More Than Enough

✦ ───── AAROHI ───── ✦

The kurti is sleeveless. I knew that when I put it on. I didn't know it would matter this much until I'm standing in front of the car, catching my reflection in the tinted window, and my arms are the only thing I can see.

"Aarohi, chalo, we're getting late." Papa is already in the driver's seat, adjusting the mirror.

"I don't want to go."

"You said that yesterday too."

"I'm saying it again."

He turns around, and I already know what's coming before he says it. "How will you learn to face the world if you never step outside?"

I get in the car.

Mumma reaches over from the front seat and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. "You look beautiful. Stop worrying so much and just be confident."

I pull my dupatta a little higher over my shoulder and don't answer.

The whole drive, I keep catching my reflection in the window, the street lights sliding across the glass, my arms underneath them, and each time I think the same thing: sleeves. I should have worn sleeves.

My sister Tanya has her seatbelt off before the car has even properly stopped. She's like that at every function, half out the door before Papa's put it in park, craning her neck at the entrance like she hasn't seen a hundred hotels that look exactly like this one.

I'm still in the back seat, smoothing my kurti down over my stomach. Then I check my reflection in the side mirror: chin first, then the kurti again, then the way I'm about to walk. Mumma's already halfway to the entrance. I have to jog a little to catch up, and even that feels like something people are watching.

Inside, the hall is loud, a hundred conversations layered over a live tabla track, gold-bordered chairs, a buffet table someone is already circling twice. I don't take any of it in. I'm doing the math on how many people in this room haven't seen me since I was thinner, and what they'll say about it in the car on their way home.

Tanya is gone within five minutes, off laughing with a girl she's just met like she's known her for years. She's always been like this, walks into a room and the room just opens for her. I used to think it was unfair. Now I just think it's Tanya.

I don't smile at anyone. If I smile, people look at me like they're trying to figure out if I'm actually angry underneath it. So mostly, I just nod.

Papa has already found a cluster of his friends near the stage, and I watch him laugh, really laugh, head back, hand slapping someone's shoulder. He's never had it easy, but you'd never know that watching him now.

That's probably why I can never say no to him. Not because I'm scared. Because I know exactly what it costs him to ask for so little.

Mumma stays close to me, the way she always does at these things, not because I need a chaperone, but because she knows if she wanders off, I'll just stand somewhere alone counting the ways I'm being looked at.

We do the rounds. Same aunty, same questions, on a loop.

"How are you, beta?"

"You've grown up so much!"

"What are you studying now?"

I'm mid-nod through the third version of this conversation when an elderly woman I don't recognize places her palm flat on Mumma's head like she's blessing a child, and says, "May God bless you with a son."

Mumma doesn't flinch. "I don't want a son," she says, smiling like she's just been asked about the weather. "Just bless my daughters to become successful."

The woman laughs it off and moves on to the next cluster of relatives. Mumma has already turned to say something to Papa's cousin.

I don't think she knows what she just did to me.

Somewhere under the noise of the tabla and the clatter of the buffet, I make myself a promise: one day, someone is going to look at my parents and say, I wish I had a daughter like yours. Not a son. Her.

I don't know how yet. But I know I'll have to earn it.

By the time we're driving home, I'm still stuck on it, the son comment looping under everything else, the arms, the stomach, the way I walked in ten steps behind everyone else. I build a whole imaginary conversation happening in someone else's car right now: She's gotten even bigger since last time. I have no proof anyone actually said it. My brain doesn't need proof.

So I'm already in a mood before we're even through the front door, and the first thing out of my mouth is at Mumma. "Why didn't you just tell Papa Tanya and I didn't want to come?"

She doesn't even look up from taking off her earrings. "I already told you. If you don't want to go somewhere, say it yourself. I'm not going to keep speaking for you every time."

She's right. I know she's right, which somehow makes it worse. I go to bed angry anyway. It's practically routine at this point.

I've never been someone who falls asleep easily. When I was eleven or twelve, I'd lie awake half the night, and out of sheer spite made sure my parents didn't get to sleep either. Poor them. I was a menace back then.

Tonight, staring at the ceiling, my mind goes exactly where I don't want it to. Back to that hand on Mumma's head. May God bless you with a son. People say things like that so easily, like it costs them nothing. Maybe they don't know a single sentence can sit inside someone for years.

This isn't the first time being a daughter has felt like coming in second place.

I was fifteen the first time I understood exactly what that felt like.

We were in a car with one of Papa's friends and his family. I don't even remember where we were going, only what was said. Everyone was laughing about something, the kind of loose, easy conversation adults have when they've known each other twenty years, when one of the uncles turned around from the front seat and looked straight at Papa.

"You know," he said, grinning, "your younger daughter is better than your elder one."

I frowned. Better?

Papa laughed. "Of course she is," he said. "She's taken after me."

Everyone laughed. I made my mouth do the same shape as everyone else's, but nothing about it felt like laughing.

The uncle wasn't done. "I mean smarter," he clarified, still smiling. "If one day a boy comes to see your elder daughter, and your younger one happens to be sitting right there too..." He let it hang for a second, chuckling to himself. "...he'll pick the younger one."

Silence. Actual silence, the kind that swallows a moving car. I looked at Papa. The smile was gone from his face, like he'd only just heard, a half-second late, what he'd let happen in his own car.

He didn't say anything.

I turned to the window before anyone could catch my eyes filling. Mumma looked over at me, she always knows, even when she says nothing, and I kept blinking hard, willing it to pass before it reached my cheeks. I was fifteen. People assume things like that roll off a teenager. They don't.

That was the first time I understood what it felt like to be in competition with my own sister. Not because Tanya had ever once tried to win anything against me. She never made me feel small. She was just being herself, and it was everyone else who kept lining us up side by side to pick a winner.

The worst part wasn't even the uncle. It was hating myself, quietly, in that back seat, for being jealous of her. She hadn't done anything wrong. She deserved every bit of the compliment she never even asked for.

I just wanted, once, to be looked at like that myself.

Still pretending nothing had happened, still staring out at the road blurring past, I made myself a promise that day. One day, I'd marry someone who chose me. Not because I'd out-scored someone else in some invisible competition. Not because I was "the smarter one" or "the better one."

Just because I was me.