The Kada They Didn't Blur

Angel for a day. That's what Tanvi's mother wrote over my entrance walk on her story — our roka angel — and for the first time in two months I looked at a public flex and didn't make a fist about it. Four thousand views inside the hour. Two wedding planners by evening. Rs 1.12 lakh in the account by noon, the largest freelance deposit since I moved to Mumbai. I want to say I felt clean. I mostly did.

But yesterday I went to bed feeling like hired family — champagne top, a fee, a server clearing an unlabelled bag while I watched and said nothing. Today I was someone's angel on Instagram and the money actually came. The wound and the balm are the same thing, and I know that, and I'm going to leave that observation alone before I ruin it.

Then Niharika. Eight forty-seven. She reposted my entrance walk under 'hostess inspo' with no credit, no tag, and the kada Tanvi's grandmother gave me not blurred. I saw my own wrist on someone else's grid. My jaw did the thing Heena has a name for from August. I screenshotted before I thought. Sent it to her. By eleven the credit-tag clause was in the standard contract — drafted angry, polished calm. Every photo, every tag, every wrist.

The Telegram rejection at six was its own kind of bad. Boilerplate, insufficient evidence, and the cc went to a sender address I haven't seen in months — the fixer's old SIM. Heena and I were on the phone for an hour after that. I'm not writing it down tonight. The walls are closer than they looked at breakfast.