Chapter 2: Vandana

It's not yet five o'clock when the auto-rickshaw drops me off at the waterfront café in Bandra where I'm scheduled to meet Vandana for chai. Though I'm a few minutes early, she is already standing at the entrance awaiting my arrival. Upon spotting me in the growing dimness of the mild Mumbai January evening — January in Mumbai being: not cold (never cold, not really, not the way Lucknow gets cold in January, the kind of cold that enters your bones and sets up residence) but pleasant, the pleasant that Mumbaikars call "winter" and that anyone north of the Vindhyas would call "a nice Tuesday" — she grins and waves one arm wildly. Her eager body language might be better suited to someone reuniting with a twin separated at birth.

Vandana and I are not long-lost relatives — in fact, we're not even friends, having known each other for a grand total of two days. She is an acquaintance from my new gym, Seaside Fitness, which is a convenient ten-minute walk from the sea-facing apartment I've leased for the year in Bandra West. I know little about this woman except that she is tall and striking, with the kind of highlighted hair that requires monthly salon visits costing more than my first month's rent in Lucknow. Vandana's demeanour is carefree, cheery, undemanding. She doesn't carry much baggage or wield much intellectual heft — or if she does, she hides it behind a perpetual smile and a wardrobe that suggests her primary relationship is with Zara.

In short, she is exactly the kind of person I want to associate with as I embark on my new life, in this new city (new to me — I'd lived here briefly in my twenties, before Harsh's transfer to Lucknow had relocated our marriage and my identity to a place where I'd learned to make the perfect dal but never learned to make: myself).

"Mar! Over here!" She's waving with both arms now. The café is on Carter Road, the kind of place where the menu lists chai at two hundred and forty rupees and calls it "artisanal." I'd have been horrified by this price three months ago. Lucknow-Madhuri would have made chai at home for the cost of a matchstick and some Brooke Bond Red Label. But Bandra-Mar is learning that some expenses are actually investments in not-being-alone, and two hundred and forty rupees for companionship is: a bargain.

"Vandana! Hi!" I match her enthusiasm with approximately sixty percent of her wattage, which is all my fifty-year-old social battery can produce at this hour. The remaining forty percent is reserved for the walk home, the evening dal-chawal, and the three episodes of Sarabhai vs Sarabhai that constitute my nightly therapy.

She hugs me. The hug is: enthusiastic, fragrant (Jo Malone, the particular English Pear and Freesia that certain Mumbai women wear the way other women wear sindoor — as identity), and slightly too long. I'm not used to being hugged. Harsh was not a hugger. Twenty-seven years of marriage and I can count the genuine hugs on one hand — the day Karan was born, the day Harsh's mother died, the day we signed the divorce papers (that last one was: not a hug of affection but a hug of relief, the kind you give when a surgery is over and the patient survived but will never be quite the same).

"You look amazing," Vandana says, which is: a lie, but a kind one. I'm wearing yoga pants and a kurta that I'd bought from a street vendor in Hill Road because my Lucknow wardrobe — salwar kameez sets in pastels, the uniform of upper-middle-class North Indian wifehood — felt wrong here. Everything from my old life feels wrong here. The clothes, the cooking, the reflex to check my phone for Harsh's messages about what to make for dinner. The phone doesn't ping anymore. The silence where his messages used to be is: a sound, actually. The sound of absence. The sound of twenty-seven years of "aaj dinner mein kya hai?" suddenly stopping, and the stopping being: both freedom and vertigo.

We sit. Vandana orders for both of us — masala chai and some kind of avocado toast that I'm fairly certain didn't exist in India ten years ago and that represents everything that has changed about Mumbai since I left. Avocado toast. In Bandra. At two hundred and forty rupees per slice. The Lucknow part of my brain wants to call my mother and report this as a crime.

"So," Vandana says, leaning forward with the conspiratorial energy of a woman about to share something important. "Tell me everything. How did you end up at Seaside?"

This is the question. The one I've been rehearsing answers to since I signed the gym membership three days ago. The true answer is: I joined the gym because my therapist — yes, I have a therapist now, Dr. Mehra, a small woman with large glasses who operates out of a Pali Hill apartment and charges fifteen hundred rupees per session to listen to me describe the specific loneliness of being fifty, divorced, and new to a city of twenty million people — told me that physical activity would help with "the transition." She didn't say which transition. The divorce transition. The city transition. The identity transition. The transition from being someone's wife to being: just someone.

But I don't say this to Vandana. Instead, I say: "I needed to get in shape. You know how it is — you hit fifty and suddenly everything hurts."

"Oh my God, totally," says Vandana, who I suspect is about forty-three and has the kind of body that suggests she's been "getting in shape" since she was nineteen. "I've been at Seaside for six years. It's my second home. You're going to love it."

"I already do," I say, which is: half-true. What I love is not the gym itself — the equipment is fine, the classes adequate, the changing room smells of phenyl and someone's forgotten towel — but the fact that at the gym, nobody asks me about Harsh. Nobody asks me why I moved to Mumbai alone. Nobody asks me if I'm "okay," the question that my Lucknow friends had been asking with such frequency and such transparent pity that I'd started avoiding their calls, their WhatsApp messages, their invitations to kitty parties where I'd be the only woman without a husband and everyone would pretend this was normal while exchanging glances that said: bechari.

Poor thing.

At Seaside Fitness, I'm not bechari. I'm the new woman in the 6 PM yoga class who can't touch her toes but tries anyway. I'm the woman who showed up to hip-hop class in salwar kameez on the first day (a mortifying error that Vandana had witnessed and, to her eternal credit, responded to with "I love that look — very Bollywood" instead of the laughter it deserved). I'm Mar.

Just Mar.

"The yoga teacher — Sunaina — she's incredible, right?" Vandana is talking. I should listen. Listening is a skill I'm re-learning. Twenty-seven years of marriage to Harsh had trained me to half-listen — to nod while he talked about polymer chemistry (his field), to murmur agreement while he critiqued my cooking, to say "haan, theek hai" to proposals I didn't agree with because disagreement produced: arguments, and arguments produced: a specific silence that was worse than the argument itself, the silence of a man who believed he was always right and a woman who'd stopped believing she was ever wrong because being wrong required having opinions and she'd surrendered those somewhere around year fifteen.

"She's great," I say about Sunaina, the yoga teacher, whom I've met exactly once and who'd adjusted my downward dog with hands that smelled of sandalwood and said "breathe, just breathe" in a voice that made me want to: cry. Not because the pose hurt (it did), but because "just breathe" was the first instruction I'd received in twenty-seven years that didn't involve someone else's comfort. Just breathe. For yourself. Not for Harsh. Not for Karan. Not for the elaborate performance of North Indian wifehood that had been my daily choreography for nearly three decades.

Just. Breathe.

"And wait till you meet Jaya," Vandana continues. "She's in the Wednesday spinning class. She's — okay, she's a lot. Very intense. Very opinionated. She once told the spinning instructor that his playlist was 'acoustically violent.' But she's brilliant. You'll love her or hate her. No in-between with Jaya."

"I look forward to it," I say, and I mean it. I look forward to meeting people who might be brilliant. Who might be intense. Who might be anything other than the carefully curated, sari-wearing, chai-serving, husband-supporting version of myself that I'd been performing in Lucknow for twenty-seven years.

The chai arrives. It's good. Not as good as the chai my mother makes — nothing is as good as the chai my mother makes, this being one of the fundamental laws of the universe, alongside gravity and the fact that auto-rickshaw meters in Mumbai are: suggestions — but good. Warm, spiced, the cardamom hitting the back of my throat in the particular way that cardamom does when cardamom is doing its job, which is: making you feel like everything might be okay, even when everything is not okay, even when you're sitting in an overpriced Bandra café with a woman you've known for two days pretending that avocado toast is food.

"To new beginnings," Vandana says, raising her chai cup.

"To new beginnings," I say.

We clink. The cups are ceramic, heavy, the kind that hipster cafés use because paper cups are: passé (and also because ceramic cups justify the two-hundred-and-forty-rupee price tag). The clink is: solid. Satisfying. The sound of two cups meeting, which is also the sound of two lives meeting, briefly, over chai, in a city that brings people together and apart with the casual efficiency of a local train — the local train being Mumbai's great equaliser, the machine that teaches you: proximity is not intimacy, and intimacy is not proximity, and twenty million people can live on a narrow peninsula and still be: profoundly, specifically, exquisitely alone.

But not tonight. Tonight, I have Vandana. Tonight, I have chai. Tonight, I have a new gym and a new apartment and a new city and a broken marriage behind me and an unknown future ahead of me and two hundred and forty rupees less in my bank account.

It's a start.