In twenty-five days, you will turn sixteen years old.

For many of your friends, the increment marks a mysterious but undeniably massive shift. Sixteen is independence; confidence; coolness. Sixteen marks the ability to attain a higher class of woman, even, considering all the other benefits. For many of your friends, sixteen also brings with it extra responsibility: they are now considered men of the household and are expected to behave with a certain maturity, a certain gravity. Their parents will start, perhaps, slowly starting to treat them as equals, first with minor tests of character and more and more with confidence. Some of them - though very few - may even take on paid jobs, either to help pad the family income or to allow themselves the freedom that a little money affords.

For you, sixteen doesn't necessarily signify anything new. Your parents still won't let you take a job, and they certainly won't start treating you like an adult, though they started speaking to your sister in that grown up tone when she was fourteen. They think of you as the baby of the family, and because of it you feel like a baby still. Around your mates, you slip on raucous confidence like a jacket, but you know you don't suit it even if it fools the people around you. It is uncomfortable and itchy, makes you struggle not to fidget. You are unequivocally under your family's thumb - not just your parents', but your sister's, and your extended family in India. You can't even escape during the week, as you live with your uncle. Every choice you make is steeped with the possible consequence of shame, not only on yourself but implicitly on your entire family.

This, at least, is a concept many of your friends also struggle with. Still, they don't understand the particular burden on your shoulders. When you visit Pune during summer holidays, your family won't let up on how you don't wear your janivaara regularly, and how you consistently forget to perform sandhyavandanam (and sometimes forget parts of it even when you do). You wrestle with the cliché of being too Indian in England and too English in India. You want to be both of these things; you know some of your cousins in the same boat reject one half of themselves, but rejecting parts of yourself makes you uncomfortable. The trick - because you think it must be a trick - is figuring out how to embrace both equally.

"This boy," your mother complains to her sister in Marathi, as though you don't fully understand what she's saying. "He's such a headache. He doesn't do anything. This kind of laziness wouldn't have cropped up if we hadn't left India. What's going to happen when he has children? How is he going to keep our traditions going?"

You know better than to interject. You know, too, that your mother isn't actually as disappointed as she lets on, but her concerns still sting. You're not sure how to fix it, how to begin reconciling all these disparate parts of yourself - the parts that belong with your family, and the parts that belong with your friends.

You don't know, either, how to begin reconciling the parts of yourself that don't seem to belong anywhere. Your gaze catches on things it shouldn't in the school dressing room. When you walk past that boy in the halls, you can't control the feeling that claws its way up your throat. You grit your teeth to stop it from spilling out, whatever it is, but you know it's only a matter of time before you can't hold it in any longer. It would be so much easier to get this secret off your chest, but you've been holding it in for long enough that you're not certain anything coherent would come out if you tried. You're not sure whether you could look your family in the face while saying it, and for some reason that matters to you.

You want to be able to hold your head high and keep your shoulders squared. You want to walk into a room with swagger and actually mean it. You want to breeze down that hallway and not pay the slightest bit of attention to that boy because he is so far beneath you he doesn't warrant even an iota of your energy.

But sixteen isn't going to be anything special. It's not going to open new doors for you, and you are under no illusion about that. The best you can hope for is that you'll maybe - just maybe - start to get your shit together. For all you know, fifth form could just be the year that turns everything around.