Excerpted with permission from How India Loves: Love Stories from the World’s Largest Democracy, published by Bloomsbury.
A song based in California has united us in the most unlikely of places. I mean, this is not a bar or a club or a remotely urban place that might be playing such music. ‘I couldn’t have said it better!’ It turns out she had just studied biogenetics in the UK and was on her way, of all the places in the world, to the university in my backyard, Stanford. She was there for student loan details that her parents were sorting out. She was nervous, for unlike Europe, barring New York City and some places here and there, public transport in the world’s most powerful country was mostly a joke. I told her that luckily Stanford wasn’t as bad and guided her to take the Marguerite Shuttle there, rental bikes until she got her own, told her about local groceries in downtown and Caltrain details, the VTA pass, and so on. She opened up on how he had broken her heart. It’s like she wasn’t important at all. By this time, ‘he’ was not one man but every boyfriend, situationship, things, bonds with and without names, one-night stands. Seemantini was fed up of all of it. She had thought that Sayantan, a Bengali student like her, whose family was from Delhi, would be it. They had so much in common, they could be together because their studies and lines of work were similar. But it was this and that and he was never around when she needed him.
Rituparna Chatterjee
How India Loves: Love Stories from the World’s Largest Democracy
Bloomsbury, 2025
Putting together the pieces on her flight back home to Kolkata, she realised he was always threatened by her academic brilliance, by the prospects the future held for her. His own stellar performance and seniority were irrelevant. The tears streamed down. At such moments, which were pretty much every day of my life, I had learned to ask, not like the journalist in me who wanted to know details (different from kitty party aunty asking similar questions for heartless, soulless juicy gossip details), basically the four Ws (who, what, when, where) before the why and how that were the tenets of journalism taught in all journalism schools.
I had to simply hold space, be present in full acceptance. (In fact, the mastery of this trait and patience were courtesy of my six years of working with and being cooking parent at my son’s school for seventy children from various cultures all over the world, and I must thank them too, for without them these stories and this book wouldn’t have happened.)
Someone had felt safe in my presence to open up, and this had become my whole life. People were just like kids, accosting me out of nowhere to tell me stories, my own rush hour be damned. Childhood truly never ends, as psychology proves again and again. Sometimes it was a CEO in Silicon Valley crying, sometimes it was a stranger at a random bank, like right now. And my job was to show them empathy and offer my silent, non-judgemental presence, which meant asking no questions.
That’s the bond you can have with strangers. There’s no baggage of history, nor the guarantee of a future, just the present moment, which allows often for the purest authenticity, often one which people can’t find with their loved ones. That’s the essence of Vikram Seth’s poem ‘Unclaimed’: ‘To make love with a stranger is the best./ There is no riddle and there is no test./To lie and love, not aching to make sense To rest within the unknown arms and know/That this is all there is; that this is so.’
It didn’t just apply to lovemaking but to every interaction that involved any bit of platonic intimacy, which, as was so common in the wellness and therapy circles and eventually on the streets of California, is always best broken into ‘Into-Me-See’. To see into someone and truly, truly see them, accept them as they are. Sex can be intimacy, but most sex isn’t. It is this intimacy that is available in all platonic ways as well, most of all, in patience, listening, total presence and non-judgemental acceptance, and what became much of my journalism career, my column, my first book, this book . . . what sparked off this conversation.
We exchanged numbers and promised to meet before both of us left the city.
All art that touches us is about humanity, which has never known any geography. Today, ‘Flowers’ is the anthem of innumerable people who are choosing, read that again, ‘choosing’ to stay single. You can call them divorcees, widows, singletons – whatever label you choose, but they are single out of choice. A year later, Miley Cyrus’s fierce Grammy performance in a 1970s-style shimmery dress showing off all of her savage, ripped self inside and out, with its powerful finale, including a mic drop, has completely shaken the world. It has become the anthem for an ever-increasing army of women who have had it with men worldwide.
In many ways, ‘Flowers’ is a modern-day rendition of ‘I Will Survive’, a very similar anthem from the 1970s by Gloria Gaynor. It is not merely a disco staple – the powerful, catchy song is a cult, a symbol of female empowerment, which was just beginning in America but which went on to rock the world. And it began with Gaynor too, like Cyrus, not avoiding but completely acknowledging the devastation of, well, a devastating breakup and the eventual discovery of strength within herself.
It was a song Banshee, a renowned journalist and a corporate communicator, now in her seventies, had sung to herself again and again. The wonderful intensity of her romance had turned into an intense marriage, turning into intense violence. Screams, sobs, abuses . . . had drifted out of their locked bedroom door and into the house where they lived in a joint family. Her in-laws were very well aware of what was happening. Our world is patriarchy, trapping both genders, so this is sadly more common than we are comfortable admitting.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about one in three, or 30 per cent, of women worldwide have faced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. Most of this is intimate partner violence (IPV). Almost one third, 27 per cent, of women worldwide aged between fifteen and forty-nine have reported IPV, either physical or sexual.
Banshee’s marriage had been violent for a very long time, so much so that everyone in the household knew it was routine. But one day, when the door of the bedroom was left slightly ajar, by mistake (of course!), she had looked out while being beaten. Her five-year-old son was standing there, frozen in shock. He had seen it. The whole point of a financially independent woman taking all this was for the sake of him. To give him a family, to protect him. Banshee felt she had lost her dignity and had failed to protect her son, the very point of her being in the marriage. It was at that moment that she knew the marriage was truly over. And knowing very well that she was losing everything she had ever known, she decided to walk out, taking her son with her. Her parents were not as supportive as she had hoped they would be. And legal procedures, societal prejudices and judgements, and life after her divorce, were, to put it mildly, ‘difficult’. That included judges and lawyers staring at your breasts occasionally because, of course, as Banshee says, ‘They can’t help it and don’t mean to, while you’re fighting custody battles, standing in lines all sweaty in the heat for hours.’
Rituparna Chatterjee is a columnist, journalist and author. Her books include the award-winning and bestselling The Water Phoenix, How India Loves and An Ordinary Life. A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The Economic Times and The Times of India, Chatterjee is best known for her long-standing column California Dreaming on her life as a global Indian.
