Asha didn’t interrupt.
Kritika, always top of the class, confessed that her father made her email password for her. “He still checks my inbox every week. Calls it ‘parental concern.’ I call it a prison cell with Wi-Fi.”
Mehar said she hated walking behind men at night. Not because she feared them—but because she feared being feared. “Even our silhouettes scare each other,” she whispered.
Someone snorted. “That’s a poem.”
Asha nodded. “Write it.”
The hour passed. No one noticed. By the time the watchman came with his keys and confused apology, the girls were quiet again—but different. Something had been unlocked that had nothing to do with hinges.
Asha went home that evening with their words stitched into her skin. She couldn’t sleep. She opened her laptop and began writing a new essay: “The Day the Door Didn’t Close.”
She wrote about how classrooms aren’t always made of bricks. Sometimes they’re made of breaking. Of listening. Of naming what scares us in rooms too small for shame.
The piece got published online. Within days, her inbox filled again.
Some readers asked: “Can you make this a series?”
Others asked: “Can we share this with schools?”
One man emailed: “Are you the reason my daughter said she doesn’t want to get married at 21?”
She replied: “No. She is.”
In April, she got an invitation from a school in Bareilly—her hometown. They were organizing a summer workshop for adolescent girls. The coordinator, a new principal who had read her work, asked if she’d come back to conduct a session.
Asha hesitated. It had been nearly seven years since she left. She hadn’t visited. She had spoken of Bareilly, written around it, carried it in her vowels and metaphors—but she had never truly looked back.
The email sat in her inbox for three days. She didn’t respond.
Then, one night, she stood by her window and saw a little girl in the opposite building—perhaps eleven or twelve—fighting with her brother over a cricket bat. Her voice was loud, her chin up. The brother gave up. The girl stood victorious on the balcony, spinning the bat like a sword.
Asha clicked Reply. “Yes. I’ll come.”
When she stepped onto the Bareilly platform weeks later, the familiar humidity slapped her face like a memory she didn’t ask for. The station hadn’t changed—still noisy, still impatient, still pretending not to see the women dragging bags twice their size.
But Asha had changed.
She wore a simple kurta and jeans. Her hair was tied up in a braid. Her eyes scanned the crowd not in fear, but in readiness.
She took an auto to the school. The roads passed by old temples, sweet shops, a cinema hall where she had once watched Dil Chahta Hai with her cousin under the pretense of a biology tuition.
The school stood like it always had—yellow walls, rusted gates, and a guard who looked like time had simply added grey to his mustache.
“Madam, ID?” he asked.
“I studied here,” she said with a smile.
The workshop was held in a small hall. Thirty girls between the ages of 12 and 16 sat cross-legged, their notebooks untouched, their expressions curious and cautious.
Asha didn’t start with a speech. She started with a question: “Have you ever been told you’re too loud?”
Several hands rose.
“Too stubborn?”
More hands.
“Too fast, too tall, too dark, too opinionated, too ambitious, too emotional?”
All hands.
She nodded. “Good. That means you’re learning how to be yourselves.”
The girls laughed nervously.
Over the next two hours, they discussed consent, courage, writing, menstruation, fear, and joy. She asked them to draw a timeline of their bodies—moments when they felt shame, moments when they felt strength.
One girl, no older than thirteen, wrote:
“I felt ashamed when I stained my uniform. I felt strong when I punched the boy who laughed.”
Asha blinked tears away.
At the end of the session, she asked if anyone had questions. A small girl in the corner raised her hand.
“Didi, how do you know you’re free?”
Asha smiled. “You don’t. But when you say ‘no’ and don’t shrink afterward, that’s a sign.”
On her way home, she stopped by the lane near her old house. The street was narrower than she remembered. The trees shorter. The sky lower.
She didn’t go in.
Instead, she walked to a nearby tea stall and sat down on a rickety bench. She ordered two cups—one for herself, one for memory.
She took out her phone and texted her mother: “It went well.”
A reply came instantly: “Proud of you. Come home for lunch?”
Asha stared at the screen.
Then typed: “Not today. But soon.”
She finished her tea, stood up, and walked toward the station.
As the train pulled out of Bareilly, she claimed the window seat again—just like seven years ago. This time, the wind felt familiar. Not like an escape. But like return on her own terms.
She opened her notebook.
Wrote:
“The girls here are ready. They just need someone to open the door.”
And as the train cut through mustard fields and memories, she leaned back and whispered to the wind:
“I’ll keep knocking.”
Part 7: Letters We Never Mailed
In the weeks after her visit to Bareilly, Asha found herself haunted—not by ghosts, but by questions. Not the kind readers sent her through Instagram or email. These were questions from girls she had never met. Girls with no access to workshops or literature, whose lives unfolded far from microphones and microphones and college corridors. Girls who wouldn’t know who Simone de Beauvoir was, but understood resistance in the way they folded their dupattas or withheld their tears.
Asha began to write them letters.
Not to post, not to publish. Just to write.
Each night, after class and grading and dinner, she sat at her desk and wrote one letter by hand. No screens, no distractions. Just blue ink, quiet resolve, and memory.
Dear girl who wants to wear shorts but hides them under her school uniform,
I see you. I was you. Your knees are not a sin. Let them exist.
Dear girl who writes poetry and rips the page before anyone sees it,
Don’t. Let the words survive. Let them live where your voice isn’t allowed.
Dear girl who thinks saying ‘no’ is violence,
It’s not. It’s architecture. You’re building a door where they left you walls.
Each letter was folded and placed in a small wooden box beside her bed. It had been a gift from Fatima—a recycled pencil box painted with flowers and the Urdu word for azadi etched on top.
She didn’t know why she was keeping them. Only that it mattered.
Meanwhile, life continued to unfurl.
Her book had been shortlisted for a small but respected award—The Nivedita Prize for Women’s Nonfiction. It was never about the prize. But Asha allowed herself a moment of vanity when she saw her name listed alongside authors she had once idolized.
At the ceremony, she wore the same handloom saree her mother had worn to her own wedding. Not for tradition, but reclamation.
She didn’t win.
But when the winner spoke and quoted a line from Her Room Had a Lock, Asha smiled. Quietly. She didn’t need the trophy. She had become the echo.
In the classroom, the girls kept surprising her.
One day, a student named Anjali presented a paper titled “Why I No Longer Want to Be a Princess.” It dissected how childhood fairy tales had taught her to wait, to silence, to desire rescue more than revolution.
In her conclusion, Anjali wrote:
“I want to be the witch. The one who lived alone and cast spells with her words.”
The class clapped for a full minute.
Another day, a shy girl named Tanvee brought in a photo of her mother standing alone by a riverbank.
“This is the only picture I’ve seen where she looks…free,” Tanvee said. “I want to know what she was thinking. She never talks about herself.”
Asha said, “Ask her. Record it. Turn it into a poem. Turn her silence into sound.”
Not everyone was a fan.
A parent complained after their daughter submitted an essay titled “Why Marriage Shouldn’t Be My Graduation Gift.”
The college principal called Asha in. The tone was firm but polite.
“Perhaps you could be a little less…incendiary?” she asked.
Asha nodded but said nothing. She had learned the difference between listening and obeying.
That weekend, she updated her syllabus.
Added a new module:
“Writing as Disobedience.”
The students noticed.
One evening, Fatima stopped by her room unannounced.
She brought kachoris and a handwritten note.
“I’ve applied for a writing fellowship in Mumbai,” she said, eyes wide with both hope and terror. “Will you write my recommendation?”
Asha took the paper from her, read the personal statement. It ended with:
“I write not because I want to be published. I write because it is the only time I am not afraid.”
She hugged Fatima tightly.
“I’ll write it tonight.”
After she left, Asha stared at her own reflection in the window. Not quite smiling. Not quite sad.
Just…still.
In the silence, she remembered a line from her childhood diary:
“I hope one day someone tells me I gave them permission.”
She had.
And it wasn’t pride she felt. It was responsibility.
That night, she opened the wooden box again. Pulled out the letter she had written months ago but never sent.
Dear Baba,
You never said you were proud. That’s okay.
I have stopped expecting.
But if one day you find my name in a newspaper, or see a girl on TV quoting something I wrote—don’t turn the page. Don’t mute the volume.
That voice is yours too. You just gave it to me before you knew what to do with it.
– Asha
She folded it back, placed it in the box. Still unsent. Still necessary.
In May, just before the semester ended, Asha took her students on a field visit to a shelter home for women survivors of domestic violence. The walls were clean, the rooms basic, the stories unbearable.
One woman said, “My husband said my anger was unnatural. I said, so was his control.”
Another said, “I haven’t spoken to my daughter in seven years. I hope she has daughters who know how to scream.”
On the bus ride back, no one spoke.
Then one girl whispered, “We’re lucky.”
Asha turned to her. “No. We’re responsible.”
Later that week, she started a new project.
A small digital archive titled Letters We Never Mailed—a space for women to submit letters they had written but never sent. To mothers. Fathers. Teachers. Ex-lovers. Gods. Ghosts. To themselves.
Within a month, the inbox was flooded.
“Dear body, I forgive you.”
“Dear Ma, I wanted to say I’m not okay.”
“Dear Sir, you should have been fired, not retired.”
“Dear Me, I will try again tomorrow.”
Each letter was anonymous. Each one a scream in ink.
She published them weekly.
They trended for months.
One day, a girl from Kashmir wrote:
“I don’t have the courage to write my name. But reading your stories makes me feel like I exist somewhere. Thank you.”
Asha replied:
“You do. And you are more than enough.”
She hit send.
Then turned to her window.
The light had changed. Evening was sinking into the city like ink into a page.
And somewhere, far from here, maybe another girl had just dared to say, “No.”
Or “Yes.”
Or simply “I want.”
And maybe, in the silence that followed, she didn’t feel alone.
Part 8: The Window Doesn’t Close
Monsoon arrived like an argument, loud and sweeping. Delhi’s skies cracked open, flooding the streets, staining the air with petrichor and politics. Asha sat at her desk, watching the rain drip from the eaves of the building opposite, the world outside her window blurred and bright.
It had been eight years since she first stepped into this city.
Eight years since the corridor in her childhood home silenced her.
Now, silence had become her ally.
She was thirty. Still unmarried. Still living alone. Still answering questions at weddings with practiced smiles.
But the world around her had begun to shift.
In August, she launched her second book—The Unlearning. It wasn’t a memoir or manifesto. It was a map. A series of essays, poems, letters, and conversations about what it meant to shed the scripts handed to women like her—scripts that began with obedience and ended in erasure.
At the launch, a teenage girl asked during Q&A, “Ma’am, what do I do when even my girlfriends think feminism is too much?”
Asha answered, “Start with your own voice. Then, listen for the ones trembling nearby.”
The girl smiled. Asha noticed her notebook had a sticker that said: Rebel quietly. They don’t see you coming.
She liked that.
Her mother visited Delhi for the first time that October.
She wore a maroon cotton saree and gold-rimmed glasses. At the railway station, she looked smaller than Asha remembered—fragile, but not brittle.
Asha took her hand and led her through the city like a tour guide:
Here was the library where she had discovered Gangavva’s diary.
Here, the chai stall that named a special after her—Asha Masala.
Here, the park where she read poems to strangers on Sundays.
They sat on Asha’s bed that evening, sipping ginger tea. The fan squeaked above.
Her mother looked around the tiny room, touched the spine of one of the books on the shelf.
“It’s not big,” she said. “But it breathes.”
Asha smiled. “So do I.”
Later that night, her mother stood by the window.
“This,” she said softly, “this view… I never had one.”
Asha didn’t speak.
They stood in silence, mother and daughter, side by side, facing a city that had taken years to learn.
When Meenakshi returned to Bareilly, she left behind two things: a jar of her homemade mango pickle, and a folded note tucked under Asha’s pillow.
It read:
“You’re not the daughter I dreamed of.
You’re the woman I wish I had been.”
Asha kept it in her wooden letter box.
Unsent, yet received.
As winter returned, Asha started a new class at college: “Women Who Weren’t Believed.” It covered everything from Sita to Monica Lewinsky, Draupadi to Britney Spears. The syllabus was controversial. Students were riveted. Protests followed. A petition demanded her resignation.
She stood firm.
One morning, a journalist called.
“We’d like to profile you. Cover story. ‘India’s Fiercest Feminist.’ Sound good?”
She declined.
“I’m not the fiercest. I’m just one of many.”
She meant it.
Because by now, she had seen them everywhere—feminists who didn’t wear the word but lived it: The maid who demanded Sundays off. The grandmother who refused to get her cataract surgery done until she was addressed by her full name. The fruit vendor who taught her daughter to ride a cycle while the whole colony sneered.
And the girl on the train, returning from a workshop, reading Fatima’s poem aloud to her little sister.
That December, she returned to Bareilly once more—this time to deliver a TEDx talk at the same school where she had once been told to keep her skirt length below the knee.
Her talk was titled “The Window Seat: A Story of Small Freedoms.”
She spoke of how feminism isn’t always protest marches or burning bras—it’s refusing to say sorry for taking up space. It’s knowing that the word no is a sentence. That love isn’t obligation. That mothers can be wrong and still be brave.
She ended by reading a poem written by one of her students.
“I don’t want to be
a goddess,
a savior,
a saint.
Just a woman
with a room,
a voice,
and one uninterrupted meal.”
The audience clapped.
Her father was there, sitting in the last row, arms crossed.
He didn’t clap.
But he didn’t walk out either.
After the event, he came up to her, cleared his throat.
“You always liked writing,” he said.
A pause.
“I didn’t understand it then. I’m trying now.”
It wasn’t an apology. But it was a beginning.
Asha nodded. “Trying is enough.”
The day she turned thirty-one, she woke up early, made herself tea, and sat by the window.
She no longer kept count of accolades, publications, mentions. Instead, she counted something else.
Girls who had sent letters. Women who had written their first poems. Mothers who had whispered, “I read this to my daughter.”
She opened her wooden box and pulled out one letter—the last one she had written to herself.
Dear Asha,
You didn’t escape.
You built a world where staying became survival, and survival became song.
You weren’t saved.
You wrote your rescue.
You are not a story.
You are a door.
Keep it open.
Always.
Outside, the streetlight flickered off as the sun lifted slowly across the Delhi skyline.
Asha sipped her tea.
Then opened her notebook to a fresh page.
She didn’t write Dear reader.
She wrote:
“If you are reading this,
you’re already beginning.
Don’t wait for permission.
The window is open.”
And with that, she began again.
– The End –
