The windows in the Centre for Social Thought don’t open. This is one of the first things Saanvi learned when she joined the research fellowship. The panes were sealed shut during a renovation that happened years before her time, and now no one seems to remember who ordered it or why. The building smells like old paper and warm dust, especially in the afternoons when the heat gathers in corners and under desks.
She likes the silence of the fourth floor. The old professors rarely climb the stairs. Even Dr. Rao—her guide—takes the lift, though he insists on calling it the elevator, a leftover tic from his Fulbright year.
At twenty-six, Saanvi is the youngest JRF in her cohort. Her workspace is a slim table next to the bookshelves, facing a corkboard that she has never bothered to personalize. It holds one yellowed newspaper clipping from The Hindu and a hand-drawn conference schedule with Dr. Rao’s name circled in blue.
She’s been reading and rereading his keynote speech for weeks. Parsing his phrasing. Studying the way he threads history and affect, violence and vulnerability. He is famous, in a quiet, scholarly way. Students from JNU and Ashoka talk about him like he’s part myth: the theorist who gave up a Harvard post to return to India, who writes footnotes like prose poems. Saanvi had read his book in her final year at St. Stephen’s and underlined entire pages, even though she never used pens on her textbooks.
Her first memory of him is still sharp. He had said her thesis abstract was “surprisingly elegant.” The word elegant hung in her ears for hours. She repeated it to herself on the metro home, as if it were not about the work, but about her. A secret confession, smuggled into a comment.
Now it’s almost 8:30 p.m. The building is emptying. The other fellows have gone home or slipped off to the dhaba behind the department. Her own laptop hums with fatigue. She’s revising a literature review for the third time—he said it was “promising, but unfocused.” She didn’t ask what he meant. She prefers the discomfort of guessing to the clarity of disappointment.
Just as she closes her laptop, her phone buzzes.
Dr. Rao
“Still in the office? Can I swing by to discuss your notes?”
No salutation. No punctuation. His texts always feel like whispers left on a table.
She responds quickly—Yes, of course. I’ll wait.
She reopens her laptop. Fixes her hair reflexively. Tucks in a strand that always escapes near her temple.
He arrives ten minutes later, wearing a soft blue shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbow. He smells faintly of citrus and archival dust. He does not sit, only leans on the corner of her table and gestures toward the open document.
“You’re circling the core idea,” he says, scanning the screen. “But not cutting into it.”
She nods. Her neck feels stiff. “I wasn’t sure if I could be that direct.”
“You can,” he says, looking at her. “You must. Your instincts are sharper than you think.”
She smiles. She does not say thank you. That might ruin it.
There is a beat of silence. He doesn’t leave. She doesn’t look away.
When he finally walks out, she stares at the corkboard until her eyes blur.
That night, sleep comes slowly.
She dreams of papers fluttering out of windows that won’t open. She dreams of hallways that shift. Her thesis draft morphs into his book, and her name is in the acknowledgments, not the byline.
At 3:17 a.m., she wakes and goes to the kitchen. Drinks water. Stands by the fridge, one hand on the door, unsure whether to cry or laugh. Instead, she returns to bed and wills herself into forgetting.
She wakes to silence.
Her fan is off. The window is open.
She doesn’t remember opening it.
The morning light cuts sharper than usual. Her phone isn’t beside her pillow. Neither is her hair tie or the stack of printed articles. Instead, on the side table, there’s a leather-bound planner—expensive-looking, embossed with the university seal and the initials S.I.
She sits up. The bedsheets are unfamiliar—cool white cotton with a navy border. The room smells faintly of sandalwood and starch. She walks barefoot across polished wooden flooring, drawn to the mirror near the wardrobe.
The woman looking back at her is still her, but changed. Her hair is straighter. Her posture is taller. There’s a gold pin on her kurta—a faculty ID badge.
She fumbles for a phone. Finds one in the coat pocket hanging on the back of the door.
The lock screen shows a department group message:
Faculty Meeting: 11 a.m. in Conference Room A.
Dr. Iyer, your student Abhinav Rao has submitted his chapter draft. Awaiting your feedback.
Saanvi drops the phone.
For a second, the world tilts. She grips the edge of the desk.
Dr. Iyer.
Her student.
Abhinav Rao.
She steps to the mirror again.
And laughs—soft, astonished.
***
Saanvi spends the morning inside the unfamiliar rhythm of her new life.
The woman in the mirror brushes her hair back in a practiced, efficient sweep. The wardrobe holds clothes she never bought—cotton saris in muted tones, linen kurtas folded with care, blazers in navy and charcoal. The desk in her flat is covered in spiral-bound dissertations and books with underlined pages, spines cracked in a way that suggests deep familiarity. The nameplate on the bookshelf reads:
Dr. Saanvi Iyer, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Thought.
She finds a university ID card in her drawer, clipped with a conference lanyard from Sciences Po. The itinerary on her phone is dense with lectures, workshops, and revision requests from students. Her email inbox is an ocean of formality. Dear Ma’am, as per your comments…
Dear Dr. Iyer, requesting extension…
And then, nestled quietly:
From: Abhinav Rao
Subject: Draft submission – Chapter Two
She opens it with care. The attachment is titled “Mapping Fragility: Gendered Territories in Post-War Kashmir.” She has read these words before. Or something like them. The arguments echo fragments from her own early thesis—the one Dr. Rao had once praised and redirected so sharply that it no longer resembled her original instinct. In this world, it seems he has inherited her voice.
She walks to the department in a daze. Students greet her with familiarity. A clerk hands her a memo she doesn’t recognize but signs anyway, trusting the performance of confidence. Everything feels like a dress rehearsal of power. The corridors look the same. Even the posters peeling off the wall are arranged exactly as they were.
Only her name has changed position.
She finds herself in her new office: wide windows, a bookshelf full of books she’s never read but apparently owns. There’s a single chair facing her desk—the chair she used to sit in, opposite Dr. Rao. Now, someone else occupies it.
He’s younger than she remembers him. Not by much, but enough. His hair is longer, less silver at the temples. The sleeves of his shirt are buttoned to the wrist, the way he used to dress before the divorce.
“Hi,” he says, standing up as she enters. “I wasn’t sure if I should wait.”
“You’re early,” she says. Her voice is too smooth, almost impersonal. She’s imitating someone—a woman who knows she’s respected.
He smiles awkwardly. “Force of habit.”
She gestures for him to sit. Her eyes flicker to the manila folder on her desk—his draft. She hasn’t opened it yet.
“You submitted a chapter.”
He nods. “I’ve been reworking the framing. Trying to bring the vulnerability to the surface.”
Her breath catches. His vulnerability. In another world, those words would have been hers—offered carefully, to someone who never acknowledged them.
“I’ll read it by tomorrow,” she says. “We’ll go over it line by line.”
“I’d appreciate that.” He sits straighter, as though being noticed lifts his spine. “Your comments on the last paper were really... sharp. I’ve never had a supervisor who pushes like that.”
She blinks. The admiration in his voice is sincere, even deferential.
“Good,” she says simply. “That’s the job.”
The day unfolds in fragments. She teaches a seminar on feminist ethnography. Students take notes when she speaks. At lunch, another professor invites her to sit with them in the faculty lounge. Someone makes a joke about a publication deadline. She laughs, automatically.
But she can’t shake the strange current inside her. The way power folds into her posture. The way the chair in her office supports her back differently. The way Abhinav Rao—her old guide, once so unreachable—now waits for her judgment with unguarded eagerness.
That evening, she opens his draft. It is not bad. The ideas are raw, some of them derivative—she spots sentences that mimic her own phrasing from old essays—but there is a kind of reaching that moves her.
In the margins, she writes precise feedback:
You need to stop narrating and begin arguing.
Don’t use the term “female experience” so loosely. Ground it in source.
What are you risking with this conclusion? Right now, nothing.
Each comment feels like a kind of justice. Not vengeance. Not quite. Something quieter. Like lifting a veil.
Two days later, they meet again in her office.
He’s dressed more casually now—no blazer, shirt sleeves rolled up. He sits before her with a marked-up copy of his draft.
“These comments,” he says, “they’re cutting, in a good way.”
She watches his hands, the way his fingers tap against the page. Once, she had studied those hands for other reasons.
“You have a strong instinct,” she says. “You’re just still performing for approval.”
He blinks. “Yours?”
She holds his gaze. “Anyone’s.”
There’s a pause. A shift.
“I wonder,” he says softly, “if I’m too used to being shaped by others. I mean—academically.”
“That’s something you’ll need to undo.”
He looks down, then up again. “Has anyone ever told you how intimidating you are?”
She tilts her head. “Intimidating or exacting?”
He smiles. “Both.”
His voice holds warmth. Something bordering on flirtation.
She feels her pulse tick slightly. A memory surfaces—his voice, in another world, saying: You’re too sensitive, Saanvi. That’s why your analysis slips.
Now, he seeks her approval like sun through glass.
“Finish your revisions,” she says, standing. “We’ll talk next week.”
He stands too, a little slowly, as if unsure if the meeting is over.
Then: “Do you ever feel like we’ve done this before?”
Her breath freezes in her throat.
He smiles sheepishly. “I don’t mean literally. Just… a strange sense of déjà vu.”
She recovers. “That’s how all advisor meetings feel. Repetitive. Circular.”
But even as she says it, she knows it’s not true.
There’s a residue in the air. A familiarity beyond reason.
That night, she cannot sleep.
She remembers a moment from three years ago: her hand brushing against his while they reached for the same copy of Subaltern Futures. His voice too close as he explained how “empathy” was often just a rhetorical device in scholarship. The coffee he brought her after she presented at the South Asian Studies colloquium—how he never brought coffee for anyone else.
How he’d said, “You’re brilliant, Saanvi. You don’t have to act like it.”
And yet, he never cited her paper in his monograph.
In the dream that follows, they are seated on opposite ends of a library table. A glass wall separates them. He mouths something—she can’t hear it. She wants to ask if it was ever real. If any of it meant anything. But in this world, she doesn’t have to.
Because in this world, he waits.
And she decides.
***
Saanvi has never cried while writing. Not even during her fellowship years, when she worked sixteen-hour days and rewrote entire chapters only to be told, too abstract, too literary, too soft.
But now, in this other world, seated at her office desk with the winter sun casting long slants of gold across her keyboard, she does.
Not from frustration. But from clarity.
The paper she’s working on is a keynote draft for an upcoming panel at SOAS. The title:
“Occupation and Intimacy: Refracted Lives in the Gaza Strip.”
The research has consumed her for months. She has been corresponding with a Palestinian academic in Rafah, translating diary fragments, analyzing personal testimonies of women negotiating surveillance, motherhood, and grief under occupation. What began as a theoretical inquiry into geopolitical entrapment has become something else—a reckoning with language itself. How theory can aestheticize war. How the word home grows heavier under blockade. How proximity to violence, even through screens, destabilizes authorship.
Her argument is fragile and dangerous. That intimacy—the most private, most human domain—is no longer separate from state violence. That occupation seeps into bedsheets and breastmilk. These testimonies teach Saanvi that domination is not an abstract thesis topic—it enters the most private rooms, just as academic authority once invaded her own sense of self. That love in Gaza is a form of resistance, not metaphor.
When she reads her draft aloud, her voice trembles. Not from weakness, but from the audacity of believing she can write this.
The next day, Abhinav arrives with questions.
He’s holding her printed comments on his revised chapter. There’s a note in the margin she forgot she wrote:
You keep returning to the idea of “rupture,” but you never ask what gets ruptured—ego or empathy?
He sits across from her, visibly nervous. He’s dressed neatly but there’s a smudge of ink on his sleeve. He looks, for the first time, like a student with something to prove.
“I think I know what you meant,” he says, pointing to the note. “But I keep circling it, trying not to admit—maybe I was writing for you.”
She doesn’t answer immediately. She watches him. There’s a strange reversal in his confession—like watching a painting shift orientation.
“I wanted you to read it and think I had finally understood,” he says. “What we spoke about years ago. About how theory can’t just live in the head. That it has to risk something.”
She smiles, faintly. “You’re remembering a conversation we never had.”
He blinks.
“In my world, you said something similar. But it wasn’t a conversation. It was a correction.”
She sees it land. His expression stiffens, confused but intrigued.
“In your world?” he echoes.
“Do you believe in parallel lives?” she asks suddenly.
He chuckles. “What do you mean?”
She leans forward, voice low, measured.
“Do you ever wonder what would’ve happened if… the roles had been different? If someone else had the authority? If you had to wait for someone’s approval—not because of intellect, but because of position?”
There’s a pause. The clock ticks above the cabinet. A fly buzzes briefly and is gone.
“I think about that all the time,” he says finally. “Especially with you.”
Her eyes narrow.
“You think about me?”
“I mean…” He clears his throat. “Yes. You were the only student I supervised who could outwrite me. It unsettled me.”
Her breath catches. This is the closest he has ever come to naming it—in either world.
“But you never said that,” she says.
“I couldn’t,” he admits. “It would’ve complicated things. You were young. Brilliant. And I…”
“And you were married. A scholar. A man I wasn’t supposed to outshine.”
He flinches—not visibly, but she feels it. The way the air shifts.
“I didn’t know how to be generous,” he says. “Not with you. You scared me.”
She wants to say something cruel. Something surgical.
But instead she asks: “And now?”
He exhales. “Now I want your generosity. Even if it’s too late.”
There is a long silence. Outside, students are laughing—someone’s birthday, maybe. She remembers being among them once, uncertain and open.
She stands up, walks to the window. The leaves on the neem tree outside shimmer in the cold breeze.
“Do you know what I’m writing about now?” she asks without turning.
“No.”
She picks up a single page from her desk and hands it to him. It’s an excerpt from her keynote: a woman in Gaza describing the way her husband built a crib out of concrete blocks, just days before he disappeared.
Abhinav reads it slowly. He does not interrupt. When he finishes, he sets the page down gently.
“This is devastating,” he says.
“It should be.”
He nods. “You’re writing something no one else can.”
“No,” she corrects. “I’m writing what no one let me write before.”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“I think I failed you,” he says.
She doesn’t answer.
“Not just academically. I think I took from you.”
Now she does turn.
“What did you take?”
“Your uncertainty. Your gaze. The way you questioned even the questions.”
He looks up at her. His eyes are dark and honest. “I see it now—in your writing. You’re doing what I couldn’t.”
She feels herself soften. And then stiffen again. Because recognition is not the same as restitution.
“There’s no moral clarity in this, Abhinav,” she says. “This isn't some redemptive arc.”
“I know.”
“But you’re finally listening.”
“I am.”
They sit in that silence for a while. No movement. No apology. Just two people inside the wreckage of an old imbalance, naming its edges.
When he leaves, he does not touch her. He does not linger. And she feels—finally, completely—like herself.
Not the woman writing for someone’s approval.
But the woman whose voice makes others revise their own.
The corridor is empty once Abhinav’s footsteps fade, but Saanvi’s office still hums with the after-pressure of things finally said.
On her desk the keynote draft lies open beside Abhinav’s chapter, their marginalia interlaced like two conversations layered on translucent sheets. She notices how often she has written the word risk—sometimes circled, sometimes boxed in black ink—as though she were marking secret pressure points on a body.
Her phone buzzes.
Subject: Fellowship Award – Columbia Global Center, NYC
A single sentence in the body: We are delighted to invite Dr Saanvi Iyer to spend the spring semester developing her project “Occupation and Intimacy” in residence.
She should feel triumph, but instead there is a quiet steadiness, like the sea pulling away from shore just before breaking again.
That evening she walks home through the fog-softened campus. Couples drift past, arms linked, laughing in pockets of light beneath streetlamps. She remembers crossing this same quad in another life, palms sweating on a spiral notebook, replaying Dr Rao’s praise until it blurred into permission.
In her flat—hers, unmistakably hers—she brews kahwa sprinkled with strands of saffron an acquaintance once carried from Srinagar. The fragrance rises, resinous and sweet. She sets her laptop on the kitchen counter and drafts two emails.
To Columbia: a measured acceptance, beginning I am honored… and ending I look forward to contributing to the center’s conversations on conflict, care, and textual ethics.
To Abhinav: just three lines.
Your revisions show the argument you were afraid of. Keep cutting until it hurts. Then we’ll talk.
She hesitates over the “send” button on the second. Not because she doubts the advice, but because she hears in it an echo of the way he once wrote to her: crisp, commanding, a note of possessive pride. She deletes the last sentence, replaces it with You’re close. Trust the fracture. Then she hits send.
The kettle clicks off. Steam curls into the dim kitchen. She sips the tea, feels heat pool at the back of her tongue, wonders how many worlds a person has to traverse to feel both weightless and weighted exactly where they stand.
She rereads testimony from Gaza: a mother describing the hollow percussion of drones, the way her baby startles even in sleep. Saanvi highlights a line—Love is the last room without cameras—and copies it to her keynote draft’s epigraph page.
She pauses, palms on the keys, and lets the sentence settle into her bloodstream. Every project she has abandoned flashes before her: papers trimmed to fit her guide’s frame; footnotes bent into servility. She sees them now as small acts of occupation—internal checkpoints she manned against herself.
At 1:07 a.m. a message pops up from Abhinav.
Thank you for the note. I’m rewriting the conclusion tonight. Also—congratulations on the Columbia fellowship. Word travels fast.
She stares at the text. In another life she would have flushed with pleasure that he even knew her news. Now the knowledge feels neutral, almost beside the point.
She types:
Rewrite, rest, then read it aloud to someone who doesn’t care about citations.
Deletes it. Too instructive.
Instead: Read it out loud to the mirror. If it sounds borrowed, start again.
Sends.
A moment later:
I’m grateful, Saanvi.
Her screen shows the ellipsis of a second message forming, then nothing. The bubbles vanish. She closes the laptop.
Morning arrives silver and austere. She walks to campus early, frost jewelling the grass. In the atrium a banner flutters—“Critical Futures Symposium: Keynote Dr Saanvi Iyer”—and she feels an unexpected tenderness for the girl who once photographed such banners starring someone else.
In her office an envelope waits, university letterhead. Inside: formal approval for sabbatical leave. Photocopies required, signatures below. Administrative inevitabilities. She signs both pages and, almost absently, flips the envelope over. On the back someone has scrawled in pencil:
Your talk changed how I read testimony. Thank you.
—A.
She touches the graphite, like testing whether the gratitude is still soft.
Just before noon Abhinav knocks. He holds a slim stack of pages—no binder clips, no protective folders, just paper warm from the printer. His shirt is untucked, eyes rimmed red but bright.
“I finished,” he says.
She gestures him in. He hands her the pages. The title has changed:
“Rupture as Relational: Witnessing the Ordinary After Violence.”
She skims—paragraphs leaner, footnotes slain, every argument tethered to a single throbbing line: Scholarship fails when it cannot admit its own desire. Her marginal notes from two drafts ago have become his spine.
“It’s better,” she says.
“I kept hearing your voice,” he admits, then laughs. “The harsher version.”
She sets the manuscript down. “You heard your own risk.”
He nods. There is, suddenly, nothing to add. The silence between them feels finished, like glaze cooling on pottery: still warm, but set.
“I’ll be gone next term,” she says. “New York.”
“I know.” His smile is small, unpractised. “They’re lucky.”
She opens her mouth—an apology, a valediction? Nothing fits. So she steps forward and, gently, presses her palm to his shoulder. Not a promise, not a confession. Just acknowledgment of the strange geometry they have travelled.
He covers her hand with his for one measured breath, then lets go first. “Thank you, Dr Iyer.”
“Do good work, Abhinav.”
He leaves, manuscript under his arm like a second spine.
That evening she locks the office, descends the staircase instead of taking the lift. On the landing she pauses, palm on the banister polished by countless hands—hers included, in another history. She thinks of Gaza, of walls and crossings, of how a person might carry a nation’s siege inside their chest yet still nurse a child to sleep.
Outside, dusk pours blue into the sky. The air smells of burnt leaves and something sweet from the canteen. Students streak past on bicycles, laughter echoing. She steps into the open, the sealed windows of the Centre behind her glowing with reflected sunset, and realises she no longer needs them to open.
Because in this world—whatever world it is—she has learned to breathe anyway.
***
Saanvi wakes to the soft buzz of her ageing ceiling fan. The room is the one she has always rented—peeling pistachio paint, a single bookcase bowed in the middle, her own thesis notes scattered like feathers across the desk. The window is shut, just as sealed as the day she moved in.
For a moment she lies still, trying to hear the sounds of another life: faculty chatter, her name pronounced with casual authority, the crisp slide of a lanyard over silk. Nothing comes. Only the honk-studded hum of Delhi at seven-thirty a.m. and the lift in the building groaning somewhere below.
She reaches for her phone—same cracked case, same backlog of notifications. At the top sits an email from Dr Abhinav Rao.
Subject: Revisions due / urgent.
No greeting, no pleasantry. She reads it twice, waiting for the old prickle of anxiety. It doesn’t arrive. Instead, she feels something level and spacious open inside her, like the quiet between receding waves.
She pours tea, takes it to the desk, and opens his comments on her chapter. The familiar red bubbles crowd the margins: tighten, elaborate, tone down affect. They are neither cruel nor kind, merely habitual—evidence of a hierarchy she once accepted as natural law.
Saanvi exhales through her nose—as if releasing a ghost—and begins deleting the tracked changes, one by one. Not in anger; simply clearing static. When the document is clean she writes a single note at the top:
Dear Dr Rao,
Thank you for the feedback. I am pursuing a revised direction and will circulate a fresh draft once complete.
Regards,
Saanvi.
She does not apologise for the shift. She doesn’t mention timeline. She refuses, in this small digital space, to rehearse deference.
Send.
The tea has cooled. She drinks it anyway. Her laptop background—the default university crest—suddenly looks impersonal. She changes it to the photo the Palestinian scholar sent her: two toddlers asleep under a sky of laundry lines, cotton shirts fluttering like imperfect doves. The picture steadies her, reminds her that scholarship begins where someone else’s ordinary life is allowed to be seen.
Her mind drifts to the keynote she wrote in the other world. The sentences are intact in her memory—occupation in the crib, love as the last room without cameras. She opens a new document and, without ritual or hesitation, types the title:
Occupation and Intimacy: Private Acts Under Public Siege.
No supervisor’s name beneath it. Only hers.
A knock jars the quiet; her flat-mate needs the iron. Saanvi hands it over, warms two parathas on the tawa, eats standing at the counter. The day stretches before her—classes to audit, forms to fill, a colloquium she promised to attend—but none of it feels compulsory in the way it used to. She is here, yes, but not pinned.
Before leaving, she slips a slim notebook into her bag: plans for a post-doc proposal, funding sources scribbled in the margins. She has no fellowship yet and no guarantees—only the memory of a future that felt both earned and inevitable. That is enough.
Down the staircase, the lift door opens and Dr Rao steps out, phone pressed to his ear. Reflex makes her spine straighten, but the feeling passes like a muscle remembering then forgetting pain. He nods a distracted hello. She returns the nod, polite, unsurprised. On his sleeve a faint ink smudge blooms—evidence of late-night work, or of a man wrestling words that will no longer obey him.
The corridor fills with the scent of early lunch—tamarind rice, green chilli. Students hurry past. Saanvi pushes open the main door and a rush of winter light spills over her shoes. The sky is unsealed.
She does not look back to see if he is watching.
There is too much ahead: a sentence waiting to be risked, a room in the world where her name will not need permission to enter first.
She steps into the brightness, breathing easily, as if every window were already open.
***
React
