The Five Chapters of Her — Part One
The Independent Woman: The First Chapter of You
Anjali Sharma
Founder, The Balanced Working Mom
My first salary was not a large amount. I remember it anyway, down to the rupee, the way you remember a first rain.
I bought myself a camera. A Canon 1300D DSLR.
It was not the most sensible thing to spend my first salary on. It was not an investment, or something practical I had carefully planned for the future. I just wanted it. And I remember holding it and thinking a thought I have never fully gotten over:
This is mine.
Not the camera. The feeling.
Dear Indian woman, before you were anyone’s wife, anyone’s bahu, anyone’s mummy, before your name came with a role stapled to it, there was a woman who belonged mainly to herself. She had opinions that were still forming and money that was still small and a life that was still mostly questions.
What independence actually looks like for us
I need to be honest about something first, because the internet is full of a version of independence that was never really ours.
You know the one. The apartment with fairy lights. The solo trips. Nobody asking where you are or when you’ll be home. It’s a lovely picture. It’s also, for most Indian women, not how this chapter looks.
For most of us, independence arrives quietly, and it arrives inside a family, not away from one. You might earn a salary and still have a curfew. You might manage a client meeting at eleven and be asked at one why you haven’t eaten. You might be twenty-six, financially self-sufficient, and still need to explain a Goa trip to a panchayat of concerned relatives.
And here is the thing I want you to hear gently: that does not make your independence less real.
Independence, for an Indian daughter, is rarely a room of her own. It is a shelf of her own, in a house full of people she loves.
It is the first salary, even if part of it goes home, especially if part of it goes home, because there is a quiet pride in that which nobody who hasn’t done it will understand. It is chai made exactly the way you like it, because you made it. It is having a Sunday that answers to no one. It is choosing your own tiredness, being exhausted by work you picked, dreams you picked, mistakes you picked.The people who set the curfew are the same people who sat up with you before your exams. There is no villain in this story. There is just a girl slowly becoming a woman, inside a house that loves her and doesn’t always know what to do with her.
If that’s you right now, I see you. You are not doing independence wrong. You are doing it the way we do it here: threaded through belonging.
The waiting room lie
Now let me tell you about the lie. It’s a soft lie, told by people who love you, which is what makes it so hard to spot.
The lie is that this chapter is a waiting room.
You’ll recognise its language. Abhi toh time hai. Enjoy these days, later you won’t get to. Once you’re settled…, and “settled,” you understand, never means a promotion or a paper published or a business launched. It means married.
Somewhere along the way, our culture decided that a woman’s life is filed under the people who will one day surround her. So the years when she belongs to herself get treated like a trailer before the real film. Something to sit through. Something with no plot of its own.
Dear Indian woman, you were not waiting to begin. You had already begun.
The friendships you built in this chapter were not placeholders. The work you did was not time-pass. The version of you who negotiated her first salary hike, who learnt to sit alone in a café without her phone, who figured out what she actually believes about God and money and love — she was not a rough draft.
She was the foundation.
And I don’t say that to make anyone the villain, not the aunties, not your mother, not the uncle who asks about your “good news” at every wedding. Most of them are speaking love in the only dialect they were taught. You can decline the filing system without declining the people. Both things are allowed.
What this chapter is actually for
Here is what I wish someone had told me, plainly, when I was in it.
Marriage, if you choose it, will add rooms to your house. Motherhood will rearrange all the furniture. Career will keep knocking the walls about. Every chapter that comes after this one is a chapter of addition, more people, more love, more roles, more weight.
A house that keeps adding rooms needs one thing above everything: a foundation that was poured properly.
That is what this chapter is for. Not to be spent. To be poured.
So if you are in this chapter right now, this is the part of the letter where I stop being sentimental and get practical, because I love you like a sister and sisters don’t only speak in poetry.
There are five things I want you to build while your name is still only yours.
Money that is only yours. Not secret money, this is not a letter about mistrust. Just money with your name alone on it, and the habit of growing it. A recurring deposit. A small SIP. An account you never close, no matter what chapter you’re in. The amount matters far less than the muscle.
One thing you do only because you love it. Not because it’s useful, not because it photographs well. Sketching, running, old Hindi songs, terrible detective novels. One thing that is yours for no reason. In later chapters, this thing becomes a rope back to yourself. Braid it now, while it’s easy.
Friendships you water on purpose. The friends of this chapter know a version of you that no husband or child ever will, the before-photo, the original. Don’t let those friendships survive on nostalgia. Put them in the calendar. Feed them like plants.
Your own opinions, said out loud. Practice disagreeing, gently, clearly, without apologising twice. Practice it now, on small things, with low stakes. A woman who learns her own voice in this chapter does not have to go searching for it in chapter four.
A record. Write yourself down. A journal, a notes app, voice memos at midnight — the format doesn’t matter. One day, a later version of you might stand in a kitchen wondering who she was before all of this. Leave her the evidence. Leave her a letter from the woman who knew.
If you are reading this from further along
And now, a word for the woman reading this from another chapter entirely, with a mangalsutra in the drawer, or a baby monitor on the nightstand, or both.
I know what this letter might be doing to you. I know the ache of reading about a version of yourself that feels like a stranger you once shared a body with.
So let me say this as clearly as I can: this is not an obituary.
The independent woman is not behind you. She is beneath you. She is not the past, she is the foundation. Every chapter you’ve lived since was built on what she poured: her stubbornness, her savings habit, her way of laughing, her opinions that everyone said were “too much.” You are still standing on her. You have never once stopped.
If reading this ached in a particular way, if you can’t remember the last time you did something just because you wanted to; I’ve written about that feeling before, and that letter is waiting for you. Start there. Then come back, because this series is going somewhere, and the last chapter has her name on it.
Where this series goes next
Five chapters. The independent woman. The wife. The mother. The working mother. And the woman who gathers all four of them up and remembers she was always one person.
Next time, we talk about the chapter where everything changes shape: becoming a wife — the beautiful, bewildering season where you gain a family and can quietly misplace yourself, all in the same year.
Until then, do one thing for me. Today, this week, whenever you can: do one small thing that belongs to no role. Not wife, not bahu, not mummy, not employee. Just you.
Buy the momos. Don’t share.
With you in every chapter,
Anjali
Hey there,
I’m Anjali, founder of The Balanced Working Mom.
I write for modern Indian women navigating marriage, career, motherhood, home, and the quiet identity shifts that happen in between.
Everything I share comes from real life — from managing work and family to learning, slowly, how not to lose yourself while building a beautiful life.
