New Delhi.

"I feel like I can't breathe," I said as a familiar panic gripped me like a hand around my throat. 

I got up and started to pace around the room, I was hoping to trick my body into thinking the increased heart-rate was a function of the movement and not anxiety, but it wasn't working. I just felt like i couldn't breathe. 

"Good god, just go outside," he said rolling his eyes at me, "I can't stand to watch you freaking out like a weak little princess." 

Retrospectively, it seems like a rude thing to say, but at the time I was so used to hearing him dismiss and disparage me that I was sure it was rude of me to be experiencing panic inside my own house, and in the presence of the man I loved. 

"I'll go out," I said turning the knob on the front door and walking out to the balcony. 

I stood at the railing looking down at the street. Archana was sweeping the clearing in front of the little beauty salon on the ground floor where she worked. She looked up at me and waved. I liked Archana. She'd come over sometimes after work and we'd get high together before she went back home to the baby. She was a runaway, she'd left her village in her teenage years to chase after a man two-decades older and married him. Her family disowned her and the husband she so dearly loved disappeared without a trace a few months after she had gotten pregnant. Desperate and without recourse, she married the first man who asked, and realised as she lay in a hospital, newly married and fully-effaced, that she hated her new husband and he hated her. They stayed together nonetheless, she worked days and he worked nights, and they never saw each other. Instead she found a profound sense of duty in caring for her child, and a deep sense of pleasure in sleeping with strange men she barely knew. The woman she worked for, Neha, loved telling the story of her life as a cautionary tale, she told everyone, and often right in front of Archana, as if by being poor she had been expected to sell her right to privacy in exchange for employment. 

"When you don't have a husband or a job, why would you have a child?" she had said to me about Archana the first time I had met her, "She should have had an abortion, no? Look how she suffers now." 

Neha was a shrewd and calculating woman who looked a little bit like a frog, she wore big glasses and had taken it upon herself to ensure all the young women living in our apartment complex were kept in line. Archana would tell me the things she said about me, most of them concerning all the men I had over at all hours of the night, I would have had them over during the day but I didn't get off work until ten. I took deep breaths as I watched Archana finish cleaning up and retreat back into the salon, I held my breath as I counted to five, and then released before breathing in again. The cold, smokey Delhi air was relaxing, even though it was killing me. It was killing us all. 

At the time I hated Delhi, and it was only a few years later that I understood why I hated it at that moment, and it was none of the reasons I thought it was. I thought I hated it because my job compelled me to see the dirtiest, ugliest parts of the city — its governance, its crime, its relentless noise — and I was left wondering why anyone would want to live in this jaded, noxious bubble of superficiality. I thought I hated it because the people were too loud, too vapid, too full of themselves, too concerned with convincing you that the stature of their fathers warranted that I show them some damn respect. None of these reasons were why I thought I hated it. I didn't even really hate it, I just didn't understand this city. I didn't understand it because someone else was doing its job in my life. 

After I finsihed having my panic attack on the balcony like a proper lady, I went back inside to see him still sitting on the futon, and playing the same game on his phone that he had been playing before I had left. 

"Your phone rang," he said, "It was some Aggarwal guy." 

"You mean my boss?" I asked. 

He knew exactly who the "Aggarwal guy" was and sometimes I wondered why he did that, why he played games with me instead of just talking to me as if we could both be human at the same moment. 

"Are you going back to work?" He asked me, as I checked my phone for answers. 

"I may have to," I told him, even though the truth was that half the time I could done what I needed to from the house. 

"I thought you moved to Delhi for me," he said like he did every day, "All you seem to do is work." 

It's amazing because while he hated that I spent all my time working, he didn't seem to mind that it was my job that paid for everything he did. Perhaps he thought that the insane, wretched love that he gave me in the form of anger and bruises deserved payment. He stood up and leapt at me without warning, pushing me against the wall, holding my throat. I could see my name tattooed across his bare chest and it made me sick every time I saw it, he had sprung it on me as a birthday present the day I had turned eighteen. I didn't understand what kind of birthday present that was, nor what it meant, but I remember thinking the moment I saw that tattoo for the first time that I would have to think twice about leaving this man. How could you leave a guy who would tattoo your name across his chest? Well, you don't, because at the end of this story, he kills you. 

"Amit I can't breathe," I croaked at him as he squeezed my throat and banged my head into the wall. 

It was a different kind of panic than the one that had led me to the balcony, and this one was addictive. 

"You don't need to fucking breathe," he said squeezing my throat tighter, "I decide how much you breathe." 

He did decide how much I breathed, for many years, but this moment was close to the end. I had begun to retaliate against his form of total unrelenting control and i couldn't take it anymore. The walls were closing in and every moment that I spent wearing his ring on my finger felt like it foreshadowed an eternity of sorrow. I had begun to see how he had taken over me like an antibiotic-resistant infection that became my identity over the course of the next few years. Two weeks later I left him, and I was instantly cured of all the anxiety I had seemed to carry for the past year. I packed up my apartment and prepared to leave this city i seemed to hate, it didn't make any sense to stay here after him. I was sure, just as he had said, that I had moved there for him. 

I had one foot out the door when on a whim, I decided to have drinks with a man I had been putting off meeting for years. I figured I was going to be on the road for several months, and out of the country by September, so what was the harm in one last fuck that would annoy Neha and tickle Archana's sordid fancy? I wasn't counting on falling in love with the last man i met in Delhi. I wasn't counting on Delhi becoming my home. 

It did. 

Like an antibiotic-resistant infection the symptoms of its love became my identity almost overnight. When I couldn't leave even though I had no reason to stay, i began to understand why you had to hate Delhi in order to love it. The man I met had been living here for a couple of years but hadn't ventured out of the 2-kilometer radius of the hospital where he worked. When I spoke to him from the road, i longed not just to return to his arms but also to this gas-chamber; when I spoke to him from the road I found myself exploring the city through his eyes. Forcing him to walk the streets in front of the parliament, explaining how no other city could place you right to the seat of absolute power and make you feel so utterly powerless. Telling him to visit the little markets where you could buy a button or a woman, for the same price, and in the same used condition. Making him eat at little corners where dynasties once stood and left in their wake only seven dishes on a menu. Explaining to him how being stuck in Delhi traffic is superior to being stuck in any other kind of traffic because everything in Delhi, no matter how strange and broken and maddening, somehow works. After i came so close to leaving, i realised I could move out, but I could never get Delhi out of my soul. I had sold it, somehow, and I hadn't even been asked. 

As I fell out of love with Amit, I fell into love with the land where he was born, and i understood that maybe all of it, all of my life, was about being led to this strange place where men like him are bred every day. I realised there was room only for one abusive lover in my life, and I had chosen Delhi over the man who beat and broke me for years. The beaten and the broken do great here. When I came back to town, back to the new man in my life, i couldn't bear to leave again. I couldn't bear, honestly, to go North of central because everything above and away from my part of Delhi felt like the centre of existence, and the thing is, as much as this statement is the hubris that makes everyone hate Delhites, it is the centre of existence. The world is here, and you are at its feet. 

The last night I spent in my old apartment was an accident. I had a flight that got cancelled, and the new man and I hadn't scheduled to meet  because I was only supposed to be in town for six hours. I had a terrible cold and my hair were unwashed, my legs were unshaven and I looked like I had been on the road for six weeks. He insisted that he pick me up, and I was too weak to fight it. I didn't know i would never go back to my place after that night. I have no idea what happened to my things, and it wasn't until earlier this year that I even thought about them. He picked me up in front of the hospital i once visited 6-nights in a row because i didn't know panic attacks were a real thing that you could feel in your body and i was convinced I was having heart attacks on a nightly basis. I got in his car and I asked him, for good measure, if he was going to murder me. He said no, but later he told me that he fell in love with me at that moment because I let my vulnerability slip out. It wasn't vulnerability, I grew up with the love of a man who threatened, with love and the utmost romance, to kill me every day. 

We drove through the night, past the medical institutes people bribe and kill to get into, through the flyovers with the bright lights, past the dozen metro stations, past the courts where all those "sensational" news stories people in little towns watch like soap operas are actually resolved, and we drove into a strange part of town. The part where the army lived. It was quiet and empty, secluded, it didn't look at all like the Delhi I had come to crave and a part of me understood why he never left that place. It created the illusion that you could be safe in these streets. 

"I love this song," he said, turning up the sound on the music playing in his car. 

"Really?" I said, surprised, "I love this song too." 

It was a Foo Fighters song, Stranger Things Have Happened, and as we sang along in the darkness, it felt like I was hearing it for the first time. There I was, sitting next to a man I truly loved, in a city that showed me it cares by breaking me down in a daily basis and all of a sudden everything felt so complete. My life. The whole world. It made sense. 

"I think I'm going to fall madly in love with you," I told him. 

It was the truth. I didn't need him to respond. Six weeks prior to that moment when I had met him in my favourite market, outside my favourite cafe which has now been replaced by a joint that sells shwarma, I had known it instantly. I had been sitting on the ground drinking coffee and talking to my little friend Upsita. Upsita was an eleven year-old con woman who seemed to live in that market, and spent all day telling blatant, but colorful lies to people in the hope that they would spare her some money. She did very well for herself, almost well enough that the tragic reality of her existence as a child in the streets was forgotten by those that loved her and amused themselves with her tales. That's what the poor are supposed to do, no? Add colour and character in a way that you can forget that they are human. The moment he came up to me in the street I lost all my words, I looked up to him and his eyes destroyed me. Something broke or something was revived, whatever it was, I was never the same again. Upsita whispered in my ear to ask if she should ask this guy for money because it was Eid later in the week and she was being Muslim that week, and I nodded my head. They had a little conversation and he gave her some money. He gave me his hand and lifted me up from the sidewalk, and I waved her goodbye. I never saw her again either, I really hope she is okay, but in that moment I knew this wasn't going to be a casual hook-up on my way out of the city. The shackles had been locked, I knew i was never getting out. 

Yet I did. I got out because of the man, and his obligation to live all over the country, but i didn't really. When I say I am going home, I mean I am going to Delhi. When we left the city about a year later, that's when I really realised what Delhi meant to me, it isn't a nice place. It's not welcoming nor is it warm. It's not even beautiful. It doesn't make any adjustments for you and it is unapologetic in its abuse of its citizens but there is a magic to its Stockholm Syndrome. I am a slave to its noxious air. Six months ago I drove into Delhi after a year of being away, that's the longest i have ever been away, my partner was by my side, and as we entered through the border the stench of over-civilization. The haze was overpowering and the impact of the pollution immediately dried out my lips and began to choke me. 

"I feel like I can't breath," I told him, without a hint of panic, and the trace of a little smile. 

"Roll up the window, you idiot," he said looking at me, "Why do you want to breathe this air?" 

"It's okay," I told him, "Delhi gets to decide how much I breathe." 

I let my lovers decide how much I get to breathe. I always have. They let me live. Stranger things have happened.