Saloni arrives at the cafe at around 9:45 in the morning. She does not beat the bombay traffic. She does not battle with it either. She has let go of all control over her life—or that is how she feels—from early childhood. The unofficial curfew at home that began around the time when she had her periods had only strengthened her feeling that she is an observer of her own life. The cafe job was different from what she had seen around her. Whenever she got out of the house early morning, she wore a loose t-shirt that said something along the lines of ‘Live Laugh Love’, which hid the curves of her waist and made her mother satisfied. The t-shirt she is wearing today is dark yellow and it hangs from her shoulders well past the hem of her jeans. The jeans was a bone of contention between her mother and her. The pale blue cloth with artificially bleached patches that made it look ‘distressed’ hugged her bottom, which made the men in the bus she took to the cafe ogle at her. Her mother had foreseen this the night she got the pair and tried it on in front of the mirror which had many sticky residues from the endless number of cheap bindis that were bought from Colaba market. After a fairly muted quarrel where the mother and Saloni resorted to various tactics of emotional blackmail and rational prudence, Saloni emerged victorious. She could wear the jeans to the cafe so that she could save the hassle of packing the pair of jeans in her bag and changing it at the cafe’s tiny washroom.

Today, the washroom was occupied and she had to wait at the small table with the single chair near the cleaning cabinet. She took out her phone and without thinking tapped the instagram app which opened to the familiar page filled with young women showing off the cheap but sexy crop tops they bought during an online sale. Most of them had a pout and Saloni unsuccessfully tried to copy the pout but caught herself just in time when she realised there were people around her. The crop tops looked good and she made a mental note to order two of those—the black one and the olive green one—once the salary was credited…in ten days. She would order it to the cafe’s address so that her mother would not find two crop tops in the shared almirah where Saloni’s clothes took up the left half and her mother’s sarees, nighties, blouses, and white cotton brassieres took up the right half. By this time the sounds from the tiny washroom—of someone coughing loudly followed by a sound unmistakably of a drop of tough phlegm hitting the closet—arose. Then, the flush rising to a crescendo and dying down. The door opened and Altaf came out. She concentrated hard on the floor so that Altaf would not notice how flustered she was. Altaf was tall, had a scar mark across his right eyebrow, and a girlfriend who would call him at around noontime, which he would attend always outside the cafe. In the washroom, she took off the t-shirt and for a moment inspected her stomach for any signs of extra fat, which did not exist, and the satisfaction turned a little sour when her eyes fell on her breasts which, according to her friends, was average but not small, which in their opinion, was the reason why some boy who lived two streets away and always chewed paan waited for her at the junction where she would get off the bus.