After a brief period of adjustment, I learned that I wasn’t alone in my aloneness. Never before have there been so many “single” women in India, unmarried, divorced, widowed, separated or in long distance relationships. A recent survey showed that there are now 71 million single women in India, a 39 % increase over the past decade.

And yet nothing about our culture, or the way we live, teaches us to be alone. Bollywood’s heroines rarely have characters or conversations beyond their relationships with men – Bechdel test super fails. They so seldom have professional ambition that when they do, it’s considered subversive. Queen was revolutionary for having a female protagonist who embraced being alone. TV ads show us men purchasing insurance and cars and homes, while women are marketed oils for their husband’s health, detergents for their kids’ clothes, and chai for the family. Everywhere, domestic couplehood is emphasised as the happy way for women to live. Indeed, the only way to live.

I had to find a different way.

I didn’t have to look far for role models. I come from a line of women who lived well into their late nineties, outliving husbands by decades. My mother was 64 when my father passed away six years ago. She is contemplating, very possibly, 30 years on her own.

She fills her days to the brim with gardening, music, family, charity and, recently, the internet. Every few months, she travels across India, often with other single women, to remote places like Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. She took a tragedy and turned it into an opportunity. I know there are days she misses my father deeply. I also know that this is what it means to seize life by its throat, with or without a companion.

This, then, was what I wanted to do.