ABHAY PURI

Retreat

The imposing structure of the airport makes Sahil feel as though he is about to enter another version of himself. The two weeks he took off from work will be over after this flight, and the cleansed, spiritual feeling he’d vaguely held on to for about two days so far already seems destined to slip away. His mother insisted on dropping him to the airport, on handing him a bag of various murukku and theplas, insisting they were for Ritika, on voicing her opinions on how these kinds of wellness retreats were extreme, on giving him a tearful hug despite their near constant bickering. He waits in line to show the security officer in front of the massive glass doors his passport and boarding pass, feeling a wave of irritation with what is ostensibly his country. He wants to resist checking his phone, but cycles through various apps while waiting in the check-in line to drop his bags.

He sees children with hands and legs decapitated, videos of explosions and maps of areas that have been bombed or razed to the ground. He sees Christmas trees being readied, pet photos, a beach party where many of his friends are dancing. He sees aid workers begging for peace, various blockades and crowds being fired at by soldiers. He sees promotions for raves or films alongside desperate news reports; he turns away from it all and walks to the line for security.

It seems a lifetime ago that the images had provoked an anger that has now morphed into a sense of being wronged, of hopeless apathy that he knows they want to create through the endless power of the algorithm. In reality, it has been less than a month, and as he goes through security there is a stirring of irritation again as he remembers the emails from his office, the vague, ominous language that he read through so many times.

Sahil works for a venture capital firm with offices in London, New York, Sydney and Singapore; he goes in a few times a week to the high floor of a slick steel and glass tower that could be anywhere. He has worked there for nearly five years, after a few years at a large consulting firm. His experience there had been largely positive until the incident a few weeks ago: he’d been promoted twice and he didn’t mind the work, although he would tell occasionally his friends how he was tired of doing cost-benefit analyses of sleep tracking apps or data mining companies or AI blockchain startups.

After security, he is scanning his work emails and something compels him to go up to the original message. His eyes scan the words ‘serious infringement’ and ‘actions that do not align with the values of the organisation’. He remembers the many chats with Ritika about the email. Her advice had been practical, a more compassionate version of what his parents might say, even what a part of him believed. They had prepared for the meeting he was due to have with his Scottish manager, Ben, and Susie, the American head of HR.

Just be relaxed, she’d said in the apartment they’d recently made a downpayment for, a small two bedroom flat that is luxurious for thirty-somethings in an expensive global city. They won’t fire you, but think about it, this achieves nothing. Everyone knows what is happening is wrong, but this is how it is. He remembers the next day in office, anxiously looking up from the ornate faux wooden desks to see when Susie would come down. The faded green of her manila folder when they went into Ben’s corner office, the extreme politeness of their greetings. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. How is everything at home?

After a week at the meditation retreat, the memory of their words feels even more hollow. As though sharing some tweets or Instagram stories was a reflection of some deeper issue in his home life, as though there had to be some personal crisis to have any kind of clarity, or a semblance of a conscience. Perhaps his endless scrolling was linked to the problems he and Ritika had been having since they’d gotten married two years earlier, but that didn’t mean watching children being killed and feeling outrage was less valid. He walks through the massive carpeted dome of the terminal after going past immigration.

He looks at the rows of stores, selling duty-free alcohol and chocolates and perfumes. He browses the selection of whiskey. He goes past the food court and wonders if he should treat himself to some popcorn chicken. He still has nearly an hour until boarding. The food at the retreat had been austere, simple, even boring. The fleeting sense of calm of the place, just two hours from his parents’ home, was in complete opposition to everything at the airport. He has the feeling of seeing behind the terminal, imagining government committees and aviation ministries and organisations and companies planning this decades ago, thinking of the egos and powers that enabled the construction of all this, the huge invisible apparatus that delivered suitcases or turned beans into coffee or staffed rows of airport desks or made sure straws and napkins were delivered to every kiosk or shiny yoga pants from China were on display. The millions of processes every day that feel like too much to even begin to understand.

Ben and Susie had done some version of a good cop, bad cop routine at the meeting, which lasted under fifteen minutes. Look I’m not someone to care about your politics, but you’re on track to be junior partner in a year or two. Our portfolio is performing well, but posting about a sensitive issue like this on socials reflects badly on the company. He remembers the feeling of his skin vibrating, his practiced stoic expression, his responses. He’d told them those were his personal accounts, they didn’t represent the company, it shouldn’t be controversial to call for peace when there’s a war.

He sees an inconceivably long row of trolleys being pushed across the walkway, hears the hum of machinery and the generic elevator music of the airport, feeling too attuned to noticing the sounds around him. He sits down at a row of chairs close to the gate, a couple of rows away from a crying baby who seems unnaturally loud. He messages Ritika even though he knows she probably isn’t awake yet, on the other side of the world. Taking off soon, love you. He sees the red glow of a new message on his social media from Trisha. He delays opening it and returns to his work email, those few seconds feeling like an exercise in willpower.

He looks again at the follow up email from after the meeting, in which Susie had said in polite jargon how it had been a fruitful and productive session, how it was just something they wanted to flag and the matter should be considered closed now. It didn’t mention the veiled way she’d indicated what the consequences could be. You deal with many portfolio companies directly, our clients and investors know you. We can’t tell you what to do on your personal accounts, but it’s a suggestion in such a charged environment. We empathise with you, but your actions reflect on the organisation. We don’t want to make it a disciplinary thing, but look what happened at Meyers Godwin. Sahil had been outraged even though he held his tongue. A partner at Meyers Godwin, a competitor of their firm, had been dismissed after multiple accusations of sexual harassment and predatory behaviour by various women, primarily online, had become a scandal. Him posting about war crimes was not analogous in any way, something Ben caught on to by saying there was no need to get into unnecessary comparisons. After Susie left, Ben had empathised more. This is the world we live in, it’s fucked up. How’s the Sweet Dreams analysis coming? Aren’t you off to India soon?

He thinks about the past fortnight while the speaker near the gate crackles as though clearing its throat before the announcement of a twenty minute delay. The quiet, green spaces at the luxury meditation retreat, the early wake-up times and the austere schedule through the day. He turns back to his phone and the message from Trisha. It’s a simple wyd but it gets Sahil excited as he clicks on her profile. There are a variety of holiday and beach photos, of her posing with various friends and attending weddings, of elevator selfies and tattoo close ups. He returns to the chat and scrolls up. There is a row of disappeared photos, fuckkk and show me and omg alongside other explicit descriptions.

Trisha and Sahil have never met. They matched on a dating app two days after he landed in India, when he’d been swiping aimlessly at his parents’ house while worrying about his mother’s hacking cough and his sense of something at work having changed. They’d chatted for a couple days during which he made clear that he was only visiting the city, going for a ten day meditation retreat and leaving the weekend after. But they’d continued texting and followed each other on Instagram. They’d discovered a couple of mutual connections via the network of similar schools and jobs they had, they’d messaged one night with various opinions about a new proto-fascist law that was dominating the news, and this had morphed into a more intimate chat and then into the familiar game of sexting.

In the seat diagonally across from Sahil, a young guy is eating a croissant and the flakes of pastry are sliding on to his beard as he chews. Sahil looks up at this and then back down at his screen, where he has responded to Trisha with a picture of the giant windows of the terminal. As he waits for her to answer, there is a sense of guilt, remembering Ritika, then the large banyan tree with a bench below it he had sat on at the wellness retreat. On a different chat, his mother asks if check-in went fine.

The wellness center was a couple of hours from the city, his routine there fixed by the early rising and meditation sessions and meal times, the yoga classes and greenery and slow walks and silence. After a couple of days of it, he had felt a sense of the smallness of his life, a sense that nothing was important, of great distance from the apartment which he and Ritika had started the long process of buying, of all of the events in his life being part of a film in which he was both actor and audience. After another day he felt great frustration, a visceral itch to check his phone or to speak to someone he knew, to stop the random flood of thoughts that became blankness. He remembered a magazine article he’d read a few months earlier, of the genre that seemed to emerge every few months. I spent a year offline and this is what I learned. This particular one was written by someone who’d abandoned her phone for a month to do a hike which had culminated in a long cry and then a slow return to her old life. Maybe there were other salient points in the article, but he only remembered her crying in the forest and felt a strong kinship with the sentiment.

Trisha has responded to his photo with one of her own, lying in bed, cleavage visible and a wink emoji. Sahil feels a rush of blood, replying with more suggestive messages. In a way he feels strangely more connected to this girl he’s never met and only sporadically texted for a few days than anyone, because of the directness of her desire, because of the technological addiction that they share, the impulses that he’d be embarrassed to tell Ritika about. He considers going to the airport bathroom, then chides himself while her responses heighten the feeling that he should. His anticipation builds as he describes what he wants to do to her. He looks up as a large suitcase squeaks along the ground in front of him and a man with a bushy moustache and bushier eyebrows sits down.

Sahil turns back to his phone. His latest messages haven’t been seen so he locks the screen to check the time. He sighs deeply. Two short breaths in, one long breath out, closing his eyes for five seconds. Even though he hasn’t moved it feels as though his heart is racing, the same thrill as successful kills on Call of Duty or a new notification on some app, a rush of dopamine that has been honed by decades of television and social media and porn and everything else. A different version of him exists on the phone during a frenzied chat or swiping through apps, one he exits for a few seconds with these breaths before the compulsion to check resurfaces.

The first boarding announcement is made and people begin to form a line next to the retractable barriers. Sahil remains seated and checks the new messages Trisha has sent. So wet for u. A disappearing photo which he clicks on after quickly looking up to see that nobody is around. Her in her bed, naked, the camera positioned so the curve of her ass is visible over her shoulder. Another one soon after in which she is holding her breasts together, a finger lightly pinching her nipple. He takes a screenshot, frustrated that he decided not to go to the bathroom after all. So f hot, he types. A few seconds later, dude u screenshotted? wtf. Panic courses through him.

As the line begins to move forward, he stands up, picks up his bag and joins the back of the line. He sends a few apology messages, saying he has no intent of doing anything with the images, he is sorry, but she doesn’t say anything. He begins to imagine all the worst case scenarios, of his sexts being broadcast to the world, of Ritika being contacted, of his white lie of an open marriage being exposed, of Susie and her green folder calling for another disciplinary meeting, of his parents at the dining table about to scold him when he was a teenager. He breathes deeply again as the line inches forward. A snotty child brushes past him.

At the meditation retreat, on the final day, they had to write down a list of things they felt grateful for. He’d written down his family, his marriage, repaying the loan his father took to send him to business school, taking the first steps towards buying a new home, his awareness of situations, his capability at work, his empathy for others and for the natural world. It had brought a kind of emptiness that his life boiled down to half a page of bullet points, but also a kind of determination, a calmness, all of which seemed to have dissipated in less than two days because of his phone, his flight, his job, his life. He sends Trisha a screenshot of his iPhone gallery. I deleted them already, sorry again.

After he takes his seat and puts on his headphones, he checks again and breathes a sigh of relief to see Trisha’s response. It’s fine dude whatever. He flips through some stories, the same dissonant mix of soldiers and tear gas and parties and memes and tattoos. He goes back to his real life, his real chats, telling his family and Ritika he is about to take off. Nothing has happened. Everything is fine. He takes more deep breaths as the safety announcements commence; he thinks about the long flight ahead and the deck he has to work on. He has the same sinking feeling about returning to office as he just did before Trisha responded, even though nothing has happened, even though he won’t face any consequences or post about the war again.

A part of him wants to leave everything behind, to get off the plane and return to some equivalent of the meditation retreat forever. Another part wants to tear up his contract, to take his firm to court and post about censorship, to go to protests and email his representatives. Another part sees that all the righteous anger is bullshit, that they sponsor his visa and pay him. Maybe what he actually wants is to meet Trisha in real life, to fuck in a way that seems new and exciting, without baggage or constraint, without the knottiness and resentment he feels with Ritika now that so many years have passed and so much has happened. The plane begins to taxi as he cycles through these thoughts.

In reality he will do none of those things. He will land many hours later, he will return to work begrudgingly and slowly get back to the routine. He will complain about the incident at dinner parties with his liberal friends or occasionally feel angry in weeks to follow, but it will become a distant memory soon. He will sext Trisha a few more times before their chats fizzle out. She will text him about visiting his city several months later and he will ghost her. He and Ritika will pay off their mortgage and have a son in three years, after many attempts. Their sex life will be unfulfilling, he will feel occasional guilt and discuss being open a few years down the line, but feel unmoored every time he does sleep with someone else. He will occasionally question whether he should’ve married later, whether he is with Ritika only because they were in the same business school program, from the same kind of milieu, the same kind of world. He will bring it up in therapy but accept the way it is, he will analyse whether losing his father just a couple of years after he took a loan to pay for his education abroad has shaped everything in his life, whether he is addicted to his phone. He will meditate daily for another few months before feeling it brings up too much that is wrong, before seeing clearly that it might change him but it won’t change the world and gradually giving it up. He will become more and more cynical about politics, he will know deep down that the rules are different for different people, that money runs everything and he has to be a model minority to succeed. He will lose interest in work but become partner in a year and a half, even if it is later than expected. He will regret the tech hellscape he is a part of, but still worry about being replaced. He will proclaim to tables of friends at various events that they are luckier than most even as he feels a great emptiness within. He will sometimes imagine a different life, but he will never choose it because he doesn’t know where to begin, because too much has already passed, too much was sacrificed to get here, too much can never change.

Abhay Puri is a writer and editor who has worked across industries and geographies. In 2022 he was selected as a South Asia Speaks Fellow. He received an MA Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London in 2025. He is the founding editor of Hammock Magazine, and his work has appeared in Helter Skelter, The Caravan, and on screen in various forms.