Chapter 4: Jaya

Jaya's story arrives in pieces, the way stories do when the storyteller is someone who doesn't believe in giving you everything at once.

The first piece: she is divorced. This comes out during our third gym session together, a Wednesday spinning class where the instructor — a twenty-six-year-old named Arjun who has the body of a Greek statue and the musical taste of a fourteen-year-old — plays Kesariya on repeat until Jaya shouts, from her bike, mid-pedal, "Arjun bhai, agar ek aur baar Kesariya bajaya toh main cycle se utar ke speaker tod dungi."

If you play Kesariya one more time, I'm getting off this bike and breaking the speaker.

Arjun changes the song. Nobody argues with Jaya.

After class, dripping and destroyed (spinning being: the exercise that your body performs while your brain screams "why are we doing this?" and your legs answer "because Vandana said it would be fun" and Vandana's definition of fun is: a war crime), we sit in the juice bar area. Seaside Fitness has a juice bar. The juice bar sells things like "Green Goddess Detox Smoothie" for three hundred and eighty rupees, which is: a blended salad with pretensions. Jaya orders black coffee. I order the same. Vandana orders the Green Goddess because Vandana is the kind of person who believes that blended kale can fix things that blended kale cannot fix.

"You're divorced," Jaya says to me. Not a question. A statement.

"How did you know?"

"The way you hold your phone. You check it, then put it down, then check it again. Like you're waiting for a message that's not coming. That's divorced-woman phone behaviour. Married women check their phones with: obligation. Single women check with: hope. Divorced women check with: habit that hasn't died yet."

This is so precisely accurate that I want to either hug her or leave the room.

"You?" I ask.

"Seven years ago. He was in finance. Dalal Street. The kind of man who understood markets but not people. He could predict the NIFTY's quarterly movement but couldn't predict that working eighteen-hour days and coming home smelling like whisky and someone else's perfume would end: badly."

She says this without bitterness. The way you describe weather that happened last year — factual, detached, the detachment that time produces when time has done its job, which is: making the unbearable into the: merely historical.

"I'm sorry," I say.

"Don't be. Best thing that happened to me. Forced me to figure out who I was without the Mrs. attached to my name." She sips her coffee. "It took me three years. The first year, I cried. The second year, I was angry. The third year, I joined this gym and started spinning and discovered that physical exhaustion is cheaper than therapy and more effective than wine."

"I'm in year one," I say. "The crying year."

"I know. I can tell." She puts her coffee down. "Here's what nobody tells you about the crying year. It's not actually about the marriage. It's about the version of yourself that you built for the marriage. That's the thing you're mourning. Not the man — the woman you became for the man."

This hits me with the force of a spinning class set to Kesariya on repeat. Because she's right. I don't miss Harsh. I haven't missed Harsh since the second month in Lucknow when I realised that the absence of his criticism was: not silence but music. What I miss is: the structure. The daily architecture of being someone's wife. Wake up, make chai, pack tiffin, manage the house, attend social obligations, be Madhuri Khanna, wife of Harsh Khanna, mother of Karan Khanna. The architecture that gave shape to days that might otherwise have been: formless, and the formlessness being what terrifies me now — the terror of waking up and having no one to make chai for, which is not the same as loneliness but is: adjacent.

"The structure," I say.

"Exactly. The structure. And the gym replaces the structure. That's why we're all here — every divorced woman in this building, and there are more of us than you think. We come for the exercise, but we stay for the: routine. The 6 PM yoga. The Wednesday spinning. The Friday Zumba. The schedule that says: you have somewhere to be, someone to be with, something to do that isn't sitting in your apartment wondering who you are."

The second piece of Jaya arrives the following week: she has a daughter.

We're in the changing room after yoga — the changing room that is its own ecosystem, a place where women exist in states of undress that produce a particular vulnerability and a particular honesty. In the changing room, conversations happen that don't happen in the gym itself. The gym is performance. The changing room is: confession.

"Ananya is sixteen," Jaya says, pulling a kurta over her head. "She lives with me. She hates her father — which is understandable given what he did — but she also hates me for not hating him enough. Teenagers have a binary view of moral failure. You're either completely innocent or completely guilty. The idea that a marriage can fail because both people were: insufficient — that's too nuanced for sixteen."

"My son is twenty-four and he still can't handle nuance," I say.

"Karan?"

"Karan. He's in Pune. Software engineer. Very talented, very angry. He blames me for the divorce because I'm the one who filed. The fact that I filed because Harsh was — well. Karan doesn't want the details. Karan wants: a villain, and the villain he's chosen is me."

"Because you're the one who changed the story," Jaya says. "Harsh kept the story the same. Same house, same job, same life. You're the one who said: this story isn't working. And children — even adult children — don't forgive the parent who changes the story. They forgive the parent who stays, because staying is: familiar, and familiar is: safe, and safe is what children want even when they're twenty-four and writing code in Pune."

I sit on the wooden bench. The bench is warm from someone else's body — the warmth that communal spaces retain, the warmth of other women who've sat here and changed and left and lived. The warmth that is: not personal but present.

"Does it get better?" I ask. "With Ananya?"

"Slowly. Last month she called me 'Ma' instead of my first name. Which doesn't sound like progress but which is: a revolution, because for two years she called me Jaya, as if I were: a colleague, not the woman who spent thirty-six hours in labour bringing her into the world."

"Thirty-six hours?"

"She was stubborn from the start. She gets it from me. Along with the short hair and the inability to tolerate bad music." Jaya runs her fingers through her cropped hair — the gesture of a woman who cut her hair short after the divorce and never grew it back because the short hair was: a declaration, and the declaration was: I am not the woman he married, I am the woman I chose to become.

I know this because I'm considering cutting my hair too. The long dark hair that Harsh liked because "lambe baal acche lagte hain" — long hair looks nice — and that I'd maintained like a garden he visited but didn't tend. The idea of cutting it is: thrilling and terrifying in equal measure. The thrill of self-determination. The terror of: what if I look ridiculous?

"Cut it," Jaya says, reading my expression with the accuracy of a woman who's been where I am.

"Maybe."

"Not maybe. Definitely. Cut it. Not because short hair is better — it's not, it's just different. Cut it because you're choosing. The choosing is the point. Not the hair."

The choosing is the point. I write this on the inside of my wrist with a pen from my gym bag — literally write it, in blue ink, on my skin, because I need to see it. Because twenty-seven years of not-choosing has atrophied the choosing-muscle, and atrophied muscles need: reminders.

The third piece: Jaya writes.

Not books. Not articles. She writes: journal entries that she posts anonymously on a blog that has twelve thousand followers and that she's never told anyone about except, now, me.

"It's called Doosri Innings," she says. We're eating vada pav again — this has become our post-gym ritual, the ritual that Vandana started and that Jaya pretends to disapprove of but participates in every time. "Second innings. Like cricket. The first innings is: the life you were given. The marriage, the expectations, the performance. The second innings is: the life you choose."

"Can I read it?"

"You can. But you'll recognise yourself. I've been writing about you."

"About me?"

"About a woman who showed up to hip-hop class in salwar kameez and didn't die of embarrassment. About a woman who checks her phone for messages that aren't coming. About a woman who is: beginning." She looks at me with the particular directness that is Jaya's signature — the look that says: I see you, all of you, the parts you're showing and the parts you're hiding, and I'm not going to pretend I don't.

"Is that okay?" she asks.

"That's okay," I say. And I mean it. Because being seen — actually seen, not the performative seeing of social media where everyone shows their best angle, but the real seeing of a woman who writes about other women's pain because she understands it — being seen is: what I came to Mumbai for. Even if I didn't know it when I came.

The vada pav is hot. The chutney is sharp. Vandana is talking about some new face serum. Jaya is typing something into her phone — probably a blog post, probably about this moment.

I check my phone. No messages from Harsh. No messages from Karan.

I put it down.

I don't check it again.