This piece is part of a series of essays. You can access the previous essay in the series here.

It’s her laugh that convinces me that Anu has a witchiness about her. It is a fearless cackle, loud and liberated. I like women who laugh openly because it signifies a kind of freedom; it is something I aspire for. What that freedom looks like and sounds like, that’s the journey.

“I always feel like I willed my life into existence,” Anu says. “In 2020, before the lockdown, there used to be this big black wall in my room where I would write.”

On that wall, Anu made a vision board. The first thing she wrote was move to Himachal by the end of the year.

Moving to the mountains, Anu says, wasn’t even part of the plan. She was going to move to Vietnam and open a cafe there. Anu’s business partner and she even had investors on board. “I thought, now I am going to Vietnam, Himachal can wait. But the borders were closed, nothing was happening, and I was visiting somebody in Himachal, where I met a friend of my business partner’s. This friend wanted to start a cafe too. And both of us were from Hyderabad, our ideologies were the same, what we wanted to do was the same.” Anu moved to Himachal Pradesh.

This, Anu says, is no less than magic.