Hari Bindi by Mridula Garg | Books That Stayed With Me
You don't question it. You don't try to hold it or understand it. You simply let yourself go with it, enjoying every little thing that comes your way.
This is the feeling I was left with after reading Mridula Garg's Hari Bindi. It is an extraordinary story that fills you with the same exhilaration while reading it as the protagonist seems to experience through that day. Such is the power of the imagery that Mridula weaves that, for a while, you become almost one with her character. Perhaps because you have lived through such days yourself—days when everything seemed just right, when the world appeared a little more beautiful than usual, and you felt like breaking all the rules of the world, not out of malice or rebellion, but out of sheer, inexplicable joy.
That is how her day begins. Rajan has gone to Delhi, and suddenly she finds herself with a day that seems to have loosened itself from the usual rhythm of her life. There is no hurry. She sleeps a little longer. She gives the househelp the day off. And somewhere in those very ordinary acts, something begins to stir inside her.
It is difficult to say exactly when she realizes it; perhaps she never does. It is not as if she wakes up that morning and decides that today she will live differently. There is no grand thought behind what she does. She simply seems to discover, one little thing at a time, the pleasure of deciding for herself.
She gets dressed. The blue bindi would have gone with her dress, but she picks up a green one instead. Rajan would have raised his eyebrows at this choice, she thinks, but then shrugs the thought off.
And then she steps out, wearing the green bindi on her blue dress.
What follows is a day that seems to acquire its own rhythm. She wanders out without much of a plan, goes to an art exhibition and laughs heartily. There is a wonderful abandon in her laughter. She isn't trying to impress anyone, nor is she worried about how she is being perceived. She is simply enjoying what she sees and allowing herself to laugh.
Then she walks into a restaurant, without having planned to eat there. Rajan would always plan before going to any restaurant—about the place, about the cuisine. But today it is a free day, and she enjoys the randomness of simply choosing a restaurant and ordering hot and cold together. Why should she not? Even if Rajan would not have liked it.
Each decision is so insignificant that, taken separately, none of them seems worth mentioning. Yet together they create something quite extraordinary. With every little choice, she seems to move a little further away from the familiar pattern of her life and a little closer to herself.
And perhaps that is what I found so beautiful about her happiness. It is not the happiness of someone who has planned an escape. It is the happiness of someone who has suddenly found herself in an open space and is discovering, almost with wonder, how much she enjoys being there.
She drifts towards a cinema and watches a Danny Kaye film, one that Rajan doesn't like. And she laughs again. There is something almost infectious about this growing delight. The day seems to be carrying her along, and she is quite happy to be carried.
Then comes the stranger.
She meets him, talks to him, laughs with him, and eventually invites him for coffee. Even that invitation has the same quality as everything else she has done that day. There is no elaborate intention behind it. She simply wants to spend some more time talking to him, and so she asks.
What I liked particularly about this encounter is that Garg doesn't turn it into a conventional romantic episode. The stranger isn't a saviour who has appeared to take her away from her life. He doesn't become an alternative to Rajan. He is simply another person she meets on this unusual day, a person with whom she can talk and laugh without the weight of everything that normally surrounds her.
He doesn't know her as Rajan's wife. He doesn't know what she normally does or doesn't do. He doesn't know which films she is supposed to like, what she should eat, how she should behave. He encounters her simply as she is at that moment.
An imagined visual journey through the day in Hari Bindi.
As I read the story, I kept thinking about how many of our own choices in life are made almost automatically. We dress in a certain way, eat certain things, go to certain places, watch certain films, behave in certain ways. Some of it is what society expects. Some of it is what the people around us prefer. Some of it has simply become habit. So much so that we don't even experience it as a restriction.
We just live that way.
And then, sometimes, something shifts.
Perhaps that is what has happened to her. Rajan's absence has created a little pocket of space, and she steps into it without quite knowing what she is doing. There is no manifesto, no rebellion. There is simply a growing pleasure in following her own impulses. The more she does it, the more she seems to enjoy it. It is as if some part of her had been quietly waiting for this day.
And then the green bindi comes back.
The stranger notices it.
He tells her that he has never seen anyone wearing a green bindi before. And suddenly that tiny moment from the beginning of the day acquires a different texture.
When she picked the green bindi instead of the blue one, it seemed to mean nothing. It was simply a choice. A tiny, almost unconscious departure from what matched, what was expected, what made sense.
But now somebody has noticed it.
And I liked that Garg doesn't tell us what the green bindi means. She lets us arrive there ourselves. Perhaps it doesn't mean anything in itself. Perhaps that is precisely the point. It was just something she chose because, on that morning, she wanted to.
The stranger sees it because he is seeing her without the accumulated familiarity of Rajan. He notices something that had seemed too insignificant for her to notice herself.
And perhaps that is how the little choices of the day begin to look different to me. They aren't acts of rebellion. They are simply signs of a self that has been given some room to breathe.
There is something deeply moving about that.
Because the story doesn't tell us that she was unhappy before. It doesn't need to. It shows us something much more subtle: what happens when, for a brief while, the things that quietly govern our choices disappear.
And what comes rushing in is joy.
She doesn't merely become free. She seems to enjoy being free. That distinction stayed with me.
There is a freshness to her day, almost like stepping outside after spending too long indoors. The air feels different. Everything seems a little brighter. A restaurant becomes an adventure. A film becomes a source of laughter. A stranger becomes someone with whom coffee can be shared. Even the choice of a bindi becomes part of the pleasure of the day.
And perhaps we have all known some version of this feeling.
A day when, for no particular reason, we feel unusually alive. When we take a road simply because it looks interesting. When we stop somewhere without having planned to. When we eat something we hadn't intended to eat. When we laugh more loudly than usual. When we suddenly feel like doing something completely unlike our normal selves.
Nothing fundamental has changed. And yet the world feels different.
That is what Mridula Garg captures so beautifully in Hari Bindi. She doesn't make freedom into an abstract idea. She makes it something you can almost feel in your body—the lightness, the movement, the laughter, the little rush that comes from saying yes to an impulse simply because it is yours.
And perhaps that is why the story feels so intimate. We recognize her. Not necessarily in her circumstances, but in that feeling. The feeling of having, for once, a day that is entirely your own. The feeling of not having to explain every little choice. The feeling of letting yourself drift, just to see where the day takes you.
While writing this, I was reminded of these lines from a beautiful Rabindra Sangeet by Tagore, Emni Korei Jaay Jodi Din:
Emni korei jaay jodi din, jaak na
Mon urechhe, uruk na re
Mele diye gaaner paakhna
Aajke aamar praan-phoaarar sur chhutechhe
If the day must drift away like this, let it.
My heart has taken wing—let it fly,
spreading wide the feathers of melody;
today my soul spills over in singing ecstasy.
Perhaps that is the feeling I was trying to describe.
The green bindi is perhaps only one small part of it.
But by the time the stranger notices it, we have travelled far enough with her to understand why that little green dot matters. Not because it is a symbol she consciously chose, but because it is one of the many tiny choices through which, over the course of that day, she seems to find herself again.
And that is what stayed with me.
The sheer joy of it.
The almost weightless happiness of a woman discovering, choice by choice, that there is a part of her that wants to fly.
And for one beautiful day, she lets it.
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