In the absence of caring family members, Indian women are confiding in a sisterhood of strangers

Blasting out of her chunky white headphones is Miley Cyrus’s self-love anthem, ‘Flowers’. I smile at the girl sitting next to me on the steel bench. We are in the small neighbourhood branch of a government bank in South Kolkata filled with senior citizens. She smiles back and begins talking. I am from California. She is headed there soon—straight into my neighbourhood, in fact, to study neuroscience. I give her tips. Two minutes into our banter, she breaks down incoherently, but of course, it makes sense to me. After all, I am a woman myself. “You know I tried my best. We were so damn alike.” She goes on to tell me about her love saga gone wrong. I squeeze her hand in support. Our parents who brought us here have no idea what has transpired between us. Two complete strangers bonded so deeply in a strange place against the background of a song about healing a broken heart playing on loop.

Over the past four years, this has become my daily life. One that began with the India book tour for my last book, The Water Phoenix, an award-winning magic realism memoir of a sexually abused child’s lifelong search for love. Readers had found themselves in her, healed themselves as they read along, emerging joyous, lighter, purged. They couldn’t stop telling me their stories when they met me at book events. I, a stranger who had returned to India after two decades, was the best friend they never had, their journal and the teddy bear they wanted to show everywhere. That is the power of telling your story. It’s never about you. They brought their mothers, grandmothers and lovers and told me about taboo bonds with no names.

Despite belonging to big families or being coupled up, the stories inside them spoke of overwhelming loneliness and invisibility. The posh woman from a powerful family in New Delhi who broke down in the powder room of a five-star hotel because of how unbearable her perfect marriage was and how nobody saw her. The classic chorus from loved ones: “But he doesn’t hit you!” “Why doesn’t he? He might as well. That would actually be more bearable,” she tears up as she reapplies her concealer and mascara, fixes her lipstick and powders her face before walking out as if nothing had happened. In a country renowned for inventing the concepts of joint family and arranged marriage, it is the intimacy and kindness of strangers that provide shelter to lonely Indian women.