Twelve thousand rupees

Heena's voice on the phone tonight and I laughed at the right moments and I was also looking at my own face on a screen, framed like a product, with a number underneath it. Twelve thousand. Not a joke, not a caption, not a meme — a bid. Someone typed that number and submitted it.

I keep coming back to the eleven seconds. That is how long my hand did not move. Coffee halfway to my mouth, the mug just suspended there, and the face in the screenshot is mine but it is also not mine — the dupatta slipping, the mouth half-open like someone mid-sentence they did not get to finish. I looked at that frame and thought: who is she, and why did someone think she was worth 12,000 rupees on a Tuesday?

Six from the dummy. Twelve from the real one. I know how auctions work. I know what it means when someone raises a number instead of walking away. But I cannot stop thinking that the price is also a kind of evidence — not of what happened in that room but of what I am worth now, in the open market, in the place where I was supposed to be the one pricing joy.

Heena said forty minutes of nothing. She said Arijit Singh took two hundred takes. She laughed and I laughed and under the laughing I was writing one word in tomorrow's calendar because I need to walk into Priya's setup and I need her to look at me and see someone who is aware. Aware of what, I do not know yet. But the word is underlined.

Suresh is silent. The main number is silent. The folder is back on the bed where I found it this morning, closed now, and I am lying beside it in the dark and sleep is a negotiation I am losing.