They said it was because she never got married. Some said she was unfortunate. Others, like my Uncle Shri, said she didn’t try hard enough. But they all agreed that if she had been married, had a normal life and a man to take care of her, she would have been happy.

By the time I was old enough to see the world through eyes unclouded by confused wonder, I had a baby brother named Polo, the family had broken apart; The Wolf and my parents had moved us to a long, white house in quiet, leafy south Calcutta. I turned six, and spent the mornings trying to fake fevers by willing my skin hot, not wanting to leave the comfort of bed to zip past a slumbering city to The House.

I read Archie Comics and Sweet Valley High and watched a lot of American sitcoms from the eighties. The only television show that was streamed in India relatively at the same time as it was in America was Friends. It ran only a couple of seasons behind and we all tried to schedule our post-school tutorials in a way that allowed us to be home at six every weekday evening. Everyone was devastated when the show ended. I didn’t watch the last episode.

Shortly before the turn of the millennium, my dad brought home what looked like a big white TV. It didn’t play any shows, so I mostly just ignored it, letting Polo play car-racing games on it all day. But then a little black box was attached to it, and everything else became boring, inconsequential.

This wasn’t like watching grown-ups drink coffee somewhere along the mythical streets of New York City. These were real people, real girls my age living in the suburbs of Cleveland and Baltimore.

I learnt to want: a little white girl, with the hair and the skin that made people pretty, the comforter-covered bed in the pink room and the parents who let her stay out late, and the blonde Backstreet-like boys who she had access to, could talk to, who would fall over themselves to talk to her.

Who had that television-screen life? What kind of person are you? How do we even inhabit the same planet? We are the same, isn’t that what everybody says? I covet what it means to be you, and because you are the converse of everything I am, where does that leave me?

They were just ideas in my head; mirages, almost. And yet, every so often, I couldn’t help that they controlled me.