I watched the horizon spill over into shades of lozenge orange this morning. The night train from Delhi was inching towards Khajuraho. The plains seemed to extend for miles and by the time we arrived, I saw shafts of light hit the signboard at the station announcing our destination. It should have been a luminous moment heralding the birth of any and all possibilities, but I was quaking inside. The deadline for the funding application for the PhD I was seeking to enrol in had just slipped up on me.

I was fraught with anxiety. All the feminist activism I'd been engaged in all of December had taken such a psychological toll on me, I didn't have the clarity of thought that is essential for writing out a proposal. I knew what I was looking to do but felt overwhelmed by the ambitious scope of what I was daring to envision. Since my references were in order, it felt incumbent that I proceeded with the application and not bail on myself, as I am prone to do in such moments of intellectual vulnerability. It has been 12 years since I actively left the world of academia. Did I really want back in? What was I trying to prove? Was my desire to enrol coming from a space of insecurity? Did I simply just want to feel that I, too, was entitled to claim a space of scholarship and the legitimacy that comes from it? What did I want this to translate into?