The Fear of Taking Up Too Much Space
You already know which chair you choose at a table of strangers. The one closest to the wall. The one that gives you a sightline to the door. You know how to make yourself smaller in an auto-rickshaw when the driver's mirror catches your eye one too many times. You have been doing this since you were twelve, maybe younger, and nobody taught you, you observed it, absorbed it, and filed it under survival without ever calling it that.This fear does not announce itself as fear. It arrives as posture. As the habit of pulling your dupatta tighter in a crowded market in Chandni Chowk, not because you are cold. As the instinct to step to one side on a narrow footpath so a group of men can pass without brushing against you. The body learns the geometry of self-erasure long before the mind has words for it.
