Madurangi

Sahana Hegde

Wedding season this time around felt like a game of musical chairs I’d just lost, even before Aditi called.  

Mind you, I hadn’t even known she was seeing anyone. “Yeah, I didn’t want to tell anyone until I was sure it would work out.” How do you hide an entire boyfriend (let alone a six-foot one) from everyone in your life until he graduates to fiance? I was sure, privately, that she was saying that because she thought it would be hurtful to say when would I have told you, we haven’t spoken in like 7 years. Which is true. I would have been hurt. I was hurt. More specifically — even though we hadn’t really kept in touch, and even though I’d also made newer, closer friends since we had —  even then, I had the audacity to be jealous. Of whoever else would be at this wedding and already known about this boy, and to whom I had now tasked myself with proving I was somehow equal to.  

For this reason, I spent nearly 20k booking flights to and from Bangalore, where the wedding was and where Aditi has lived her entire life. She’s always seemed pretty happy there. Happier than I had ever managed to be, at any rate. Though maybe I never tried hard enough.  

*  

There is no reason for me to have ever lived in Delhi except that I want to, but I’ve erred on the side of want more often than not. Even when, as in this case, the reasons for the want seem flimsy: there were people I was trying to follow, there were people I was trying to escape. Three years later, the former have yet to embrace me and the latter have never let me go, but want seems like a good reason nonetheless.  

There is no reason for me to live in Delhi and I’m convinced Delhi knows this. The last three years have brought me, time and again, dangerously close to believing in a sentient universe, a pastime best left to optimists and people with the ability to regulate their emotions. I have too many self-harm scars to pass for either, and while teetering in this undignified way on the brink of pseudo-theism I have imagined Delhi as an animal trying to shake me off its back. Trying to rid itself of a flea.  

The charges it strings me up on are common. I have standards of living that have been described to me as unrealistic, and a salary that I describe as laughable. Once I asked a broker if he could show me a place with windows in the bedroom and the hall, and he told me, verbatim, that with my budget I’d be lucky to find a house at all. Over the last three years I have turned this city upside down trying to find a house I could afford in which I wouldn’t wilt like a houseplant for lack of sun.

I have proven to be particularly bad at this game. First came the house in Delhi’s  infamous Paryavaran Complex, rented with a friend of a friend and her then-boyfriend (that relationship didn’t outlast the lease. I think everyone involved is happier for it). A tiny dark matchbox of a house where I spent six miserable months learning the hard way the aforementioned truth about my need for sunlight. 

The second house was also in  Paryavaran Complex, the ex replaced with a — reader, I hope you’re sitting down — friend of a  friend of a friend. That house I moved out of because it turned out to be an illegal construction. Then there was the house I paid a deposit for before it was snatched away anyway because they decided to rent to some cousin instead. They refunded the deposit, at least. All this led me, via the infamous Facebook group Delhi NCR Flats & Flatmates, directly into Satan’s underpants. Greater Kailash 1. Eight hellish months getting bullied within an inch of my life day in and day out.  

The fourth house, up until this February, really felt like a keeper. The flatmates worked. The  house was overpriced but beautiful. It took me months to find that house. It felt earned. That feeling, and the threat of homelessness feeling lifted, was what gave me the cognitive space to turn my bellyaching to the love lives of friends from seventeen years ago. 

Three  nights into my trip to Bangalore, the group chat I shared with the two flatmates in question imploded into a deluge of argument. Not the first, not even the fourth, but easily the worst. 

As a general rule, conflict makes me ill whether it’s mine or not. But the selfish terror of this one: that one or both of them would move out.  

What’s the opposite of a fantasy? The daydream equivalent of a nightmare? I have one about housing that goes like this – someone moves out, I don’t find a reasonable replacement in time, I can’t afford rent any more, and then I have to either drag myself, kicking and screaming, back into the hell of house hunting or drag myself, kicking and screaming, back to Bangalore.  

Look, most of my friends don’t like going home — well, going to their parents’ homes — either.  But most of them have better reasons. Like their parents aren’t trying even now, or they live somewhere disconnected, or they live in Chennai. I don’t know much about my problems with Bangalore, but they’re not really rooted in the present. The Bangalore problems of the present are easily solved: I could make new friends, I’m an adult now and I could stay out late and travel and maybe even get away with some of my outfits. It isn’t that. It’s that the past has seeped into the city like an old, stubborn turmeric stain. No matter how many bookstores, cafes, bars, malls, or Cubbon-Park-meetups I go to. I go home and start regressing almost on impact. The wheels hit tarmac and the ghost of my fifteen-year-old self cracks open her infernal little eyes, come what may. 

What happened, exactly? After typing and deleting three different paragraphs here I feel forced to  describe my childhood unhappiness the way Shankara tries to describe the eternal soul: not this. It wasn’t neglect, it wasn’t abuse, it didn’t have the muscle to fit any legal category, actually, it was barely corporeal. It might not even be remembered in its entirety. A sagging, marooned feeling, like being trapped on a ship without the wind to fill its sails, a becalming. I identify it by the scent it brings, which is the creeping conviction that I do not have a future.   

Now, as I tried to broker peace over Whatsapp in an auto speeding to Aditi’s mehendi by preaching, pleading, prevaricating, by going over heads and behind backs, nothing felt earned, and nothing felt ended. It felt, instead, like Delhi had shifted the goalposts again. Keeping my grip on my life in that city feels like trying to juggle with wet soap.  

*  

One thing about Aditi: between the day I met her aged eight and this day, when I walked in to find her sitting almost spread-eagled, each limb surrendered to a madurangi artist, her face has not changed in the slightest. She’d be the first to be identified in those corporate party games where they make you match the baby photo to the colleague. Perhaps if her face had changed it would have felt less baffling that I couldn’t think of a single genuine thing to say to her.  

“It looks so good,” I said. “I can’t believe this is happening!” I said that more than once over the next  few hours. Just to fill up the space, sometimes. I couldn’t seem to access better words. More people were trickling in, cousins, other friends, more recent friends. More real friends.  

The thing is that this disconnectedness wasn’t coming from the fact of Aditi being an old friend but not a recent one. This was why she wasn’t a recent friend. There was no confrontation of the likes happening in my phone just then, I’ve never been capable of something like that. It was just drift, a slow rusting. Looking back, it happened in parallel with the becalming, as if everything else about Bangalore bled into my relationships as well because I wasn’t careful enough.  

They had moved since we were children, and I hadn’t been to the new Aditi’s House before. (I had to identify it, when I got there, by the banana leaf canopy outside.) The house we were in was beautiful, but it didn’t feel like Aditi’s House; it felt like something auditioning for the role of  Aditi’s House. It felt like a pair of shoes so new the paper stuffing was still in and there wasn’t room for your feet. 

I don’t know what there is to say about that. In her old house, we used to dance together. 

*  

When I start to lose the nerve to live, a symptom is the conviction that my life in Delhi is a colossal waste of money. As is the time spent working so I have the money to waste colossally. Several hours later, I suffered the indignity of having to wake my mother up in the middle of the night at twenty-five because I was about to have a panic attack because the flatmate fight had taken a turn for the worse. 

I felt like I was dying. Not just because this was generally how I felt when faced with the prospect of being forced to move back to Bangalore, not just because any and all fights that I see or hear make me feel like I’m dying. Also because the truth was that over the last few months, living in Delhi had started to feel pointless anyway. The thing that lies in wait for me at Kempegowda International Airport seemed to have finally figured out where to find me next. 

This was Delhi Dwelling #4 and I didn’t think I had it in me to try and pull together #5. I felt again like a flea clinging to some animal’s hind leg for dear life – doomed, undesirable, and doomed to be undesirable, and if all that was in Delhi too then why try this hard to stay? What was the point of working so hard just to pay rent for the privilege of loneliness when we had perfectly good loneliness at home already? 

My mother suggested that perhaps, like the flea, I needed the hind leg of Delhi for lifeblood whether it wanted me there or not. (She didn’t say that. She said I shouldn’t make any decisions while I was upset.)  

*

I didn’t tell my father much about what was happening. I didn’t tell him anything about how it was making me feel. My feelings have been a volatile topic in the past, even without the question of house and home. Appa, like my friends here and my friends there and my employers and the Government of India, cannot really understand why I insist on living at the other end of the country when I have a perfectly good home in Bangalore. I could live rent-free, he reminds me. I could join my parents on trips. Hiking, sightseeing. Once he told me that if I lived in Bangalore he could have bought me a second-hand car. 

“You could have a good life here, Sahana,” he’d said, quietly. I have never wanted a car but the wistfulness in his voice blurred my eyes anyway.  

Appa, of course, has not seen the length of the skirts I consider essential to a good life, and this is only one reason why I was so miserable the eight months I did live at home, right after graduation. That stretch was why I say sometimes that I had to leave Bangalore because it tried to kill me. One thing about me: I will freely frame city and family and job before taking accountability for the fact that it was me, actually, who tried to kill me.  

It’s not that I think Bangalore is incompatible with life. Every story I’ve ever written has been set there. It seems to be my default setting: I think up these characters and part of their makeup is they live in Bangalore, I mean actually live in it: they know where they like to be at what time and how to get there. Bangalore doesn’t feel incompatible with any life but mine.  

*  

In the platonic realm, especially as a child, I was a bit of a serial monogamist. This means that I went to school with several people at the wedding reception — one of them even stood right  behind me every day for years in the height-order line — but knew them only by face. And Aditi being occupied on stage, these were the people I had to apologise to for turning back to my phone every few minutes, typing furiously, hunched over like I was performing CPR.  

At least it gave us something to talk about. “My flatmates are fighting,” I told them. I rolled my stinging eyes there for levity, because surely it’s impolite to have a crisis at someone else’s reception that doesn’t involve actual CPR. “I turn my back for five minutes and they’re at it again,” I added, just for good measure.  

Lately it hadn’t been that far from the truth. I’d been fraying at the ends trying to extinguish these fights. But steeped in Bangalore now, unable to reassure myself that this was an exception to my life, that it would never be the norm again — that made me unravel entirely.

Everything was fine before I left. That was the thing. Everything was fine.  

*  

At some point, the night of the reception found me sitting alone on the steps of the building, turning  my screen off and on again as though that would change what was on it. It felt like everything was falling apart. It felt like I was sitting on my ass outside a party brimming with the life I’d failed at while another one fell apart in the palm of my hands. I needed something to last. I needed this to last. I needed to become the kind of person who could make something last. Panic rising fast and powerful as bile in my throat.  

Flatmates claim they’ll move mid-tantrum all the time. It’s not a serious threat. It’s noise, this is noise. Unfortunately it makes it so I can’t hear myself think.

Try. Okay, even if it was a serious threat I could end up fine. I’d put up with some serious shit because the alternative was calling another broker or returning home, and maybe I didn’t have to. I could find a replacement flatmate for whoever moves out. I might not need to choose between Delhi Dwelling #5 and becalming Bengaluru. People do it all the time. Why does this scare me the way that it does?

Aditi and her groom were only a few feet away. The reception photoshoot is going on, the ring lights picking out the sequins of her dress against the night sky. I’d spoken all of two words to the guy. Sweet smile. I’ve noticed he gets pissed off at the same things she does. She’d been posting  pictures of him captioned things like ‘forever’ for weeks. Now here we all were.  

The camera crew switched from photos to videos. I switched from counting backwards to doing breathing exercises. What a week. What a fucking week. This terror of change, no, of loss, of Delhi looking at everything I did to keep it and going the way of Bangalore anyway. This old, stubborn hometown grief. I could feel it all pooling together in the pit of my stomach.  

I clicked the phone screen off again, on again. A stream of vitriol splashed across it from one flatmate to the other. 

– I’m gonna exit this group because I’m sick of fighting every time you get bored with your life and make assumptions and start drama.

It occurred to me that I have been wrong for some time now. There are arguments and there is just bullying.  

*

I’ve always been prone to motion sickness. I am like the apocryphal frog who won’t move when things start heating up but who objects, nonetheless, to being frog soup. I didn’t expect time to stop while I was gone but I’m annoyed it didn’t anyway. I wanted things to last even when I was the one to  end them. Most of the time, I refuse to end them at all.

I watched Aditi twirl, the skirt of her dress fanning out wide enough that the groom has to take a  step back, laughing. Surreal she’d be married by this time tomorrow. I wondered how long it had taken her to decide this was what she wanted. Forever. No, not how long. How long was immaterial. The question was how someone decided.  

Off again. On again. I needed something to last but this wasn’t going to be it. Some things were better short-lived.  

*  

At the mehendi earlier that week, all of the Bride Squad had agreed to show up to the reception early, a commitment I was rewarded for honouring with two hours alone. So I wasn’t  surprised when, on the morning of the wedding, I was the first one there again. Actually, there was a part of my brain only too willing to spin it into further evidence of my own continued importance, of my friendship with Aditi having a still-beating heart. A thing that had lasted.  

What hadn’t lasted was the argument back in Delhi that had raged for three days and four nights; a  number of decisions had been made, the most important of which was that I was going to fly back home that night and kick a flatmate out my goddamned self and figure it out from there. It still made me sick with worry. It still felt like delusion to believe that I wasn’t at the beginning of another end. 

But what else was there to do? Still better to be a scalded frog than actual soup, surely.  And — how had this missed me earlier? — I could just not think about why it was that I was always getting scalded (subconscious death-drive, probably). The wedding of a childhood friend is terrifying enough without getting into things like that.  

I had an agenda to check off, anyway. Reel-filming, candid-capturing. Being familiar enough to be forward and, once or twice, forward enough to be flirtatious, with my colleagues in the Bride Squad. People whom I will never see again, in what I believe is an example  of situational irony, are the people with whom I do my most competent socialising.

There’s a photo from that day of Aditi, her mother, my mother, and me. Amma hunted me down in the dining hall and dragged me back to stage to take it. “A photo of our family,” she said, and she used the  English word “family”, which is how you knew she meant it. 

Amma and Aunty met because Aditi and I made friends with each other. We lost touch, but they never have. They meet every  week, I think. They text all the time. It’s the opposite of the way relationships usually go for my mother. All my life she and I have responded to the bitterness of endings in opposite directions – she keeps her ties thin on purpose, the better to ward off disappointment. I’ve already clarified that I’m a clinger, who clings. But for this wedding alone we’ve switched sides. All week I have sat alongside the ghost of my friendship with the bride, the same week Amma has turned into a kind of testament to the bride’s mother. She skipped a family wedding to be here. She’s been shopping for wedding saris and mangal sutras. Now she wants a family photo. One picture, to last, before she puts me on a flight to stick it out with Delhi. 

I say yes, of course. But I can’t bring myself to look at it afterward. 

It would have been a relief to leave any other event early; miming goodbye to Aditi from the side of the stage (the actual wedding had been over for hours now. Why were they still keeping her there?) was not. Maybe a saving grace, though, because my mouth has a habit of making promises my brain can’t keep, like we should keep in touch or I love you. 

The prospect of making a heart  with my hands in front of God and the priests and our mothers seemed ridiculous. I did it anyway. But it seemed so ridiculous that I think it came across ironic.  

*  

Aditi wanted all of us, me and her real friends, to let  the mehendi artist write BRIDE SQUAD on our palms in block letters, which is not my style. But it  was Aditi, this was her wedding, and honestly, what the hell, I couldn’t deny it felt good. That she wanted me to do that, after all those years, all that silence. That she still saw me as someone she had this claim on, and she wanted it written on my skin, and she said so without thinking twice. Even if it was just madurangi. Even if it’s temporary. 

I hadn’t known that the madurangi went on everyone at a mehendi, by the way. I actually had to let my manager know at the last minute that I wouldn’t be able to work later that night like I’d meant to because it turned out my hands were going to be out of commission. Stressful stuff, but then, this was a one-time thing. Soon I would go home and the dye would fade, Aditi and I would lose touch again and once the color cleared from my hands – in a couple of weeks – it would be as if none of this had ever happened. The wedding. My having known her at all, even. It’s just madurangi. It comes off. 

Well, not quite. I looked it up at the mehendi function — typing it into the search bar letter by letter with my fingertip. How does mehendi work. ‘Temporary permanent stain’, apparently. It’s not the dye that comes away. It’s the skin. 

***

About the Author

Sahana Hegde is a writer, translator, and beleaguered grad student. She is currently translating a novel from Kannada to English as a 2025 ALTA Mentee, and working on a novel as a general optimist. On occasion she also writes at her Substack.