ABSTRACT
For Jinny Menon it is important to begin and continuously return to her narrative beginnings as a way to situate her listening and living. Jinny knows the dangers of being erased, perhaps made extinct, and of only being seen as a "good" South Asian girl, as only someone who needs to be controlled. Jinny begins with her father's words, "Someone needs to control her", those long-ago words that evoked and continue to hold such pain, spoken lightly by her brother years after her father's passing. Jinny begins to unpack and make visible what lays beneath, and behind, cautions about relationship building. In Jinny's telling, no-one wonders about the experiences of the girls beyond what was made visible. By turning to Bhattacharya, Jinny makes visible the necessity of speaking up, of telling stories that might allow the next generation of women to live "otherwise".
