Dearest reader of mine,

You are on a career break — just out of your first corporate job — the one that chaperoned you to therapy, and even now bestows piercing pangs of pain every time you swallow your opinions and rage. The OTT platform you have been mindlessly scrolling and subconsciously hope-baiting suggests a television series which seems intriguing, as if speaking in your tongue, though evidently older than the times you currently live in. ‘Gilmore Girls’, the tag mentions.

You click. The soundtrack plays and somehow cheers you — you, who have not been able to wash your hair in ten days and change your bedsheet in three weeks — up. You change your body posture to a more attentive one.

‘Stars Hollow’, a purple town banner on the sidewalk announces, while a woman, who we later get to know is Lorelai Gilmore, walks into a diner — Luke’s diner — which gradually becomes your favourite safe space, and whose coffee Lorelai clearly drinks daily on whims unfathomable in ounces.

There, a guy tries flirting with Lorelai, who declines, and then he approaches her daughter Rory. Both mother and daughter joke about his bluff right on his face, without worry. It is obvious and fun in Stars Hollow. However, in the real, patriarchal world, you pause the screen to get caramel-flavoured popcorn from the kitchen and pass by without turning towards the live debate your mother is watching on the drawing room television about assaults, kidnappings and acid attacks by male stalkers on girls who rejected their proposals.

And so watching Stars Hollow feels like being in a cocoon where Lorelai’s morning struggle is her fuzzy alarm clock not purring on time, and Rory’s concern is her mother only having lip glosses in flavours resembling breakfast cereal — vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and toasted marshmallow, for Rory to apply.

You are a woman who grew up having to constantly calculate risk around male presence, minimising your brilliance so as to not threaten the egos of the surrounding and faraway men, and adding three apologies before going quiet so as to avoid having to say ‘no’.

So, from across the screen, you now breathe in the lip gloss and coffee, feel cozy and giggle too.

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Carole King begins the title track, her voice you gradually learn to hum to, which heals you even before the episode begins, and goes, “Where you lead, I will follow.”

You are not in the headspace to interrogate the words from your sociological lens, but you love the rhythm and belongingness it invokes.

In her paper The Whistle Stop Café and Luke’s Diner: The Village Café as Utopian Space for Women in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café and Gilmore Girls, Julia Neugarten writes that Lorelai’s forceful demands for coffee from Luke sidestep the culturally gendered expectation of female demureness, where men demand food or drink and women provide it.

The next time you get your periods, the OTT platform, as if aware of your state, suggests you watch ‘Gilmore Girls’ again. You put your laptop on your stomach — the warmth of the slightly heated laptop bottom soothing your cramp as you giggle at the antics of Lorelai, perhaps the coolest mother you have seen, and one of the first flawed mothers you remember being celebrated on-screen, who speaks her mind.

Through your four-year-old laptop, you experience women loitering in leisure for the first time. Rory can read anywhere — at the bus stop, on the bus, in Luke’s diner. When Lorelai is upset, she walks the town engulfed in obvious gloom about her blunder. Rory and her best friend Lane hang out on the streets. Together, all three stroll under fairy lights at night, relishing pizza slices, not worrying about reaching home early or being slut-shamed for laughing in public — only focused on tackling tofu and sad students during school hours.

At work, all the men intently follow Lorelai’s instructions. Sookie, the chef, and Drella, the harp player, are demanding — in fact, upfront — about their quirks without being punished or judged.

And most importantly, Lorelai and Rory live in a house without a giant gate or even a boundary wall or fence. You start dreaming that if you work hard and move to the right country, town, neighbourhood, you will somehow find your own Stars Hollow where you could finally thrive without having to constantly be on the edge about defense.

Gradually, ‘Gilmore Girls’ reruns become a part of your life — every few weeks, every few months, after a heartbreak, in the background when you are filing spreadsheets, on days your brain is fried after back-to-back meetings and has no space to take in something new. Every watch arrives with a slightly more mature, observant worldview.

There are some reality checks, of course: Sookie’s husband pressurising her to have a fourth child, the neighbour Babette — plus-sized and older — expressing how she never thought a man would ever want to be with her and look at her with desire, Rory’s first boyfriend upholding women, including his mom, cooking for their husbands almost all the time and her second boyfriend touching her at a house party without consent.

Eventually, like all cocoons, this one, too, cracks. Over time, you realise that Stars Hollow is mostly white and almost no one in the town seems to see colour.

And then you read Danielle M. Stern’s paper It Takes a Classless, Heteronormative Utopian Village: Gilmore Girls and the Problem of Postfeminism, where she argues that popular culture celebrated as feminist can, in fact, embrace postfeminist ideas that obscure the need to confront institutional discrimination and the inequalities faced by women with intersecting marginalised identities.

And even as you know the critical analysis, you chuckle with Rory under the town gazebo at night, close your now-new laptop, and check the locks of every door and window thrice before going to bed.

You yawn with yearning and surrender to your surroundings, even as you make your gorgeous girl best friend’s birthday video with the background score of the ‘Gilmore Girls’ title track’s music. And even though the song promises that all she needs to do is call your name and you will be there on the next train and wherever she leads, you will follow — you can’t. You can’t because on the next train there might be a group of howling men, because where she leads there might be ogling men your father’s age, and your home has two steel locks, and a boundary wall twice your height topped with iron nail spikes.

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The reading continues: here are the stories from my archive woven into this piece:

Dearest reader of mine,

“Let her wear what she can now. Later, she won’t be able to.” An aunt scoffs while sipping ginger-cardamom tea in your drawing room. You are seven but you know what it means. She adds how before marriage she herself “would even” wear pants.

There is a yearning in her eyes that you notice but her twenty-seven-year-old married son does not. He spreads over the sofa in his shorts and tee, and scrolls through his phone while bingeing on coconut cookies.

This conversation happens with you, the girl across the street with whom you play in the evening, the one a thousand miles away whose parents immigrated to another country at the peak of the dot-com boom, and the one speaking another tongue across the national border, in a region you have been taught to dissociate from since childhood.

Across brown households, from one South Asian home to another.

As soon as a girl starts making some sense of the world around her — and often even before that — family members, relatives, neighbours and, of course, random men dressed in Western shirts, pants and coats begin instructing her to wear traditional attire, reminding her of the culture she has to uphold.

On the first day of college, a hostel warden, thrice your age, screens your chest at 7 a.m. with a devotion that would embarrass the security staff of the most high-risk airport. She then instructs you to unpin your side-dupatta, be a “good girl”, and cover your breasts.

During summer vacations, outside your parents’ home, your bare-chested neighbour — who last wore a dhoti-kurta at his wedding thirty-five years ago — sprawls on a chair, ogles college girls one-third his age, and calls out to his sociology-postgraduate daughter-in-law: “It is too hot. Make some aam-panna and kadhi-pakora.”

Inside the smallest room of their house and the only one without a fan and a window — the kitchen — his wife questions the newlywed bride, “Why are you wearing such a light sari? Wear a heavier one, and put on more jewellery. Cover your head. It’s a part of our culture.”

At the office, a male senior learns that you debugged his code, and adds a snarky, “Don’t focus too much on developing your skills. Enjoy your time before your parents marry you off. Learn how to wear a sari instead.”

Consequently, growing up, you revolted at the mere mention of having to wear traditional attire. Often, this distancing and dissociation were not directed at the fabric or the aesthetic. They were at the way the attire was imposed as a character-diagnosing metric.

You never hated the sari. You hated how they measured your respectability against the six yards of it.

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Because wearing a dupatta was akin to covering a part of your skin you were taught that you “didn’t own enough” to conceal or reveal. Because cousins who once rebelled against restrictions on wearing short skirts in high school later found themselves carrying the burden of ‘six yards of grace’ because their in-laws expected it.

Because the sari came to represent the sacrifice of the self. The dupatta the scrutiny of your silhouette by those you didn’t even invite to surveil. The kurta considered compromise under the cloak of companionship or so they would tell. And the bindi meant an imposition over the brain and the being of the rebel.

As if the burden of carrying the ‘culture’ of the native land falls on the shoulders of women whose families do not let them inherit even an inch of the ancestral land or even their childhood room.

And then, gradually, you grow up and bid farewell. You move away from your hometown and village, cross borders and oceans, begin earning your own money, and settle into pin codes where no one calls you by the childhood nickname you once found both cringy and adorable. Sometimes, you even reclaim yourself in the land in which you were born as well.

And it is amidst this anonymity and newfound liberation that you discover a version of you that exists neither in rebellion nor in restriction. After all, whether you spend your life following every rule or consciously breaking each, you are still defining yourself in relation to them.

In your hostel corridor at midnight, you drape a wrinkly dupatta over a stained bandeau top, and stand under the yellow bulb with your roommate and three other girls from two nearby rooms and record a dancing video after the third try.

On quiet Sundays at home, you drape your mother’s wedding sari, slip on your grandmother’s gold bangles, and stand beneath the drawing-room chandelier you bought with your income. You half-read Jane Austen and half-pose for a photograph as your mother adoringly captures the moment. Your father looks at you with pride, then looks away, fearing that your beauty will be struck by his own eye.

You start building your own collection — scores of sets of pearl earrings, anarkalis in cotton and satin and silk, clay necklaces you collected on a trip, lac bangle sets that match your lehenga, and on every wear, leave glitter on your fingertips.

And what felt like a coerced costume at thirteen feels like an autonomous homecoming at thirty, now that you can separate beauty from obedience and aesthetics from orthodoxy. It is the privilege you have now through your education, relocation, financial security, mobility, and the confidence that choosing differently will not threaten your safety.

And with this belongingness, comes the recognition that this return to tradition is not equally available to every woman, not even the ones who washed your soiled plates in your hostel mess, flat or office canteen, or the young girls in villages, and the women married into traditional households. Women coerced and conditioned into wearing clothes intertwined with expectations and diktats they never consented to carry. After all, choice exists only when the conditions for choosing do, and not in a vacuum.

And so you breathe in the scent of the fabric now; taking in the fragrance of your mother, and the journey the cloth has travelled through different versions of you.

From the little girl who saw ethnic attire as a restrictive rule, to the teenager who declared it ‘incompatible with her attitude’ and promised herself to become ‘so successful’ that no one could force her into adorning it, to the woman who now wears it with the help of a parlour lady in a city far away from her place of birth, attends her promotion party or award ceremony, returns and changes into her shorts and tank top, and sends pictures in both to her family back home.

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Your daily five-minute literary luxury awaits.

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The reading continues: here are the stories from my archive woven into this piece:

Dearest reader of mine,

There is a quiet companionship women extend to one another simply by coexisting; in moments that last seconds yet linger for years, in gestures that offer belonging before biographies.

It is there in Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster Barbie, when Stereotypical Barbie travels from the perfection of Barbieland to the reality of Earth and encounters, for the first time, patriarchy, nature and the bewildering weight of being human.

Barbie, who fears anything she considers even remotely imperfect — even cellulite — turns around to see an elderly woman with crinkled skin, pauses in quiet awe, and tells her, “You are so beautiful,” to which the woman smiles, “I know it”, and off they chuckle together.

The movie softly, surreally, shows how women often recognise one another long before they ever know each other.

A similar tenderness appears in the renowned period-drama miniseries, The Queen’s Gambit. Beth Harmon meets Annette Packer, the only other girl in the tournament hall across a chessboard. As Beth defeats Annette and begins winning against more experienced male players, she gets her first period in the middle of the tournament. Annette enters the girls’ washroom to congratulate her, immediately understands the situation, hands her a tampon, asks if Beth knows how to use it, and waits outside until she is ready.

Some forms of sisterhood require neither history nor words. Dear reader, maybe you have experienced it as well.

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At dusk, you step onto the terrace, slightly skeptical, slightly scared, that some man might ogle at you again. But instead, you see different women in three neighbouring houses. One woman, your mother’s age, taking swift steps on the adjacent plant-filled terrace. Another teenage girl on a terrace across the street; whispering into her phone, rehearsing the courage of teenage rebellion — away from the misogyny running her home. Another woman your age dries her hair on a terrace far enough for you not to recognise her face, yet close enough to feel less alone. None of you speak. Yet every few minutes, each of you glances up, quietly reassured that the others are still there.

In beauty parlours, women who have only just met sit before mirrors, watch fruit packs slowly stiffen upon their faces, and quietly narrate the violence waiting for them back home.

While in the metro, you stay on high alert in the slightly empty general compartment, ignoring the men leering at you, setting your principles aside and covering your chest with the white stole you had carried to be used against heatstroke. You shift to the crowded ladies’ compartment as soon as possible. You sit squeezed between two aunties. There is less space to spread over, but more to exist in.

One aunty walks over to you, and of course, without any salutation or greeting, asks the most pertinent question, “What do you put on your hair; for it is so long?”

Your smile stretches wide. It feels like a bigger compliment than a hundred online comments combined. So you share your haircare routine, laugh with everyone over your occasional laziness in following it in between, and in that half an hour, you journey from one woman’s eyes lighting up as she recalls her maternal grandmother’s mane reaching almost to her ankles, to another laughing as she remembers arriving late to school because her own hair took too long to plait.

Right on the corner before you enter your office building, you and your teammate notice a school girl’s stained skirt, and instead of entering the office gate, cross back over the traffic light, gently tell her what happened, offer her a sanitary pad, and reassure her. She is a bit conscious, a bit startled, but you two comfort her, look for chocolate in your handbags and after two frantic minutes, find six toffees combined, offer them to her and wave goodbye.

Perhaps this is why women notice one another so instinctively. In a patriarchal world that so often asks them to remain vigilant, they find rare moments when they can simply care for one another. Most of these are not grand gestures. Yet, they make life bearable, even beautiful.

At work, you are in a conference room with two women you have never seen and twenty men, all of whom you have previously worked with. The fifty-something married manager, whose reputation for failed attempts at flirting with new women employees always arrives before he does, enters the room. As he sermonises about team spirit and proclaims, “You young people need to practice devotion and loyalty,” the three women immediately make eye contact. When the meeting pauses for a break, all three of you walk straight into the washroom, imitate him and laugh your heart out at the irony.

You fix each other’s hair and discuss upcoming deadlines, marriage pressure from your respective families, dresses on sale online and why you would never marry a man like the ones in your household, ever in your lifetime. This is the ease with which women co-exist, strangers in name, sisters in instinct.

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As you wait for your cab at night, you stand next to a group of giggling girls gathered together whom you have never met before — anonymous faces, familiar fears, immediate trust. They smile at you in silent solidarity. Then as one of them is about to leave with her partner on a bike, you tell her her dupatta is hanging too low and might get entangled in the wheel of the bike. She thanks you wholeheartedly before her silhouette vanishes in the dark.

I have often believed that nowhere do women resemble themselves more completely than in a women’s hostel. Hair oiled, uncombed. Legs sprawled across beds. Laughter loud and unrestrained. Women from villages and small towns stay awake into the small hours of the weekend. Sharing stories of violence they had never spoken aloud before. Doing each other’s makeup at 2 a.m. to cheer the one who finally left an abusive boyfriend. Women who met only hours ago sleep beside one another in spaghetti-strap tops and shorts, who could never have slept that freely in the homes they share with the men they are bound to by blood.

There is something profoundly beautiful about an intimacy that asks neither for introductions nor identities. Amidst the perils of a patriarchal world, where the United Nations has observed, “The home is the most dangerous place for women and girls”, this is the refuge that women effortlessly keep building inside one another. They have long practised an ancient language of reassurance that requires neither promises nor words.

Not every safe place needs walls. Sometimes it is simply the shadow of another woman on the other side of the road. Sometimes another woman is the softest, safest refuge to behold.

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Your daily five-minute literary luxury awaits.

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