Chapter 34: Will You..?
The breakfast table was at its usual Sunday volume when Damini said it — caught between Akshay’s refusal to eat his paratha unless it was cut diagonally and Madhvi’s insistence that squares were “easier for sharing,” Garima already negotiating her exit from the table before her plate was half-finished.
“Gomzi aa raha hai,” Damini said, not looking up from lightly buttering her toast. “Do din mein. Mumbai mein koi case hai.”
The table didn’t go silent — children rarely allow that kind of silence — but something shifted in the adults around it, a small recalibration passed between them without anyone performing it.
“Kitne din ke liye?” Shobha asked, already doing the math of school runs and spare rooms in her head.
“Ek din ka kaam hai bas,” Damini said. “Subah aayega, doosre din tak nikal jayega wapas.” She said it plainly, without the particular weight that might once have lived underneath those words — not flinching, only the old, familiar tiredness of someone who had long since stopped expecting more than what was offered and had learned, slowly, that wanting more wasn’t the same as being owed it. “Dinner karega humare saath, phir hotel chala jayega raat ko. Maine bola ki ghar pe reh lena. Lekin bola- hotel court ke paas hai. Practical rahega.”
Mihir glanced at Damini for a moment, something unreadable passing behind his eyes, before he looked down at his own chai. He, of everyone at this table, knew exactly how many versions of this sentence Gautam had said to him over the years, and exactly how often the second half of it had turned out to be true.
“Last time bhi sirf dinner ke liye aaye the,” Ritik said, not unkindly, simply naming the pattern the way the young sometimes do without quite registering what they’re naming. “Bole the ek ghanta hai, phir teen ghante baith gaye. Lekin raat ko nahi ruke the.”
“Haan,” Damini said. “Issi baar bhi wahi hoga shayad. Dinner, thodi der baithna, phir nikal jayega.” She said this evenly, the way you describe weather you’ve stopped hoping will change — not bitter, simply accurate.
Tulsi, sitting beside Mihir the way she had for thirty-eight years before either of them had learned what it cost to lose that closeness, felt something tighten briefly in her chest, listening to Damini describe a pattern she had clearly made peace with.
Mihir had his own guilt to reckon with. Six and a half years. If Noina had never found her way into this house, into Mihir’s weaker moments, Gomzi would never have had reason to keep his own distance from the house the way he had — wouldn’t have learned, from his own parents’ broken example, that leaving before anyone could be hurt further was sometimes mistaken for kindness. Whatever had grown wrong between Gautam and Damini in these years, some part of its root reached all the way back to Mihir’s failures long before either of their children’s marriages had needed protecting from anything.
She reached for his hand under the table without looking at him, her fingers finding his the way they always did now — easily, certainly. Not an accusation. She had long since stopped carrying this particular weight as anything sharp enough to wound him with. Only a reminder, offered quietly to herself as much as to him: that they were close enough now to such mending themselves, and that whatever Gomzi and Damini still owed each other, there was time yet for it to be repaid.
Mihir’s hand turned in hers, holding on rather than simply being held. Whether he had followed the exact shape of her thought or only felt the change in her grip, she couldn’t tell — but something in the way he tightened his fingers around hers said he understood enough of it. *Soon,* the grip seemed to say, for both of their unfinished things at once. *Everything will be fine.*
“Bas use bata dena,” Tulsi said to Damini, “hum uska intezaar karte hain. Jitna time woh de sakta hai, utna hi sahi.”
Something in Damini’s face eased slightly — not hope, exactly, just the relief of not being asked to want anything more than what was realistic. “Bata dungi,” she said.
Just then Garima ran past, freed at last from the table, Timsy close behind her, both of them shouting something about the rainbow they’d drawn that morning being “naya wala, pehle wale se bhi acha” — and at the far end of the table, only two people understood exactly what that meant.
Mihir’s eyes found Tulsi’s. He said nothing for a moment, then leaned slightly toward her, his voice pitched low enough to stay only between them.
“Hume bhi apna naya rainbow banana hai.”
Tulsi didn’t answer right away. She only looked at him — really looked — before turning back to her chai, something quiet and unfinished settling into the space where an answer might have gone.
-----
Tulsi found her in the garden that morning after breakfast sitting alone on the swing with her phone face-down beside her, untouched — the particular stillness of someone who’d run out of things to scroll past and hadn’t yet found anything to replace it with.
She lowered herself onto the swing beside Mitali without asking permission for it, the way she’d slowly given herself permission to do with all the children of this house since coming back — a right she knew she still held over every member of this family.
“Mitali,” she said, watching the garden rather than the young woman beside her, giving the question somewhere else to land besides directly on her face. “Kuch socha tumne? Career ke baare mein. Ya phir studies continue karne ke baare mein.”
Mitali’s shoulders rose and fell once — not quite a shrug, more the particular weariness of being asked a question that had stopped feeling like curiosity from anyone and started feeling like a test she kept failing. “Pata nahi, Maa.” Her eyes stayed on her own hands, folded in her lap. “Kabhi socha hi nahi maine iske baare mein. Toh ab soch hi paa rahi ki mujhe kya karna hai. Itne saalon mein kisi ne poocha bhi nahi tha — toh maine bhi nahi socha. Ab recently aapne poocha toh kuch —“.
She didn’t know how to finish that sentence.
Tulsi let that sit a moment, the swing’s small creak filling the space where a quicker response might have gone.
“Suchitra ne mujhe bataya tha,” she said finally, “ki tumne pehle modeling ki thi.”
Something flickered across Mitali’s face — not quite alarm, but close to its edge. “Haan. Lekin woh — bas time pass tha. Kuch serious nahi tha usmein.”
“Toh modeling ko as a career kyun nahi sochti?” Tulsi asked her.
“Modeling?” Mitali looked at her uncertainly.
After a pause, she said, “maine bataya na time pass tha woh”
“Time pass tha,” Tulsi repeated, the way she had with Suchitra that morning, not letting the phrase pass unexamined this time either. “Lekin tumhe achha laga tha karte hue?”
A pause, longer than the question needed — Mitali visibly weighing whether the honest answer was even allowed here. “Haan,” she admitted at last, quietly, as if confessing to something. “Mujhe pasand tha. Camera ke saamne hona, naye outfits, naye looks. Lagta tha jaise main kuch — main khud kuch hoon. Apne aap mein.” She stopped herself there, the sentence folding back in on itself before it could go any further, and looked away toward the flowerbeds instead.
Tulsi watched her for a moment — the careful posture, the old habit of making herself smaller than the room required, the same instinct she imagined had once let Noina shape this girl into exactly the tool she’d needed.
“Mitali.” She waited until the girl’s eyes came back to hers before she went on. “Tumhare paas uske liye beauty bhi hai, figure bhi hai, aur jo confidence camera ke saamne dikhta hai tumhare chehre par jab tum iske baare mein baat karti ho — woh sabko nahi milta. Kam logon ko milta hai, itni asaani se. Toh tumhare liye isse acha career kya hi hoga?”
Mitali looked up, genuinely confused now. She started saying, “Ab? Kaise Maa? Iss family ka part banne ke baad kaise? Virani family ki ek traditional image hai society mein.”
She paused, then added, more to her own lap than to Tulsi, “Aur waise bhi — Maasi, Noina ke kaaran iss family ki reputation already kharaab hui hai. Main aur add nahi karna chahti usmein.”
Tulsi turned to look at her properly now.
“Tumhe galat lagta hai modeling karna?” she asked. “Sharam aati hai karte hue?”
“Nahi, Maa, bilkul nahi.” Mitali shook her head quickly, as if the suggestion itself needed correcting before anything else could be said. “Lekin society—”
“Society ki, logon ki parwah na maine kabhi ki hai, naa hi tumhe karni chahiye.” Tulsi’s voice stayed even, but something settled and certain underneath it. “Aur jo Noina ne kiya hai — uska bojh tumhe uthane ki zaroorat nahi hai. Woh uska kiya hua hai. Tumhara nahi.”
Something in Mitali’s face came undone slightly — the particular unguarded look of someone hearing, for the first time in years, an opinion about herself that she’d actually let herself want to be true. Noina’s voice had shaped most of her life until very recently, and Noina had never once told her anything was hers to want. Suchitra had only ever told her what was safe. This was neither of those.
This was Maa, who had stood beside her when she decided on the legal case against her aunt without once making her feel like a pawn in it, who had been happy to hear “Maa” the very first time Mitali had used the word — and whose opinion, somewhere in these past months without either of them quite naming the moment it happened, had come to matter to her more than anyone else’s left standing.
“Sochungi,” she said, barely above the garden’s own quiet. “Sach mein sochungi, Maa.”
They sat a while after that, the swing moving in its own small rhythm, neither of them in any hurry to fill the quiet with more than it needed.
“Lekin—” Mitali said eventually, almost reluctant to bring it up at all, “maine weight put on kar liya hai. Kaafi.”
“Toh lose kar lo,” Tulsi said, simply, as if this were the least complicated part of the entire conversation. “Young ho. Koi badi baat nahi hai.” She thought for a second. “Damini ki ek friend hai, fitness trainer hai — uska centre hai yahan paas hi mein. Join kar lo. Damini se number le lena uska.”
Mitali nodded, something almost like relief in the gesture — the relief of a problem being handed back to her in a size she could actually manage.
After a moment, Tulsi gave her a look, mock-stern, the corner of her mouth not quite cooperating with the seriousness she was aiming for.
“Aur ab agar kabhi tumhare haath mein chips ya junk food dekha — toh bahut bura hoga, Mitali.“
Mitali smiled and side-hugged her, “Maa.”
Tulsi put her hand on her head briefly and then smiled back, “chalo, mujhe nikalna hai bandhej ke liye.”
-----
He had seen them from the drawing room window — Tulsi and Mitali on the garden swing, Mitali’s shoulders doing that thing they did when she was being asked something she hadn’t let herself want an answer to yet, and Tulsi sitting beside her the way she sat beside all of them when something needed to be said without being forced.
He stepped back from the window, away from the glass, and dialed.
Aarti picked up on the second ring.
“Mihir uncle. Sab theek?”
“Sab theek hai,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Ek baat batani thi. Joshi sahab aa rahe hain Anjaar — do teen din mein. Interview ke liye, records dekhne ke liye.”
“Haan, uncle, Vaishnavi ne bataya tha. Sab taiyaar hai. Purani workers ko bhi bol diya hai — jo Kaki ke saath shuru se hain. Sab aa jaayenge. Aur baaki sab bhi taiyaar hain - woh jo dekhna chahen, jisse bhi baat karna chahen, kar sakte hain.
“Achha kiya.” He glanced toward the garden once — Tulsi was nodding at something Mitali had said, her hand moving in that particular way it did when she was making a point she considered obvious. He turned back. “Ek baat aur. Mandir ke baare mein — jo Kaki karti hain, jo paisa jaata hai wahan — Joshi sahab ke saamne uska koi zikr nahi.”
A small pause. “Lekin uncle, yeh toh achi baat hai—”
“Mujhe pata hai,” he said. “Issi liye nahi chahta.”
He let that sit a moment.
“Tumhari Kaki ne yeh kabhi apne naam ke liye nahi kiya,” he said. “Kisi ko dikhane ke liye nahi kiya. Unke liye ye personal hai. Agar kahin likha gaya toh woh cheez jo sirf unki thi — unki hi nahi rahegi.”
“Samajh gayi,” Aarti said, the earlier brightness in her voice settling into something quieter. “Vaishnavi ko bhi bata dungi. Aur kuch preparation?”
“Bas itna hi. Baaki sab dikha dena unhe — records, purane ledgers, jo bhi maangein. Sirf yeh ek cheez.”
“Theek hai, uncle. Kaki ki cheez hai — humein kya haq hai batane ka.”
He thanked her and hung up.
He pocketed the phone and stood there a moment, the relief arriving slowly, the way it does when you realize you’ve caught something just before it fell.
Thankfully, it had occurred to him on time. If Joshi’s team had stumbled onto the temple donations without warning — if it had appeared in print, her name attached to something she had always kept entirely her own — she would have felt it as a violation, however well-intentioned. He knew her well enough to know that. What she gave, she gave without wanting it witnessed. That was the whole point of the giving.
He hoped there was nothing else he’d missed. He ran back through everything — Vaishnavi, Aarti, the records, the ledgers, the workers being interviewed — searching for some detail he hadn’t thought to protect, some corner of her life he’d inadvertently left exposed. He couldn’t find one. But the hope sat uneasy anyway, the way it does when you love someone who has already absorbed more hurt than any one life should reasonably hold, and the thought of adding even the smallest fraction more — even accidentally, even in the course of trying to honor her — is genuinely unbearable.
*Bas,* he told himself. *Yeh kaafi hai. Ab kuch nahi chookega.*
Through the window, Tulsi was getting up from the swing now, her hand briefly on Mitali’s head before she turned toward the house.
He moved away from the window before she could see him standing there.
-----
Gautam arrived a little after six, the cab pulling up just as the evening light was beginning to soften over the garden. He came in with his usual brisk efficiency — briefcase in one hand, phone still half-raised to his ear finishing a call — and for a moment the house simply watched him the way it always did, recalibrating itself around a presence that came so rarely it never quite stopped being an occasion.
“Gomzi!” Mihir reached him first, pulling him into a brief, solid embrace before holding him back by the shoulders to look at him properly. “Kitna thaka hua dikh raha. Case kaisa chal raha hai?”
“Thik chal raha hai, Dad. Bas lamba din ho gaya aaj.”
He bent to touch Tulsi’s feet next, the gesture unhurried, neither performed nor perfunctory — something that had settled into its proper place between them over these months, the way it hadn’t, perhaps, in years before. Tulsi rested her hand briefly on his head before he straightened, and something passed across her face in that half-second that she didn’t try to hide — not quite guilt, not quite tenderness, but some private reckoning with years of his absence that she knew, somewhere underneath everything else, she and Mihir’s own unraveling had played its part in lengthening.
“Bhabhi,” Ritik said, grinning, “ab toh pooc lo Bhaiya se ki ghar pe rukne mein kya problem hai.”
“Koi problem nahi hai,” Gautam said, easy, practiced, the answer arriving before the question had even fully landed. “Bas court ke paas hotel zyaada convenient hai.”
He paused a moment, surprised at the ease with which he had replied to Ritik.
No one pushed it. No one asked him to stay home after that. But Tulsi caught the small, familiar weariness pass over Damini’s face — not hurt exactly, just the old shape of an answer she’d stopped expecting to change.
Dinner was loud in its usual way — Garima narrating a story about a substitute teacher to anyone who’d listen, Timsy more invested in cutting her roti to smaller and smaller pieces than eating any. Gautam sat between his father and Damini, and Tulsi noticed, quietly, the way she noticed most things now, that he laughed more easily tonight than he had on his last visit.
Once the plates had cleared, he reached for his briefcase.
“Mitali,” he said, “yeh tumhare papers hain. Maine khud check kiye hain. Sirf yahan, aur yahan sign karna hai.” He slid two folders toward her. “Padh lena pehle. Koi doubt ho toh abhi poochh lo, before you sign them.”
“Thank you, Bhaiya,” Mitali said, the weight of the moment settling into her hands along with the papers.
“Mention not. Tumhara haq hai. Maine sirf kaagaz banwaye hain.”
By the time dinner wound down, the sky outside had gone fully dark, and Gautam rose, glancing at his watch. “Achha, main nikalta hoon.”
“Itni raat mein cab mein jaoge?” Damini asked. “Traffic bhi hoga abhi.”
“Thik hai, manage ho jayega.”
Mihir didn’t say anything immediately. He simply looked at his son for a moment — the particular look of a man who had spent a year apart from his own wife once, and knew exactly the shape of the excuse being offered here.
“Apna ghar hote hue,” he said finally, quiet, without any edge to it, “tu hotel mein kyun rehta hai, Gomzi?”
A pause.
Then Mihir added, “Thaka hua lag raha hai beta. Aaj raat ruk jaa.”
Gautam didn’t answer right away. Something worked behind his eyes — a man standing at the edge of a decision he’d perhaps already half-made days ago, only now admitting it to himself in front of the people who’d notice.
“Dad,” he said, almost apologetic, “main kapde nahi laya. Night wear, I mean.”
“Mere paas hain,” Mihir said, already waving the objection away before it had finished landing. “Track pants, t-shirts — brand new pade hain, kabhi pehne nahi. Tujhe fit bhi aa jayenge.”
Gautam looked at his father a second longer, then exhaled, something in his shoulders giving way. “Theek hai,” he said. “Aaj ruk jaata hoon.”
The room didn’t erupt — there was no need for that kind of noise, not for something this quietly significant — but something passed through it all the same, a small current shared between the adults, none of them saying anything that might make Gautam feel cornered into a decision he’d arrived at on his own.
Damini said nothing. She only nodded once and turned toward the stairs, leaving him to follow at whatever pace he needed.
-----
He changed into Mihir’s track pants in silence, the unfamiliar softness of borrowed clothes somehow making him feel more like a guest in his own life than the hotel room ever had.
Damini was sitting at the edge of the bed when he came out of the attached bathroom, her hands folded in her lap, not quite looking at him.
“Damini.” He sat beside her, leaving a careful, deliberate distance between them, the kind a man leaves when he isn’t yet sure he has the right to close it. “Listen.”
She turned to him.
A pause — long enough that the air conditioner’s low hum became the only sound in the room.
“Tum khush ho yahan?” he asked. “Wapas ghar aakar?”
“Bahut zyaada,” she said. “Aur shayad bilkul nahi.”
He frowned, the contradiction sitting strangely against the careful evenness of her voice. “Matlab?”
“Ghar aake bahut khush hoon, sab ke saath.” She looked down at her own hands before lifting her eyes back to his. “Lekin tumhare bina kuch achha nahi lagta, Gomzi. Kuch bhi.”
He said nothing for a moment, the words settling into him slower than they should have, given how plainly she’d said them.
“I miss you too, Damini,” he said finally. “I can’t really express - kitna.”
Another pause, longer than the first — neither of them rushing to fill it, both of them simply sitting inside it, the way two people do when they’ve finally stopped performing the distance they no longer actually want.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you too,” she said. “Itna ki kabhi keh hi nahi paayi properly. Tumse, ya khud se.”
They looked at each other in silence - the coldness that had been characteristic of their interactions until a few months back, replaced by something else.
Their faces had drifted closer somewhere in the silence, neither of them marking the exact moment it happened.
He reached for her hand then, turned palm-up in his — and then closed the distance between their lips himself, slow enough that she could have pulled back if she’d wanted to. She didn’t. Her free hand came up to rest against his chest, not pushing, only feeling the unevenness of his breath under her palm, the proof that this mattered to him exactly as much as it did to her.
When they finally drew back, just far enough to see each other properly, neither one reached for the lamp.
The night was only beginning for them.
When Gautam left Shantiniketan early the next morning, he left Damini with a hope she had not allowed herself in a long time.
-----
A few days later, after the house had settled back into its ordinary rhythm and Gautam’s borrowed track pants had been washed and folded and returned to Mihir’s cupboard without comment, the call came.
Dr. Joshi. Brisk as always, no preamble.
“Mr. Virani. The Anjaar visit went well — excellent material, excellent people. Your Vaishnavi is remarkably precise for someone her age. Aarti is equally capable and helpful. A pause, the particular pause of a man moving efficiently from one item to the next. “One small request remains. We need a photograph of Tulsiji — mid-work, factory in the background. The image should tell the story before the article even begins. A founder on her own factory floor. That’s what gives the piece its credibility — not a studio, not a posed shot. The real thing.”
“Kitne din mein chahiye?”
“Two, three days at most. I’ll send you my photographer Arun’s contact — he’s worked with me on three publications. You can coordinate directly with him. What she wears, how the shot is framed — I’ll leave that side entirely to you, Mr. Virani.” The faintest note of dry amusement in his voice before he rang off. “I imagine you’ll know better than I would.”
Mihir called Vaishnavi within the hour.
She picked up immediately, already slightly braced — he’d felt she always was now, whenever his name appeared on her screen.
“Uncle.”
“Vaishnavi. Ek kaam hai. Article ke liye ek photo chahiye — tumhari Kaki ki, kaam karte hue, factory background mein. Joshi sahab ke photographer aa rahe hain — Arun, do teen din mein. Achhi saree pehnani hai unhe, Bandhej ka sabse achha design — aur shot factory mein hoga.”
The pause that followed had its own particular texture — not reluctance exactly, more the sound of someone rapidly calculating how impossible a task actually was before committing to it.
“Uncle — main? Kaise? Kya bolke pehnaaoon unhe? Aap toh jaante hi hain Kaki factory mein simple cotton sarees mein aati hain, hamesha. Agar maine kaha aaj yeh pehen lijiye toh woh seedha poochhengi kyun. Aur main unse jhooth bol nahi sakti — aap jaante hain yeh bhi.”
“Jhooth nahi bolna hai,” he said. “Sach bolna — photographer aa rahe hain, Bandhej ke liye, website ke liye. Itna hi. Baaki tum sambhal lena.”
He heard her exhale. “Theek hai, uncle. Try karungi.”
“Tumpe bharosa hai.”
A small silence, then — quieter, almost to herself: “Bas Kaki ko jab pata chalega — mujhe lagta hai woh mujhe maaf kar dengi. Aap zyaada mushkil mein hain.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. He thanked her and hung up.
-----
Three days later, Vaishnavi found Tulsi in the cabin, bent over the worksheets the way she always was by mid-morning, pencil tucked behind her ear without her noticing it was there.
“Kaki, main website pe kaam kar rahi thi—”
“Acha hai, Vaishnavi,” Tulsi said, not looking up.
Vaishnavi set the folded saree down on the edge of the desk — deep maroon, the bandhej work on it dense and fine, clearly not factory floor material. “Kaki, aap yeh pehen lijiye. Maine ek photographer ko bulaya hai aapki photos lene ke liye.”
Tulsi’s pencil stopped. She looked up. “Meri photos? Kyun?” A small frown. “Sarees ki photos lo. Karigar ki photos lo. Meri kyun? Bandhej mere akele ka thode na hai — hum sab ka hai.”
“Unn sab ki bhi lenge, Kaki,” Vaishnavi said, already prepared for this. “Lekin jo website designer hai, woh bolta hai pehle founder ki chahiye. Uss hisaab se color theme decide karega website ke liye.”
Tulsi made a small, unconvinced sound and went back to her worksheets. And said without looking up:
“Theek hai. Ek photo lo. Lekin aise hi — jaise main abhi baithi hoon.”
“Kaki.” Vaishnavi’s voice climbed half a note, the exasperation entirely genuine. “Ek photo hi toh maang rahi hoon.”
“Toh lo,” Tulsi said, gesturing at herself — the cotton saree, the dye on two fingers, the pencil she’d just retrieved from behind her ear.
“Aap samajhti kyun nahi,” Vaishnavi said, and now something almost wounded entered her voice, real enough that Tulsi looked up properly. “Yeh ek mauka hai hamare designs ko showcase karne ka. Maine yeh saree kitni mehnat se design ki hai, Kaki — aur yeh design aapki age ki ladies pe perfectly suit karegi. Issi liye aapko keh rahi hoon. Kisi aur ko nahi.”
Tulsi looked at her a moment — at the saree, at the particular stubbornness on Vaishnavi’s face, the one she recognized because she’d worn it herself often enough in Anjaar, fighting for some small thing that no one else had thought worth fighting for.
“Acha, theek hai,” she said, picking up the saree at last. “Lao. Pehen leti hoon.”
Vaishnavi exhaled — relief arriving a half-second before she could compose her face around it — and slipped out to call Arun before Tulsi could ask anything else.
-----
The days that followed slid by without either Tulsi or Mihir quite marking their passing — the kind of stretch that only reveals its own shape afterward, looking back. Mornings on the balcony, kaada and chai arriving and leaving without comment now, the silences or conversations between them no longer requiring anything to fill them. Late evenings with chamomile folded into ordinary things — a child’s homework, a missed phone call returned, dinner eaten a little later than planned. Nothing about it announced itself as healing. It simply accumulated, the way trust always had between them, long before either of them had needed a word for it — and would, it seemed, need none now either.
-----
It was the dawn of April 4th.
She woke a few minutes before her alarm, the way she always did, the body keeping its own time regardless of what the clock said.
The first thing she did, before her eyes had even properly adjusted to the grey light at the window, was reach for her phone.
Nothing.
No message at midnight. Not from him.
There had been a time — years and years of it, before everything — when he would shake her awake at the stroke of twelve, however deep she’d already gone into sleep, however many times she swatted his hand away and mumbled at him to let her sleep, *kal subah bata dena*. He never once let her finish the sentence. *Aaj hi aur abhi hi kehna hai,* he’d say, every single year, as if the date itself might slip away from them both if he waited even six hours to say it. She used to find it faintly ridiculous. She missed it now with an intensity that surprised her, lying here in a room that wasn’t even the same room, on a morning he very possibly hadn’t realized had arrived yet.
They don’t share a room anymore, she reminded herself. *He can’t very well descend the stairs at midnight to wake me. But a message — surely a message wasn’t too much to expect.* Unless he was simply asleep. Unless this year, somehow, the date had passed him by entirely, folded into everything else that had needed his attention these past weeks — the trip to Gujarat, whatever business had kept pulling him away in such oddly secretive bursts, the deflections at her polite inquiries, she’d decided, for now, not to push on.
She set the phone face-down on the side table and got up.
In the bathroom, running the water hotter than she needed it, she caught her own reflection in the fogged mirror and laughed quietly at herself — actually laughed, a short exhale through her nose. *Look at you. Over sixty years old, standing here disappointed because no one remembered to wish you at midnight.* Birthdays were for children, surely — for Garima’s excited countdown, for Timsy’s solemn insistence on choosing the cake flavour herself, for Akshay and Madhvi’s annual argument over who got to blow out which half of the candles. Not for a grandmother to so many kids, who had built a company, survived six and a half years of exile, and come home to a husband who could, apparently, still surprise her — usually for the better these days, but evidently capable of forgetting things too, like anyone else.
*Vanity,* she thought, working shampoo through her hair, almost amused at herself now. *That’s all this is. Plain vanity, wanting to be remembered.* She let the water run a moment longer than necessary, the warmth of it some small private indulgence on a morning that otherwise seemed determined to pass like any other.
Still — when she stepped out and reached for the towel, she found herself reaching for the phone again before she’d even properly dried her hands.
Nothing.
Not from him. Not from Vaishnavi either, which struck her as its own small oddity. Vaishnavi, who had gone half-mad with planning every year in Anjaar — insisting on a cake even when Tulsi told her not to bother, showing up at six in the morning with flowers from her own garden, once driving forty minutes to a town with a proper bakery because the local one’s icing wasn’t “good enough for Kaki’s birthday” — Vaishnavi had not so much as texted.
*No matter,* she told herself, setting the phone down for good this time, refusing to let it sit in her hand a moment longer like something she was waiting on. *It’s only a date. The house will remember when it remembers. There’s an order to finish today, and Bandhej doesn’t care what day it is.*
She dressed, then crossed to the wall where Baa and Bapuji watched over the room from a single framed photograph, the diya and dhoop already laid out beside it in the prayer corner from the night before. She lit the dhoop first, watching the thread of smoke climb and curl toward the photograph, then the diya, cupping the flame steady with one hand until it caught. She stood a moment in the familiar quiet of it — the same ritual every morning of her life, untouched by any of the six and a half years that had touched everything else.
Then she bent and touched the photograph itself, her fingers grazing the glass over where Baa’s feet would have been, then Bapuji’s, the gesture worn smooth from repetition. *Aashirwad dena, Baa, Bapuji. Aaj bhi, jaise hamesha.* She didn’t ask for anything specific. She never had. Only the blessing, asked for and received the same way every morning — birthday or otherwise.
Then she straightened her saree, picked up her phone one last time out of habit rather than hope, and went out to start her day.
She went to open the main door quietly, the way she always did at this hour — not wanting to wake anyone who might still be sleeping, the house not yet fully into its morning noise.
But the main door was already open. He was already there. Not inside, not yet at the balcony — standing just at the threshold, close enough to the doorway that she nearly walked into him, his eyes on the gate at the far end of the path.
Maybe he wanted to wish her in person, first thing as she came out of her room, and was waiting for her here, she thought. But then why was he looking outside rather than towards her room?
“Jai Shree Krishna,” he said distractedly, barely turning his head.
“Jai Shree Krishna,” she said, looking at him for a moment before stepping past him toward the tulsi plant.
She lifted the small pot she kept by the door and filled it from the outdoor outlet, the water running cold over her fingers in the early morning air. Then back to the plant — pouring slowly, evenly, the way she had every morning of her adult life, the ritual of it settling into her hands without needing her attention. She then folded her hands briefly, eyes closed, the prayer moving through her the way breathing did, present without requiring thought.
When she opened her eyes she carefully plucked a few leaves — the good ones, the ones that had caught enough sun — and held them loosely in her palm.
She glanced back toward the door.
He was still there. Still looking at the gate with that particular quality of attention that had nothing to do with the gate itself — the studied looseness of a man trying very hard to look like he wasn’t waiting for anything in particular.
Strange, she thought, to be this on edge over newspapers. But she had already decided, somewhere between the tulsi plant and the cold water on her fingers, that he had simply forgotten what day it was — and so she let it go.
“Wahan kya kar rahe ho?” she asked, the leaves still in her hand.
“Kuch nahi,” he said, too casually, his eyes still on the gate. “Bas socha — newspapers aayen toh le loon.”
She looked at him for one more moment, that studied profile, the careful ordinary of his posture.
“Acha,” she said. “Main kitchen mein jaa rahi hoon.”
“Haan, theek hai,” he said, still not quite looking at her. “Main papers leke balcony jaata hoon.”
She went inside, the tulsi leaves warm now in her closed palm, and behind her she felt him settle back into his waiting as if she had never interrupted it at all.
The moment she was out of sight, the papers slid through the gap at the bottom of the half-closed door, and he was on them before they’d even fully landed — gathering the stack, flipping through with quick, practiced movements until he reached it: the Saturday premium supplement of the Trade & Industry Gazette, and there it was, a photograph of Tulsi mid-work at the Mumbai factory, the bandhej work on the maroon saree catching the light just the way Arun had promised it would.
He carried the whole stack to the balcony almost at a run, settling into the chair, eyes flicking up toward the kitchen door every few seconds even as he scanned it — the entire supplement given over to Bandhej, page after page of it, Tulsi’s photograph from the Mumbai factory floor sitting beneath a headline he had read perhaps a dozen times already in drafts Joshi had shared with him, and yet it read differently now, printed, real, irreversible.
He heard her footsteps on the stairs before he’d finished the second paragraph.
In one motion he set the stack down on the table, the Gazette deliberately on top — and then, almost as fast, thought better of it and slid the Times of India over it instead, smoothing the pile with the flat of his hand just as she stepped out onto the balcony, tray in hand.
He stepped forward to take it from her, the way he always did, setting it down beside the newspapers, on the table between them. But he didn’t sit.
He moved instead to the railing, one hand resting on it, and looked at her for a moment longer than the moment required.
“Tumse kuch kehna hai,” he said.
She was about to sit when something in his voice made her pause — a particular gravity she hadn’t heard from him in weeks, not since the car ride after the conclave.
“Kya?” she asked, coming to stand beside him at the railing rather than sitting across from him at the table. The kaada sat behind them, untouched, the morning suddenly feeling like it had narrowed down to this one stretch of railing and whatever he was working up to say.
He didn’t look at her right away. His eyes were on the garden below, on nothing in particular.
“Jab tum wapas aayi thi, mahino pehle,” he said, “tumne kaha tha — tum kabhi dobara meri patni nahi banogi. Haina?”
Something in her went very still. *Is he—* The thought arrived half-formed and unwelcome. *Is this about to be about separation? Has something changed?* She had not let herself consider, in weeks now, that the ground beneath them could shift again, and the sudden possibility of it landed with a sharpness she hadn’t braced for.
“Haan,” she said carefully. “Lekin—”
“Poori baat sun lo, Tulsi.” He turned to face her now, and whatever was in his expression wasn’t grief, wasn’t retreat — something steadier than that, something that had clearly been decided long before this morning. “Isse pehle ki tum kuch aur expect karne lago, main ek baat clear kar dena chahta hoon. Aaj main bhi yehi kehta hoon.” He paused. “I never want to treat you or see you as my wife again. Except legally. On paper.”
She stared at him. Whatever she had braced herself for — and she realized now she’d braced for something — it had not been this. The words didn’t assemble into sense fast enough, and for a moment she simply stood there, the railing cool under her hand, waiting for the rest of it to make the first part bearable.
He didn’t make her wait long.
“Jo bhi galatiyan mujhse hui hain itne saalon mein,” he went on, “woh isiliye hui ki — kaafi hadd tak, I took you for granted. Only because tum meri wife thi.” His jaw tightened slightly around the admission, the old discipline of not letting himself look away from his own failure even now. “Ab main nahi chahta dobara kabhi aisa ho. Iska ek hi tareeka hai jo mujhe saaf dikhta hai.”
He stopped there.
“Kya?” she asked, and heard her own voice come out smaller than she meant it to.
“Batata hoon,” he said. “Lekin usse pehle kuch aur bhi bolna tha. Shayad tumhe thoda off tangent lage.” A faint, almost nervous breath. “Lekin — yaad hai, chauntaalis saal pehle kya hua tha?”
She blinked, thrown by the turn, though something in her chest had already begun, cautiously, to loosen.
“Hum bachpan ke dost the,” he said, before she could answer. “Main uss waqt Payal se engaged tha — family ke dabaav mein hi sahi. Ek baar toda, phir wapas rekindle ki thi engagement. Tab main tumhare paas aaya, aur kaha ki mujhe tumse pyaar hai. Tumhari feelings jo bhi ho, sochke bata dena, maine kaha tha.” A small, private smile crossed his face, gone almost as soon as it arrived. “Tumne kuch din baad mera pyaar accept kiya. Aur phir humne — Baa aur Bapuji ke aashirwaad se, mere cousins ke sehyog se — bhaag ke mandir mein shaadi kar li.”
“Yeh sab baatein ab kyun keh rahe ho?” she said, the question coming out sharper than she intended, the not-knowing finally too much to hold politely. “Jo bhi kehna hai, saaf saaf, seedhi tarah kaho na.”
“Main yeh kehna chahta hoon,” he said, holding her gaze now, “ki — humne courtship kabhi enjoy nahi ki.”
For a second she only looked at him, the sentence arriving somewhere she hadn’t expected it to land — not grief, not separation, something else entirely, something she didn’t yet have the shape of.
And then he was lowering himself onto one knee in front of her, right there on the balcony, a single rose appearing from his pocket — and she had just enough time to think, absurdly, *where has he been keeping that* — before he spoke again.
“Tulsi.” His voice had dropped into something quieter than she’d heard from him in years, all the performance gone out of it entirely. “Will you be the one and only love of my life?” A breath. “Kya tum mujhe permission deti ho — main tumhe waise hi pamper aur cherish karoon, jaise tum hamesha se deserve karti thi. Jaise mujhe shuru se karna chahiye tha.”
She looked down at him — this man on his knee on their balcony, the rose held up toward her with a steadiness that had clearly cost him something to find — and felt something in her chest crack open in a way that had nothing to do with old wounds at all.
“Umar dekhi hai hamari?” she managed, the words arriving before the feeling had fully caught up to them. “Iss umar mein courtship, pamper, cherish — kya bol rahe ho, Mihir? Theek toh ho?”
“Umar ka pyaar se kya connection?” he said, entirely undeterred. “Hum dono ek doosre ko boodha hone hi nahi denge.” His eyes held hers, something pleading and amused both at once. “Ab jaldi batao — main apne hi ghutne pe hoon, kisi aur ke nahi.”
She let the silence stretch, just slightly, just to watch what it did to his face. “Sochne toh do thoda,” she said.
“Itna kya soch rahi ho,” he said, “deal buri nahi hai. Tum full-on tantrums throw kar sakti ho. Rooth sakti ho — aur main tumhe manaata rahoonga.”
“Naa. Deal kuch khaas achi nahi hai,” she said, fighting to keep her face as composed as his had been a moment ago.
His eyebrows rose, something delighted breaking through the seriousness. “Negotiate kar rahi ho? I like it.” He shifted slightly on his knee. “Batao — how can I sweeten the deal?”
“Ek janam se kya hoga?” she said. “Saat janam ki baat hoti thi na hamari? Ab bhi saat janam ki deal de sakte ho, toh theek hai.”
“Of course,” he said, without a second’s hesitation. “Sirf saat janam nahi — aane wale har janam ki hai yeh.”
“Paaku?”
“Ekdum paaku.” He smiled as he said it.
She took the rose from his hand — the stem still slightly warm from his pocket — and then reached down and took his other hand, pulling him up to standing in front of her.
They stood there a moment, just looking at each other, thirty-eight years and six and a half years and one rose all folded into the same small space between them.
He raised his arms slightly, then hesitated — the old, careful uncertainty of a man still asking permission with his body even after she’d already given it with her words — and she answered by stepping into him before he could finish deciding.
His arms closed around her like she was the only thing on the balcony, on the property, on the earth that morning that mattered at all. He bent his head and pressed the lightest kiss to her hair, barely a kiss at all, more the suggestion of one.
“A very happy birthday, Tulsi,” he said, quietly, into the top of her head.
She pulled back just enough to look at him. “Tumhe yaad tha?”
“Raat ko barah baje se hi wait kar raha tha,” he said. “Lekin socha — pehle yeh baat kar loon, phir wish karoonga.” A small, sheepish breath. “Sorry — agar tumne wait kiya toh.”
“Wait toh kiya,” she admitted, something rueful tugging at her mouth. “Aur thodi disappointment bhi hui, sach kahoon toh.”
His hands came up to his own ears, properly contrite, the gesture so sudden and so familiar — something out of a much younger version of him — that it caught her entirely off guard. “Really, very sorry.”
She reached up and pulled his hands back down, holding them in hers instead. “Lekin yeh andaaz mujhe bahut acha laga.“
“Ab kaada pee len?” she said, finally easing back from him, something soft still lingering in her voice. “Thanda ho jaayega.”
They settled into their chairs, the rose set carefully aside on the table, and reached for their cups. She watched him over the rim of hers — still faintly unable to believe the last ten minutes had happened at all — and was mildly startled to see his eyes drop, almost immediately, to the headlines of the Times of India sitting on top of the stack.
Today, of all days. She’d expected the papers to stay folded entirely this morning, the way they sometimes still did when neither of them could be bothered to reach for them. Instead here he was, scanning headlines that, as far as she could tell, held nothing of any particular interest — no election news, no market crisis, nothing that would normally hold his attention this closely. Clearly, she thought, with a small private amusement that didn’t quite manage to cover the sting underneath it, the newspaper is more interesting to him than I am, this morning of all mornings.
He picked it up properly now, holding it slightly higher than usual, his eyes still fixed on the page.
She looked at her kaada in the meantime, took a sip — and that was when she saw it. The paper beneath, its top half visible, and on it, unmistakably, her own face.
“Arre,” she said, the sound escaping before she could stop it.
“Kya hua?” His voice came out almost steady, almost, the paper still held up at the exact height needed to keep his own face hidden behind it.
“Kuch nahi,” she said, already setting down her cup and reaching across for the paper now lying exposed on the table — the one that had been beneath the Times of India a moment ago.
She held up the paper properly now, both hands around it — and the first thing she saw, before the headline, before anything else, was her own face.
She stared at it for a moment, not quite reading yet, just absorbing the fact of it. The Mumbai factory blurred just enough behind her to read as context rather than subject. Her own hands visible at the edges of the frame, mid-movement, caught in the middle of something rather than posed for anything. She looked — and this struck her as strange, looking at her own photograph — entirely like herself.
Above it, in bold serif type:
***Bandhej — More Than a Business: An Ecosystem of Trust***
On top of it, slightly towards the right, in smaller fonts:
*Trade & Industry Gazette, Saturday Special Supplement.*
-----
Beneath the headline, in smaller type:
*By Dr. Harshvardhan Joshi, Independent Textile Historian.*
She stilled at the name.
Dr. Joshi. She placed him immediately — at the Conclave, perhaps fifteen days ago, the man who had drawn her into a conversation about indigo-vat fermentation with the ease of someone who already knew enough to ask the right questions and enough to listen properly to the answers. She had liked him. His interest had felt entirely genuine — the focused attention of a historian encountering work he considered significant, nothing more complicated than that.
She looked at his name again, then at the date on the masthead.
*Pehle se toh nahi tha yeh sab,* she thought, and then stopped herself. The conclave meeting had felt accidental — two people at an event, finding common ground. There had been nothing staged about his curiosity, nothing performed about his engagement.
And yet.
She filed the question away without answering it, the way she’d been filing things away all morning, and turned her attention back to the page.
She found her name almost immediately, the way you always look for your own name first without meaning to. It appeared exactly once, in the photograph caption.
*Tulsi Virani, Founder.*
Nothing else attached to it. No qualifier. No mention of Virani Industries. No mention of a husband, a family name, a lineage she had married into. Just her name, and the factory behind her.
She read the caption twice.
*Strange,* she thought, the first thread of something she couldn’t yet name pulling at her, quiet and insistent. *Every smallest piece ever written about Bandhej has found a way to mention him. Even the ones that had no reason to.*
She turned the page.
-----
The second spread stopped her almost immediately — not the text, but the photographs. Ten sarees, laid out in a careful grid, each one captioned with a date, a name, a location. *The First Ten.* She recognized the sarees before she read a single caption — recognized the dye lots, the resist patterns, the slight variations in the tie-work that told her exactly which week of which month each one had come from, because she had been there for every single one of them.
She hadn’t expected to see them here. Photographed, traced, documented — each one found wherever it had landed in the years since.
Three still in Anjaar. The first caption made her go very still: a karigar’s daughter she had known since the girl was fifteen, photographed at her own wedding two years ago, wearing her mother’s saree — the fabric softened with washing and wearing, the bandhej work still intact, still holding. She read the woman’s name twice. Set the paper down for a moment without realizing she’d done it.
Picked it up again.
Four scattered across India — Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad, one in a small town in Rajasthan she hadn’t known had any awareness of Bandhej at all. Three abroad — a name in New Jersey, one in Hamburg, one in Barcelona. The Germany caption was simple: a woman who had seen the saree at an exhibition, had bought it for the indigo gradation in the border work, and had been contacted years later by a researcher asking if she still had it. She did. She’d kept it carefully.
*a researcher,* the caption said.
She read that phrase once, then moved on, the thread pulling a little tighter without her quite letting herself follow it yet.
She almost missed the third spread entirely — her eyes had gone back to the karigar’s daughter in Anjaar, the wedding photograph, without her deciding to return there. She made herself turn the page.
The lost techniques section was where her reading slowed to almost nothing.
A resist-tie pattern unpracticed for forty years — she remembered the woman who had taught it to her, remembered sitting on the floor of her house for three months of Sundays until her own hands could approximate what the woman’s hands did without thinking. She remembered the afternoon the woman had said, *Ab tumhara haath bolne laga* — now your hands are speaking — and how she had returned to Amba Kutir that evening unable to say why her eyes kept blurring.
The article knew about the three months. It knew about the floor. It knew about the woman’s name, her age, the fact that she had believed until Tulsi came that the pattern would die with her.
Tulsi set the paper down again.
This time she was aware of doing it — aware of her own hands on the table, the paper face-up between them, the morning suddenly requiring more air than the balcony seemed to be providing.
She looked up — not at him, just up, at the garden, at the neem tree, at nothing.
Across the table, she was peripherally aware of the Times of India. Perfectly still. Not turning.
She picked the supplement back up.
The natural dye process. The double-weave. Each one described with a specificity that made her read certain sentences two and three times, not because they were unclear but because she kept stopping at the details — *the surviving notebook, the half-remembered instructions, the two women in their eighties* — and feeling the ground shift slightly beneath each one.
*How,* she thought, and then stopped the thought before it finished forming, the way you stop yourself from pulling a thread you aren’t ready to unravel yet.
She read on.
It was somewhere in the middle of the double-weave section — a detail about the specific shed sequence Tulsi had reconstructed over four attempts before it held — that she lowered the paper without meaning to, her hands dropping slightly, her eyes going unfocused for just a moment as something too large to immediately process moved through her.
Across the table, the Times of India rose. Smoothly, quickly — a fraction too quickly, the adjustment of a man who had been watching for exactly this moment and had very nearly been caught doing it. The paper settled at a height that covered him completely.
But not before she saw his grip on it.
Both hands. Knuckles slightly whitened. Held with the particular tension of someone maintaining a position that required more effort than it should.
She looked at his hands for one moment — just one — before dropping her eyes back to the supplement.
*Wahan kya kar rahe the,* she thought, *gate pe. Newspapers ke liye.* The studied looseness of his posture at the door this morning. The Times of India placed on top of the stack with a precision that had nothing to do with reading preference. The way his eyes had gone to the papers the moment she’d sat down, as if confirming something he already knew was there.
And then — arriving so quietly she almost didn’t catch it — the image of him at the gate, collecting the papers as they slid through. The moment he would have seen it. And she knew him only too well to know that he wouldn’t have been able to contain his loud exclamation, had he been genuinely surprised.
He had known.
He had known before he brought the papers to the balcony. Had known when he placed the Times of India on top.
She looked at the supplement in her hands.
*And yet,* she thought. *He said nothing. Showed me nothing. Let me find it myself.*
She turned to the last page.
**When One Woman Builds, a Community Rises**
The numbers arrived first — and she had to read them twice, not because they were unfamiliar but because seeing them assembled like this, in print, gave them a weight they didn’t quite have when she was living inside them. The count of women currently employed. The count of households where this represented the first independent income. The count of girls in school whose fees came, in part or in whole, from wages their mothers had earned at Bandhej.
Then the names.
A widow in Anjaar she knew well — had known since the first year, when the woman had come to the cooperative with nothing except a skill she’d been told had no market value, and had left three years later running her own small dye unit within the network. A girl, barely twenty, who had used her Bandhej wages to remove herself from an engagement her family had arranged before they understood she didn’t need it to survive. Vandana, quoted at length — Vandana, who had been there since Amba Kutir had four workers and no orders and no certainty of either, who spoke now about what the cooperative had meant for a town that had long since accepted its skilled women as invisible.
Her eyes were blurring slightly by the time she reached the closing paragraph of the section. She blinked, steadied herself, read on.
*Within artisan circles, Tulsi Virani is regarded less as an entrepreneur and more as a preservationist — a woman who built a commercially sustainable structure around something far harder to manufacture than fabric: trust.*
She read the word and something in her chest pulled tight and then released, the way a knot does when the right thread is finally found.
*Trust.*
A tear slid free before she’d finished deciding whether to let it. Then a second one, quieter than the first. She made no move to wipe either away, only kept reading, the words going slightly soft at the edges and then steadying again as she blinked.
-----
***Acknowledgments***
*Special thanks to the artisans, dye workers, and cooperative members of Anjaar, who opened their homes, their records, and their memories to our research team across prolonged visits over the past fortnight. Their generosity made this documentation possible. They are thanked first because they should always have been.*
She read the last sentence twice.
*They are thanked first because they should always have been.*
No researcher writing from the outside would know to say that. No historian, however thorough, would understand why the karigars needed to come before the publication, before the Institute, before everyone else — unless someone had told them. Unless someone had sat with them long enough to understand that the work and the workers were not two separate things, had never been, and that any document which failed to honor that in its very first acknowledgment had already missed the point.
Only one person would have known to say that.
Only one person had ever understood, without being told, that for her, the karigars came first.
She sat very still for a long moment, the supplement open in her lap, both hands flat against the page.
The Gujarat trip about 20 days back. The bell on the phone call — that specific bronze resonance she had recognized from six years of daily morning prayers and had told herself she’d imagined. The indigo-vat question at the conclave, answered with a precision no one acquires secondhand. The briefcase put away too quickly at lunch. The deflected questions, one after another, each one met with a deflection so smooth she had almost let herself believe it.
Almost.
And most telling of all: The article had been published in today’s issue. On her birthday.
She looked up.
Across the table, the Times of India had come down at some point without her noticing — it sat forgotten in his lap now, and he was no longer pretending to read anything at all. He was watching her with the particular stillness of a man who has been waiting a very long time for something, and is now watching it arrive, and doesn’t quite know what to do with his own face in the meantime.
Their eyes met.
He held her gaze for exactly one second — and then reached for the supplement still in her hands with an expression of fresh, entirely unconvincing curiosity.
“Yeh — yeh kya hai?” He turned it toward himself, as if seeing it for the first time, his eyebrows rising with what she had to admit was a remarkable performance. “Arre. Dikhao — poora supplement hai. Bandhej ke baare mein.” He looked up at her, something lighting in his face that was trying very hard to be surprise and was, in fact, something else entirely. “Tumne dekha? Aaj ka—”
“Haan,” she said.
Her voice came out perfectly steady.
“Dekha.”
She reached for her kaada, found it had gone completely cold, and drank it anyway, her eyes on the garden, on the neem tree, on the morning light moving through it the way it always did at this hour — ordinary and unhurried, asking nothing of anyone.
*Ekdum paaku,* she thought, and said nothing at all.
-----
**Author’s Note:**
Hello everyone — and thank you, as always, for being here.
This chapter was a long time coming, and I’ll be honest — it was one of the most carefully written ones I’ve attempted in this entire story. The proposal scene especially. I wanted it to feel earned rather than dramatic, playful rather than performative, and above all — *them.* These two people who have known each other for forty-four years and somehow still managed to never quite do things in the conventional order.
I hope the “Will you?” landed the way I intended it to — not as a grand romantic gesture but as something quieter and more permanent than that. A reframing. A choice made consciously this time, with full knowledge of everything it has already cost both of them.
And yes — for those of you wondering — the Trade & Industry Gazette supplement is only the *first* part of Mihir’s birthday gift to Tulsi. The second part is still on its way. I’ll say nothing more except that it arrives before the morning is over.
As always, I write faster when I know you’re reading. If this chapter moved you — if any moment in it stayed with you — please do leave a comment or review. It genuinely matters more than I can say. And if you’ve been reading silently until now, this might be a good chapter to finally say hello.
See you in Chapter 35.
— ElitePerfumer
Edited by ElitePerfumer - 13 hours ago
maybe di can even kill her now
Biwi to Husband's Lie Detection Machine ki tarah work karti hai.
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21