The PG on the Third Floor Taught Me More Than Any Classroom Did.
On the strangers who became sisters, the ones who quietly faded, and the belonging you can build from scratch when nobody assigns it to you.
The bathroom was shared between more women than is technically advisable.
The kitchen had rules that nobody followed and a fridge that was, at any given time, a small museum of passive-aggressive sticky notes. The walls were thin enough that you knew everyone’s business whether you wanted to or not. The Wi-Fi had moods. The landlady had opinions about everything and a specific ability to deliver them at the least convenient moment.
It was, genuinely, one of the best places I have ever lived.
There is a version of growing up that happens in classrooms and carefully planned milestones. And then there is the version that happens in a shared PG kitchen at 11 pm, waiting for the chai to boil, listening to a stranger talk about her day and realising, quietly, that she is not a stranger anymore.
We came from everywhere and nowhere in particular. Different states. Different mother tongues. Different religions, different backgrounds, different ideas about what a woman’s life was supposed to look like.
One was vegetarian for reasons she explained at length to anyone within earshot. One slept with the fan on full blast regardless of December, December and had made a certain peace with the feedback she received about it. One sang in the bathroom and had accepted her audience with grace.
And somehow between the thin walls and the shared razais and the arguments about whose turn it was to clean we became each other’s people.
Nobody assigned us to each other. Nobody ran a compatibility test. The universe just put us all under the same roof with the same budget and the same general confusion about adulthood and said: figure it out.
We figured it out.
The rituals of a shared PG are their own kind of sacred. Let me tell you about them.
The rituals that held us together
The chai gossip. Not gossip in the mean sense but in the human sense. The sitting-together-at-the-end-of-a-long-day sense. Someone has had a terrible day at college. Someone’s mother called and said something that requires twenty minutes of collective processing. Someone has news. Someone has a crisis. Someone just needs to sit with other people who understand, without explanation, that life in your early twenties is mostly confusion wearing the costume of confidence.
The head massages. I am not sure how this started but at some point it became the thing we did for each other on difficult evenings. Sitting on someone’s bed, someone’s hands in your hair, the ceiling fan running, everyone talking about everything and nothing. The cheapest therapy in Delhi. Also the most effective.
The rain dances. Delhi rain is not gentle. It arrives with complete conviction. The correct response the only response is to go outside anyway. We got completely drenched multiple times. We came back inside laughing like people who had temporarily forgotten every single thing that was worrying them. Rain has a way of making you forget you’re supposed to be a responsible adult.
The shopping. Lajpat Nagar. Sarojini. Wherever the budget allowed. Four opinions, zero agreement, hours that passed without anyone noticing. Chai from a stall because the food court was too expensive. The specific joy of finding exactly what you wanted for exactly the right price, celebrated like a collective victory. In PG life, it was.
These women strangers who became sisters under a shared roof showed me something the family home couldn’t have: that belonging is not only inherited. It can also be built. Chosen. Assembled from scratch by people who had no particular reason to love each other and did it anyway.
But I want to be honest about this too because this is not the edited version of things.
Not everyone from those years stayed.
Some of the people I was most certain about in that PG hallway are now Instagram accounts I scroll past without feeling much. Somewhere between then and now, the friendship ran its course quietly without a clear ending, the way most adult friendships actually end. Not a fight. Not a dramatic farewell. Just a slow loosening of thread until one day you realise there is nothing holding it together anymore.
And some, a smaller number than I expected and larger than I needed revealed themselves to be fair-weather.
The kind who are wonderful when you are thriving and suddenly unavailable when you are struggling. The kind who will sit ringside at your hardest seasons and call it support. The kind who reach for you when they need something and become impossible to reach when you do.
Not every friendship that felt real was. Some people were drawn to your warmth the way you lean toward a fire in winter not because they love the fire, but because they are cold. When spring comes, they walk away.
I gave those friendships everything I had. That is what I do, I over-give, over-invest, make myself available in ways that are not always returned. It took years to understand that generosity without discernment is not virtue. It is exhaustion in a nicer outfit.
Here is the strange and wonderful thing though.
My PG friends met my college friends eventually. And in that collision of two completely separate worlds they all became one world. Mutual friends. Group chats I couldn’t have predicted. The universe has a tendency to connect the right people. You just have to be the kind of person worth connecting to.
The PG taught me things I didn’t know I needed to learn. How to live alongside people whose habits are nothing like mine. How to ask for help without apology. How to give comfort without overextending. How to be one person among many..not the eldest..not the responsible one..just Sneha. Figuring it out. Same as everyone else on that third floor.
It was the first time in my life I was not the eldest daughter.
I was just a girl. Among girls. All of us the same age, the same confusion, the same half-formed dream of becoming something we just hadn’t decided what yet.
The samajhdaar (sensible) eldest daughter learned, in a shared PG in Delhi, that she was also just a person. Funny, a little chaotic, capable of joy that had nothing to do with being responsible for anyone.
That was the most important lesson of her entire education.
And no syllabus would have taught her that.
If this brought something back, follow me here. I write every Tuesday about the things nobody says out loud :)
— Sneha
