Manyavar and Music

I was wearing my dull purple kurta again that morning, the Manyavar one. It wasn’t meant for regular days, but I had started wearing it to the office anyway. With jeans, sometimes sandals, sometimes shoes. I wasn’t dressing for anyone. Just trying to feel... a little more myself.

The metro was pulling into Indiranagar when I looked at my reflection in the glass. It was flickering. Light, tunnel, shadow, light again. My collar had folded at the edge. I adjusted it out of habit.

And somewhere between one song and the next, that line just arrived. No trigger. No memory.

“I want to see her in my clothes.”

It stayed in my chest like a stone in water.

Not “I want to gift her something.” Not “I want to see her dressed up.” Not even love.

Just that one strange, oddly heavy wish.

I wasn’t thinking of anyone. There was no her. Not in real life. No conversations I was replaying. No lingering text threads. Just the idea of a person who might someday feel safe enough, close enough, quiet enough... to wear what I wore.

To slip into a kurta still warm from my body. Or to walk barefoot to the kitchen in a faded t-shirt, I’d stopped wearing because the collar had worn out. Someone who wouldn't ask wouldn't say anything. Who would just wear it? Not because it meant romance. But because it meant comfort.

It wasn’t a fantasy. It wasn’t about attraction.

It was the kind of intimacy that didn’t need to be named.

I kept repeating the line in my head like it was someone else’s dialogue, like I was watching it in a film that hadn’t been made yet.

“I want to see her in my clothes.”

I wasn’t even sure why it moved me.

Maybe because it meant I was ready for someone. Without needing them to arrive. Maybe because it revealed a softness I had kept folded for too long. Or maybe because, in a world full of noise and performances, this desire, this small, unclaimed, specific desire, felt so quietly human.

That day, I didn’t tell anyone.

I just got off at my stop, buttoned the cuff of my sleeve properly, and walked into another day where no one knew I was carrying a line like that inside me.

And I was okay with it.

Because sometimes, the most powerful feelings aren’t meant to be shared.

They’re just meant to be felt, fully, alone, and without apology.