Mira was born into a house of quiet women.
They spoke in softened tones, lowered their eyes in photographs, and carried sweetness in their hands—jaggery pressed into dough, rosewater on wrists, silence between their teeth. They moved like hymns through the house, graceful and obedient, bearing the weight of generations with a kind of practiced elegance. There were altars in every room, each filled with brass idols, sandalwood incense, jasmine garlands. But none for themselves.
Every evening, the scent of saffron and cumin would rise like incense, thick with memory. Mira would sit on the floor, watching her mother’s hands—beautiful, cracked, always moving—knead dough with the same rhythm her grandmother had used, and hers before that. They passed down recipes like relics, sacred and unchanging. Alongside them, they passed down another inheritance: obedience, self-sacrifice, the art of making oneself smaller.
Once, at eleven, Mira had asked her grandmother, “What did you want to be?”
Her grandmother had stopped stirring the pot, wooden spoon suspended midair, as if the question had broken a rule. She looked at Mira for a long time, the wrinkles around her mouth tightening.
“I wanted to be good,” she finally said, quietly. “Good means quiet. Good means chosen.”
Mira hadn’t understood then. But something inside her—something half-formed and untamed—had already begun to stir. Not anger. Not yet. Just a soft ache. A whisper that freedom might taste like something beyond sweetness, beyond pleasing others.
Years passed. Mira studied, worked, smiled when spoken to. But the ache never left. It curled inside her, gathering shape like a storm waiting for wind. Her body grew, but her voice still felt like a borrowed dress—measured, altered, stitched to fit someone else’s idea of who she should be.
Then one evening, standing alone in that same kitchen, Mira looked down at her hands—floured, tired, echoing the women before her. Her reflection blinked back from the curve of a steel pot: quiet, dutiful, dissolving.
She didn’t shout. She didn’t curse. She simply untied her apron, left the dough unbaked, and walked out the door.
Barefoot, she stepped onto the earth like it was her first prayer. The sky opened above her—not as punishment, but as invitation.
Later, she cut her hair—not for rebellion, but for ritual. She lit a single candle. Not for the gods, but for the girl she used to be—silenced, sacred, and unseen.
They had once called her “my goddess,” a title given like a gift but shaped like a cage. She understood now: to be adored is not always to be free. They had placed her on a pedestal to preserve her, not to let her live.
But Mira did not want a pedestal. She wanted a path. A future that tasted of her own choosing.
So what do ladies prefer?
Mira preferred to choose for herself.
To be her own witness.
Her own flame.
Her own myth.
