She walked into the office on her first day wearing a navy cotton sari and her grandmother's coral earrings, and felt — halfway through the morning — as if she had been sleepwalking for two decades and someone had now switched on a light.
The publishing house had hired her for financial planning at a starting salary of seventy-two thousand a month. She was forty-two. She had not worked in twenty years. Her Masters in Economics, completed at twenty-two, had sat in a frame on someone else's wall for two decades.
On her first day, her boss — a woman named Lakshmi Iyer — said:
LAKSHMI — "Aaranya. I am going to be honest with you. There were thirty-six applicants for this role. Most of them were under thirty. I picked you."
AARANYA — "Why?"
LAKSHMI — "Because anyone who has run a house for twenty years on a domestic budget without losing her mind can manage a publishing company's quarterly accounts in her sleep. The young ones know spreadsheets. You know survival. I'll take survival."
[ Aaranya laughs out loud. It is the first time she has laughed at her own resilience as something to be proud of]
By month four, she had restructured the entire vendor payment system. By month eight, she had saved the company eighteen lakh rupees in unnecessary recurring costs. By month eleven, she was offered a senior position with a salary of one lakh forty thousand a month plus bonus.
She was, at forty-three, earning more than her own father had ever earned. She paid her rent on time. She paid her own electricity bill. She bought herself a small second-hand car. She opened her own SIPs. She started a Provident Fund in her own name.
She was sitting at her balcony one evening, going through her bank statement, when she realised something so simple it almost made her cry.
For the first time in twenty years, every rupee in her account was a rupee she had earned. Not given. Not allowed. Earned.
It was at this office that she met Priya and Nithya — two women in their thirties who took one look at her, decided she was theirs, and brought her into a friendship that was loud and rude and made her laugh in a way she had not laughed since college.
[ Office canteen. The three of them at a small table. Aaranya is unwrapping a homemade idli. ]
PRIYA — "Aara. We have been here for four months. You have never once mentioned a man. Are you a saint?"
AARANYA — "I was married for twenty years. Trust me. I am very far from a saint."
NITHYA — "And now?"
AARANYA — "Now I am — I don't know what I am. I am someone who pays her own bills. That is enough for one year."
PRIYA — "That is the sexiest thing any woman has said in this canteen since the founder's wife divorced him in 2003."
[ All three laugh. Aaranya laughs the hardest. ]