# Girls, As They Are There is a peculiar blindness in how we speak of girls. We construct them from fragments of our own desire, fear, and nostalgia—and then we forget that we have built them at all. We believe we are describing something found in nature, something essential and unchanging, when we are really only describing the shape of our own gaze turned inward. The girl, as she exists in our collective imagination, is always half-formed. She is the threshold between something and something else—between innocence and knowledge, between obedience and rebellion, between the child we believe her to be and the woman we will permit her to become. This incompleteness is not accidental. It serves a purpose. It allows us to project onto her whatever we need: the purity we have lost, the possibility we have abandoned, the beauty we are no longer capable of recognizing in ourselves. Consider how we speak of girlhood as though it were a country we once inhabited, a language we once spoke fluently. There is always a kind of mourning in the way we talk about girls—as though by describing them, we are eulogizing something in ourselves that has already died. But what of the girls themselves? What of their own interior landscapes, the architecture of their thoughts, the weight of their solitudes? These things remain largely unmarked. We are so busy constructing the girl—adorning her with our metaphors, our anxieties, our unmet longings—that we rarely pause to listen to what she might actually be saying. Her voice, when it emerges, often sounds strange to us, as though it were coming from very far away. The truth is simpler and more difficult than any of our stories about girls. Girls are people. They are neither the repositories of our lost innocence nor the blank pages upon which we inscribe our fantasies. They are beings in their own right—thinking, feeling, desiring, resisting, becoming. They contain multitudes. They are sometimes tender and sometimes cruel. They are wise and foolish, generous and petty, brave and afraid. They are, in short, human—which is to say they are infinitely more complicated than anything we say about them. Perhaps the only honest thing we can say about girls is this: they are exactly as they are, and we have barely begun to see them.

# To Give So Much in Love?! So much love, and I never asked for it?! Does love always give too much? I’m not worthy of all this. I say ‘not worthy’ because I’ve known it all along—known I wasn’t. Don’t think so well of me, please. I barely care what others think, I think I said that once. So is this revenge through love? Even hatred doesn’t sting this deep! Not being good has been hurting me terribly lately; I’m telling you plainly, you’ll have to bear the blame for this. There’s even shame in not being good! And all of it—mine?! So has this love finally put chains on me? I’m begging you with folded hands, don’t let yourself love me too much. Once I become a lover, I can become terribly reckless. You’ve never seen anything close to it. You can’t even imagine a fraction of it. Both indifference and love run too deep in me. If you’re swept away in fierce love, will you be able to handle everything? Women have a strange power. When they love and you give them even a particle of what they want, they can return it many times over. In such a way that you’ll truly love the reward. If you can’t give everything, give just one sincere smile—try it—and you’ll see something miraculous has happened: your whole world is gleaming with that smile. Astounding! How did they learn this magic?! A furious, exhausted summer afternoon. You’re at the office drowning in work. You haven’t even had lunch; forget calling her. (Men tend to forget to call, and women somehow accept it. But there are exceptions. If a boy forgets to call, the girl can turn his life into a living graveyard—you’ll find many such stories.) She knows you haven’t eaten at noon. Women will ask the person they care for whether they’ve eaten or not—without fail. I’ve noticed men rarely ask this. (So when someone asks me this often, I get very anxious—not because I want them to ask, but because I really do get worried.) She called you several times; you couldn’t pick up. (You know that not answering during work hours won’t matter; you can call back later. You’ve already taken her for granted.) That’s when she’ll send a text. “Please! Pick up. Urgent! I’m in real trouble. I need to talk to you right now. Please! Please!!” Then you find a free moment and call her back. “What’s wrong? What happened?” She’ll answer in that coaxing, wheedling voice, “Nothing. I just really wanted to hear your voice. Hehe……” “What do you mean? Nonsense! I’m hanging up….” “Hey, come on, just listen for a bit……” “What now??” “Please eat lunch. If you don’t, I won’t eat either. I promise!” And you think, ah! Life is beautiful! Why wouldn’t I want to live? Just being alive brings so much! “Why are you being difficult with me lately?” “What did I do?” “Why did I have to call seventeen times? Were you flirting with some girl?” “How absurd! I’m home! I was watching a movie. My phone was on silent, I didn’t notice. Did you really call seventeen times?” “Don’t talk stupid. Check your missed calls. You were watching a movie? Fine, go ahead and watch your movies. Marry your books and your films—they’re everything to you anyway. What am I to you? Let me go.” “Okay, I’m letting you go. Bye. Take care. Sorry for everything.” Ten minutes pass like this. You’re watching *To Kill a Mockingbird*. You’re thinking it’ll be fine—finish the movie, then vent your rage through a phone call. Fat chance! The phone rings again. “What’s your problem! You think you’re so special now, do you? I’ll come to your place myself. If I don’t smash that portable hard drive of yours, my name isn’t—. And those precious books you’ve read? I’ll burn every last one of them. See if I don’t!” If you want, you could stop the “trouble-making” by accepting her terms. But she’ll just say, “Oh, so you don’t need me anymore. You’ve got plenty of beautiful friends on Facebook! Look at you now—liking their pictures, commenting on them, sitting with your mouth open waiting for them to upload something new. What, you think I don’t understand anything? Don’t think I didn’t see? You changed your profile picture ten minutes ago, don’t tell me you didn’t notice. You liked her picture just now, commented on it—looking nice. Well, how nice. Good, very good. I was happy. Go on then, stay peacefully with them instead.”
“Don’t you ever speak to me like this again in your whole life.” “How dare you!” “Okay, just leave me! I am fine with myself!” There’s a terrible fight. Try leaving her the way she said. Then you’ll understand the chaos. “What’s wrong! Why aren’t you talking to me? What’s the problem with you? Oooh! You’ve found yourself a new darling, haven’t you? You think I don’t understand anything?” This is the Bengali woman. She’ll turn your life upside down. You’ll think, Oh earth, open up and swallow me whole. Maybe the earth will oblige, but you won’t find a single sapling nearby to climb. Before the tigress, you’ll have to stand there as her dear man, whimpering like a house cat. I say it’s fine as it is. Why would you want so much happiness, brother? You need someone to fight with in life. The man who has no one to quarrel with—let him go off somewhere, pour sprite over his puffed rice, and eat. (To those of you who are already mentally preparing to sniff out autobiography in these lines, I most earnestly urge you to promptly visit an ENT surgeon and get your nasal passages examined and cleared of such concerns.)
“You know, your little brother talks a lot like you do.”
“How so?”
“If he gets caught, he’ll say, ‘I must have misunderstood.’ When he doesn’t feel like talking, he says, ‘I do talk, but I like listening better.’ He puts on airs saying, ‘You shouldn’t talk about age with girls. It’s rather impolite.’ You say, ‘Hey, I’ve got to go. Catch you later.’ He says that too. But like you, he doesn’t call out a sharp ‘Hey!’ like that. None of my other favorites do. Only you, almost always. That ‘Hey’ of yours—it’s unique. It sounds absolutely wonderful to hear. You should patent that ‘Hey’ of yours, understand? Haha…… I really like another thing you do. You say, ‘I’m going. You coming?’ ‘I’ll eat. You feeding me?’ You add a question to the end of almost every sentence. And then the very question that’s been circling in my head at that exact moment—somehow you ask it so gently yourself, pause a moment, and then answer it too. ‘Am I busy? Nah! Not busy at all!’ ‘Sad? Nah! Just quiet.’ How do you do it, tell me! I don’t think anyone else in the world can do it like that. When you’re in a bad mood, you say, ‘Hey you rotten thing! You know what I’m like? I’ll pick you right up and smash you down!’ How cute! I could get you angry just to hear you say that.”
“Hey! “You notice all these things—when did you even start paying attention to them! I never even knew about most of this myself.”
“See, see! You just said ‘this’ again! When someone forgets you, all their tiny little habits start circling in your head. Like, if he were here now, he’d say it this way, he’d react like that.”
I was enchanted—by the infinite power a girl possesses to enchant. She had just made my day!
Girls are born with a few strange gifts, and one of them is the ability to notice even the smallest things with uncanny precision. In the time spent with a boy, they absorb—slowly, almost imperceptibly—how he thinks, the way he speaks, his manner of reacting, what words bring him joy, and a thousand other such details. Without even knowing it, they kindle in you a tremendous guilt: the guilt of not loving them quite the way they love you. Love can wound as deeply, can torment as mercilessly, can exact its revenge as thoroughly as anything else in this world—nothing comes close, not even fierce hatred.