Asha Sharma stepped off the overnight train at Renigunta just as the sky was turning the color of old gold.
Asha Sharma stepped off the overnight train at Renigunta just as the sky was turning the color of old gold. She carried only a small backpack, a water bottle, and the quiet decision she had made three weeks earlier in a Microsoft conference room in Hyderabad while everyone else was still arguing about procedural generation in open-world levels.
Her long hair—dark, thick, the kind that had once earned her lazy compliments at every family wedding—was already tied into a loose braid. She hadn’t cut it since her M.Tech days. It had become part of the uniform: the serious Indian-origin tech woman who could talk shader pipelines and still look like she belonged in a wedding video.
Now she was walking the last stretch to Tirumala on foot, like thousands of others. The air smelled of camphor, jasmine, wet stone, and the faint sweetness of laddoos being fried somewhere far below.
At the kalyana katta—the tonsure hall—she removed her shoes and stood in line. A family from Kerala was ahead of her; the mother was explaining to her small son why they were about to give God his beautiful curls.
First the braid was severed in one clean motion—thirty-two years of hair falling into the collection basket like a dark river changing course. Asha felt the sudden lightness behind her ears, the cool draft on the back of her neck. She closed her eyes.
The razor moved in steady, practiced strokes. Cold water, warm lather, the soft scrape of metal on skin. Each pass revealed more scalp, more sky, more of the person she had quietly decided she wanted to meet.
She thought about the email she would write tomorrow to the Xbox leadership team:
Subject: Quick personal update
Hi all,
Just a heads-up—I shaved my head at Tirumala this morning. Not a crisis, not a breakdown, just something I needed to do. I still promise the same thing: no soulless AI slop in our games. We’re still building worlds that feel alive, not procedurally hollow. See you in the Monday sync.
She almost smiled under the lather.
When the barber finished, he wiped her head with a damp cloth, then held up a small round mirror.
Asha opened her eyes.
The woman looking back had bright eyes, a faint red line where the razor had kissed the skin, and an expression that was neither shocked nor triumphant—just present.
She thanked the barber, pressed a folded note into his hand, and stood.
Outside, the morning sun had cleared the gopuram. Pilgrims were moving in every direction. A child pointed at her smooth head and whispered something to his sister. An old woman in a green saree gave her a slow, approving nod.
Asha touched her scalp once—velvet stubble under her fingertips, still slightly damp—and started walking back down the hill.
Tomorrow she would catch the train to Bangalore, then fly to Seattle for the next planning retreat.
But right now she was only this: bare-headed, barefoot on warm stone, carrying nothing extra.
For the first time in years, the weight she felt was only her own.
And it was exactly the right amount.