The absolute necessity of female friendships

An enduring fiction about female friendship is that it is a leisure activity, an indulgence that exists on the margins of real life. For adult Indian women, this real life is imagined as marriage, children, domestic work and caregiving, and in some cases, paid work too (and in rarer cases, perhaps even a career). If one does not understand how female friendship can be a lifeline, it is easy to dismiss the time spent sustaining it as wasteful.

To appreciate the significance of female friendship, one must first understand the profound social isolation that defines the lives of countless Indian women.