The first salary came on a Tuesday.
It was not a large amount. I had known what it would be - the offer letter had been clear - but seeing it actually sitting in my account felt different from knowing it was coming. A real number. Mine.
I called my mother first.
She said congratulations and asked if I had eaten lunch. I said yes. She said good. We talked for nine minutes about nothing important and then she said she had to go check on something on the stove.
I sat with my phone for a while after that.
I had a list.
Not written down - just carried in my head for months. Things I would do when I had money of my own. A particular pair of shoes I had looked at twice in a shop near my college and not bought. A book I had been waiting on. Dinner somewhere that wasn't the cheap place near the office where the food was fine but the chairs were plastic.
I did none of these things that day.
I transferred two thousand rupees to my mother's account instead. No message with it - just the transfer. She called back twenty minutes later and said I didn't have to do that. I said I know. She said thank you. I said it was fine.
Then I went and bought the shoes.
They were slightly uncomfortable for the first two weeks. Then they weren't.
I wore them to office and nobody noticed. That was fine. I noticed.
The second thing I did with that first salary was open a small savings account I had been meaning to open for months. I put five hundred rupees in it. The balance looked small and serious at the same time.
I thought about my father, who had been putting money into something similar for thirty years without telling anyone the exact amount, and what that must have felt like the first time.
I understood, very suddenly and specifically, one thing about him that I had not understood before.
There are things you cannot know about your parents until you have done a version of the same thing yourself. The first salary is one of them.
