It was just another Tuesday.
Jhanvi never really wanted the job of magazine editor at her college. She had taken it up reluctantly. She wanted to be like her sister, Meher, who never stopped working. Meher always had two or three jobs at once, brought food to the table and still managed to light up every room she entered. Jhanvi, her mother, and their father waited for her every night, not just for the food or the stories but for her presence, her smile, her quiet authority.
“I love her more than anyone,” Jhanvi once said when asked who she loved more, her mother or her father, pointing straight to a photo of Meher.
But now, as she grew old, that warmth felt far away.
She was stuck. A story deadline loomed just a day or two away. Her dark room felt like a trap, and she rubbed her temples in frustration, as if she could knock an idea loose from her skull. She was angry, sad, and worst of all numb. “Nothing important ever happens in my life,” she muttered. It all felt like one dull, flat, grey loop.
Her phone buzzed.
The WhatsApp group. A bunch of college mates, mostly men, a couple of girls, technically created for extracurricular discussions, now hijacked by late-night memes and inside jokes. She rarely spoke there anymore. The boys had started calling her “bro”, their way of bypassing the discomfort of acknowledging a girl as a peer. It made her laugh at the start but then it grew on her.
Lately, the tone in the group had shifted, like milk that goes sour when it reaches expiry. It started subtly. Reels mocking women drivers. Jokes about “gold diggers.” Then came the darker stuff, an image of a bruised Barbie, captioned “When she talks back.” A video of a muscular man slapping a woman in a bar. Nobody said anything, the good men or the women. But they all saw it. They all knew.
She didn’t respond.
She had seen this escalation before, on phones, in metro queues, on the streets, in hospital waiting rooms. Everywhere, it was the same: loud reels, louder opinions. The boys laughed about how women were “getting ahead,” but never questioned why they themselves weren’t. Jhanvi herself had written up similar but neutral stuff before for laughs and for likes.
A meme came in the group.
A badly cropped photo of a woman stepping out of an Ola cab, tagged:
“Modern girls be like: 10K salary, 40K lifestyle.”
Her body was framed in a way that made it clear what they were really pointing at.
Jhanvi’s heart froze.
She zoomed in. Her breath caught.
It was Meher.
Her sister, her idol, her family.
Not a public figure. Not someone who posted her life online. Just her sister, on her way home from work.
How did they get this?
Was someone following her?
Did they even know it was her?
Or was that the point?
Then the remarks began trickling down from the meme sharing men in the group.
“Probably has one job and three boyfriends to balance her lifestyle.”
“Modern feminism starter pack: coffee, fake accent, and cab selfies.”
Jhanvi stared at the screen, frozen. Shame, guilt, rage. All of it rushed in.
Should I say something?
Would it matter?
Why her? Why my sister?
Why did I stay quiet for so long?
Jhanvi angrily typed her comment. This time she couldn’t stay silent, this time she didn’t delete.
“Her name is Meher. She’s 26. She works two jobs to support our family. She pays for our mother’s dialysis and never asks for anything in return. That picture? It was taken without her consent. It’s a joke to you? You think that’s funny?”
The group fell silent.
Mocking random women was one thing. But when the target had a name, a story, a connection, it burned.
Some sent DMs with apologies. One major contributor to the group dismissed it with, “Relax, it’s just a meme.” Another left the group altogether.
Jhanvi didn’t care. She had said what she needed to.
Not just for Meher, but for herself.
The next day, she sat in the college cafeteria, surrounded by laughter and noise, but she wasn’t part of it. She was writing. This story wasn’t a pitch. It wasn’t clickbait. It was truth.
She wrote about Meher. About the woman behind the image.
The woman who worked endlessly, who gave without taking, who lived with grace despite what the world said about women like her.
Jhanvi had always felt her life was too small for stories. That nothing happened to her.
She didn’t know her sister’s pain would become the breaking point, the moment she turned from a silent observer into a writer with fire.
She cried the whole day before she wrote that story. The people-pleaser, the soft-spoken girl, had wept and sunk. But from the ashes, something new emerged. A phoenix, not of fire, but of voice.
That morning, as she left for college, she looked at Meher and said,
“Didi, live the same way. I’ll only be sad if your head ever stoops low.”
Meher laughed. Hugged her sister tight. She had already seen the meme.
She walked out, as usual, unfazed.
The events that led to me writing this short story :
https://ajayan.substack.com/p/raising-daughters-in-india-is-a-revolution