The vocabulary you were handed
There is a word for the woman who calls twelve times before he picks up. Devoted. There is a word for the woman who has not made a single plan without first checking whether it suits him. Dedicated. The vocabulary Indian women inherit for love is almost entirely a vocabulary for self-erasure, and it arrives so early, in the films, in the way your mother waited at the door, in the stories about women who loved so hard they burned, that by the time you are inside a relationship of your own, you cannot tell devotion from dependency. They feel identical from the inside. That is the problem.
