i hate being the main character of my own story

the windows we look into and the stories we never hear

circa 2009

i have always been a city girl. delhi. pune. bangalore. four walls of apartments, balconies with drying clothes, roads lined with auto-rickshaws and the occasional metro rail slicing through the skyline. i think the cities raised me just as much as my parents did. maybe even more. but if there is one thing i know for certain, it’s that high rises have shaped me more than anything else; those towering structures with endless windows, each one holding a life, a story, a moment i would never be able to see but would always wonder about.

the first time i became aware of these buildings in a way that felt important, in a way that made my brain itch with new thoughts, was in pune, sometime before third grade, because by then i had already moved to bangalore. i must have been no older than eight, sitting in the backseat of our car on a full moon night, staring out of the window as the world rushed past. i remember being convinced that the moon was following me, that no matter where we turned, it stayed right there, floating just above, keeping pace with us like an old friend. and then, in an instant, it was gone, swallowed up by the thousands of windows that filled the night sky, their tiny yellow lights flickering against the dark.

i remember asking my dad what those buildings were, and he told me they were IT firms: massive offices where engineers spent their days earning their bread and butter, places where thousands of people sat behind computers, working under artificial lights before returning home late into the night. my dad was one of them. my brother would grow up to be one of them. and in a few months, come august this year, i would be stepping into that world too.

alongside these office towers, new apartment complexes were rising just as quickly, built to house the endless stream of employees who had come to these cities chasing something bigger, something better, something more than what they had before.

that night, mini aditi, with her eight-year-old mind, stopped thinking about the moon and started focusing on the buildings instead. i remember trying to count the floors, wondering just how many people could fit inside one of those structures, how many lives were stacked on top of each other like neatly arranged furniture in a dollhouse. i remember asking my dad if families lived there, if everyone got their own space, if all families were like ours? four people under one roof, sharing the same life. and then, i remember asking him the question that changed everything for me: was there another little girl, just like me, living behind one of those windows?

he said yes.

and that was all it took. i remember whipping my head around, staring back at those glowing windows, searching for some sign of her, some proof that she existed. did she go to school like i did? was her favorite subject skating too? did she beg for a mcdonald’s happy meal the same way i did every weekend? was she looking out of her own window at that very moment, wondering about me the way i was wondering about her?

and then, just like that, something shifted inside me.

for the first time, i truly understood that behind every single window, in every single building, there were people living entire lives i would never know, people with their own joys and heartbreaks, their own problems that felt like the end of the world, their own families waiting for them to come home. and in that realization, i felt something i couldn’t quite name—something that made my heart feel both too full and too small at the same time, something that made my chest ache in a way i didn’t yet have the words for.

it made me feel insignificant, but not in a way that scared me. it was more like understanding that i was just one small piece of something much bigger, that my existence was just a drop in an ocean of other lives, and somehow, that realization made everything feel strangely comforting, as if nothing i ever did would be big enough to shake the world.

of course, eight-year-old aditi didn’t have the words for any of this. she only knew that it made her feel weird, that it made her chest feel tight and her thoughts feel too big for her head. so she did what any kid would do-she turned back toward the sky, searching for the moon again, hoping it would still be there, waiting for her.

fifteen years have passed since that night, and now i live in a city that is even wilder than before, where the buildings stretch higher and the windows shine even brighter, where the streets are louder and the people seem to move faster than i can keep up with. but sometimes, when i am sitting in a car, driving past rows of endless high rises, the memory slips back into my mind, bringing with it the same quiet wonder that once overwhelmed an eight-year-old girl staring at a skyline she didn’t yet understand.

i have thought about that moment in every way possible, turned it over in my mind, tried to make sense of it, but no matter how much time passes, i always come to the same conclusion.

i still feel like a drop in the sea. and somehow, that still makes me feel safe.