CHAPTER 2
ISHIKA
Stranger Things season five is going to drops three months later and yes, I have already rewatched the previous seasons at least five times. Who am I kidding—I’ve watched them more than that and I know it’s unhealthy but it’s my comfort show.
There are people who read, people who meditate, people who jog; I have Eleven and Hopper and a couch and a very specific brand of déjà vu when the opening scene hits. I could watch the same episode a thousand times and still feel like I’m coming home.
The world makes sense inside those frames—monsters with rules, friendships that don’t flinch, a town that keeps turning even when it’s trying to fall apart.
I like that about it. I like that when the noise outside gets loud and people become unpredictable, the show is steady.
Predictable in the best, most forgiving way.
I almost jump when my phone rings because no one really calls me.
Calls mean interruptions that I cannot bill for, and more often than not a sales call followed by silence when I realize they’ve dialed the wrong number.
Why? Because I am a lonely 25 year old who doesn’t have anyone in her life. Pathetic, I know.
The shrill voice echoes. My hovers hovering over the answer button. Maybe it’s a brand wanting to collaborate, or one of the vendors with a question about samples, or maybe—this is ridiculous—a friend checking in, oh wait I don’t have any.
Then the voice comes through. “Hey, Ishika,” and I recognize it immediately. I would never forget a man I worked with for a year, someone who was immensely kind to me. Jayesh greets, so casually it’s like he’s standing right there in the doorway of my life, unannounced and somehow expected.
“Hi, sir,” I reply, because that’s how I have to answer.
He’s not a client in the traditional sense; he’s the man who taught me how to see a room and then filled my notebook with notes and corrections for about a year.
He trained me, then handed me projects. He’s the kind of mentor who expects blunt honesty and gives brutal feedback wrapped in tea-scented patience.
He’s familiar, which is why I sit straighter when he speaks, which is also why my stomach tightens in a way I don’t like. “I have a job for you, if you’re looking for one?”
Looking for one? Being an interior designer is a master class in instability. There are barely any steady jobs and when you find one, the pay is a joke unless you negotiate like you’ve never seen a proper meal.
Freelance is the lifeline; I bounce between client calls and little gigs and sometimes the money lines up and sometimes it doesn’t.
I’ve learned to live off the rhythm of inconsistency.
I will not say the word desperate out loud because then I become exactly what I refuse to be—needy, small, visible.
“Yes, sir. I’m interested,” I say, making sure my voice is flat. I do not say please. I never say please. Please is a weakness, like asking someone to stay because you’re afraid they won’t.
There’s a beat of silence where I hear him shifting, “it’s good for your career. High paying, too. I was working on it until yesterday, but my wife’s ill and I need to be with her, so I’ll have to drop out. I need you to fill in, is that okay?”
My first thought is practical—Jayesh knows how I work, sure, but stepping into someone else’s project halfway is never clean.
There are patterns to a project: mood boards, supplier calls, the way the original designer’s vision leaves fingerprints in the choices already made.
I don’t want fingerprints that aren’t mine.
I feel my hesitation in the way my fingers curl around the mug. Jayesh, in his slow, measured way, answers before I can say anything. “I’ll be on the phone with you wherever you need me,” he assures like he can hear my small doubts.
“Why me?” I ask, because I have to ask. Not for ego.
For clarity. He trained a dozen interns.
He knows half the designers in the city who would bend their backs for a line on their CV.
Maybe he’s thinking I’m cheap, maybe he’s thinking I’m convenient.
Maybe he’s thinking something else and I don’t like the guessing.
“Because you’re talented, Ishika. You know how I work, and it’s urgent,” he says calmly, and there’s nothing theatrical in it.
No flattery, just the fact that someone thinks I’m capable.
That should comfort me. It does, in a way that makes the hollow place beneath my ribs loosen.
Yet my distrust is a muscle I’ve trained for years; it doesn’t relax easily.
Then he says the number.
“Fifteen lakhs,” he says, as if reciting a phone number.
Typical Jayesh, practical right down to the decimal.
My mouth goes dry for a moment, and I hate that the texture of my breath changes at the sound of money.
It’s terrible to admit that this can tilt the axis of my choices, but it does.
Money is not only freedom—it’s bargaining power, a chance to breathe without counting every transport cost against my sanity.
Maybe I could save. Maybe start a firm. Maybe stop saying yes to clients who disrespect timelines because I need the cash.
“I’ll do it,” I agree almost immediately, the decision coming out before my brain has time to dissect it. When money like that speaks, reasons that were once carved in stone become negotiable.
There’s an audible release on the other end. Relief, which I suddenly realize I have been holding in my own chest too. “Thank you, Ishika. This means a lot to me.”
I throw the word no-issues like a glove. It’s easier to make it sound like not a big deal; easier than admitting my heart is thudding in a way that has nothing to do with excitement. Easier than letting Jayesh know I’m not immune to the weight of the offer.
He continues, practical as ever. “I’ll send the briefs and the current supplier list. Can you meet the CEO tomorrow?”
I hum, a sound that’s almost absent-minded because the tremor of everything else inside me is louder. “Okay.”
I say the word and hang up before I can parse how my fingers buzz with a static I don’t want to name.
I’m not scared of the work. That, at least, is honest. I can manage a project, pick out a fabric, argue with a supplier over lead times.
I’ve been doing it for long enough that my hands know the language of rooms.
What makes my throat tight is not the job. It is the people.
Meeting a CEO is a small thing on a resume and a large thing in a room of seats where power sits in one place and you sit across from it, measured.
I don’t fear a suit. I fear staying. People who enter a life and mark it like they own it, then leave without a forwarding address.
People who get comfortable enough to assume they will stay.
So when Jayesh says CEO tomorrow, my brain files it under people to whom I do not let stay.
I tighten the wall around myself like a reflex, like armor.
There’s a part of me that hates how predictable this wall is.
I know it’s a protection, but the price is high.
I want to laugh at it sometimes, at the way I scan faces for exits the moment I begin to care.
I pace my small, narrow kitchen while the kettle for tea screams a small protest. My flat is rented and small and stubbornly mine.
Jaipur’s late-afternoon sun slides across the walls in a lazy gold stripe that does nothing to warm what I’m feeling.
I tell myself I will sleep early. I will set the project files during dinner.
But now is for Stranger Things rewatch number...
God knows. Comfort. Warmth. Pattern. I will memorize the lines and let the predictability of Hopper’s grunts soothe something in me.
And yet there’s this thread of everything unresolved—like a loose stitch caught on the edge of a sweater.
Jayesh’s voice rings in my ear with the number again, fifteen lakhs, said like a fact.
Practicality hums under the thought of saving and investing and opening a firm.
Not because I’m greedy, but because I want to be independent in the sense that no one can easily unmake me.
Money here means choice. Money means I can say no when something is toxic and not have to count the cost of walking away.
Because fifteen lakhs—say it in any currency and it sounds like rescue.
There is also the thought I don’t let surface often: what would it be like to be noticed and not immediately sized up for what I can give?
I have seen people assume my work is the only strict and professional thing I have to offer because I am quiet and efficient, but I can get creative.
Maybe I’m asking too much to want someone who takes the time to understand the thing you don’t say, and then still chooses to stay even when the running away would be easier.
Maybe that’s too much to hope for. And hope destroys everything.
The truth is I don’t want things. I want to be sure. I want guarantees in a life that has never given me any. But guarantees are fictional. They are tales told in the neat pages of other people’s lives. Mine is scribbled on napkins and archived in cancelled plans.
So all I do now is return to the couch and play episode one while hoping this CEO stays strictly professional and I don’t make any connections that end up hurting me.
Because I will any day choose to be selfish than to hurt myself.
Because all I have had since I was sixteen is myself. And I plan to keep it that way.