TuHir FF:Never Your Wife Again! Ch-35 on pg 64: Pehli Date - Page 64

Originally posted by: Phir_Mohabbat

Never your wife again . Maybe partner

Read the chapter and you will know

Originally posted by: bpatil3

Chapter 34:

Thank you for the lovely TuHir moments ❤️❤️❤️.

hey dear, thank u for this beautiful review-

My pleasure entirely - I have been waiting since chapter 1 to write these scenes.
Okies the scene starts from Damini disclosing Gautam's arrival plan. Her hidden sadness, longing was understood by both the parents.

yes. So glad it came out well.

Somewhere Mihir feels that it's bcoz of him Gajtam n Damini's life is affected. Leading a life alone is traumatic, it's hard to describe to the world also to live with it. Who can be a better person to understand this pain than Mihir n Tulsi. Tulsi supporting Mihir and trying to not feel guilty about his own mistakes, her advances to console him, holding his hand, giving him confidence that we are together is much more meaningful, and he acknowledged it.
Correct she doesn’t want him to keep feeling guilty about what’s bygone now.

His naughtiness and desire to create a new rainbow 🌈 is quiet impressive. He is vocal about his feelings many a times, Tulsi controls him from PDA. At the moment, she is not sure what exactly to do with this man and his wish😂😂.(Banda koi mauka nhi choddta)

Yess he’s still thinking about her words and turning it around on her - she told him through Timsy that we should make a new rainbow, being a metaphor for their relationship. We saw what exactly he had in mind by the end of the chapter.

Tulsi n Mitali bond getting stronger day by day. Tulsi helping Mitali understand her mivr for modelling and advised to continue as a profession if she has slightest of interest in it. That last wala chips 😂😂..true to her character. Why is Tulsi not asking Mitali about her terms with Rithik?? How is it going, if any challenge etc. Or advise them to be with each other and find reasons to be together.

Yes if she enjoys modeling that’s what tulsi willl ensure she gets to do. That chips wala - even I was laughing when I wrote it.

Actually she asked both of them about their feelings for each other (I think on Valentine’s Day) - both said they have no feelings so now she’s giving them time while being also scared of what’s brewing between Munni and Ritik

Mihir apni khurafati karte ja rha hai.., for good, he connected Aarti and explained her Mr Joshi's visit n admired Vaishnvi's effort. Good thing, he strongly recommend her to avoid the work done to temple. Seva n Bhakti are not for flaunting, wo bolte hai na Seva chupke se karo, bina expectations ke, bina naam kamane ke iccha se, wo samarpan aur man ki shanti ke liye karnewala karya hai.

Good move.

Mihir ki khuraafaten abhi aapne dekhi kahan hain? Next chapter mein dekhoge.

Yes correct - if that would have been printed toh tulsi phir bahut zyaada naraaz ho jaati.

Tulsi waiting for someone to wish her, then remembering their year old ritual of wishing in the midnight, probably the first one to wish. Uss time pe shayad wo Tulsi ko OTT lagta hoga, but somewhere she is definitely looking for his attention. So her checking her mobile again n again signifies this😂.

Yes jab woh midnight jagaake wish kiya karta tha, she used to find it ott and ridiculous but now she’s missing it. Aisa hi hota hai - you get irritated pehle and then miss the same thing when you don’t get it..

Then consoling herself, she is no more a kid, yet looking forward superb.

Realistic for tulsi, haina?

Mihir was more excited, he is waiting like a child for his favourite thing to be delivered home, checking at the gate again and again, enthusiastically, longing with restlessness. It's so cutalicious.

Yes now onwards, Mihir will be more like the show’s Mihir- cute, childish, romantic etc etc

Tulsivis somehow disappointed at the beginning, he is waiting for something else than her bday😜, she felt he forgot to wish her, didn't even remembered to wish in person. Wife instinct 😂😂.

Yeah - Aaj toh jai shree Krishna bhi theek se nahi bola! Birthday wish toh door ki baat hai

Then comes the newspaper and he collecting with utmost happiness and desperation.

Exactly like the shows Mihir naa

Tulsi was like kitna bacche ke jaise behave karrha hai😂. His act to pull up the newspaper, hide it, behave naturally, then hide it😂😂😂 you wrote it exactly how Mihir behave when he wants to surprise Tulsi or hide something. Too good lovely.

yes i enjoyed writing it soooo much. Abhi toh next chapter mein aur mazaa aayega.

Aankhen churana, kuch nhi jaane ke jaise behave karna 😂😂😜.

😂 lolZzz

Then his hesitation to hold her, hearty wishes, his happiness to be there around her to wish her bday personally, so subtle and beautiful. This is love and bond defines Tulsi Mihir's relationship, their own private moment, thank god none disturbed their "me time "😃

Thank you- so happy it all came out well.

This chapter has been beautiful again. Thank you so much writer

thank you dear, the pleasure is mine

Thank you for this beautiful review dear. My replies in red.

PS - can I say something? I’m disappointed that you didn’t write much on proposal scene

Originally posted by: saloni_306

chap 33:

New rainbow .... great title

Hey dear, thank you so much for the beautiful review.

Ek baat bataoon? Waise toh I obsess over every word I write but i obsess a lot about getting a good title for each chapter.

Now we understand that Tulsi is maybe the only person who knows Mihir better than anyone else. she understands his behavior so well. In Baa's room, where she reflects on Mihir's anger and temperament.. She isn't afraid of that side of him because, over the years, she has accepted him as a whole .. his flaws as well. From an outside, that kind of acceptance sounds a little toxic. But their relationship isn't new it's built over more than 4+ decades. After spending that much of life together, people often learn each other's imperfections, triggers, and strengths so deeply that acceptance becomes part of the relationship. It doesn't necessarily mean the flaws are justified it means they dont need explantions.

correct! Tulsi knows Mihir even more than he knows himself. Yes it does sound a bit toxic from the outside. Exactly!! She’s not justifying it or excusing it..

This Mihir is such a green forest yrr... The way he values Tulsi is truly commendable. honestly, they both green flags. Sometimes I focus so much on Mihir's love that I overlook all the efforts Tulsi makes for him. As i told before i just love his character .... Mihir is that he's aware of his flaws and genuinely tries to work on them. Seeing a man acknowledge all of his mistakes, his behavior, and making an effort to become better is so refreshing. We don't get to see that often in male characters, and that's what makes his growth feel so satisfying...

He always lover her and kind of valued her too but losing her once for 6 years (he lost her during mandira fiasco too but it was brief and he wasn’t mature enough that time to understand what it cost her to forgive him - he took it as a clean slate as he said during his confession night) made him actually realize how much she matters to his very existence and so now he values her! But what remains to be seen is how he behaves the next time they’ve an argument or quarrel

Loved the bedroom scene. It felt so natural, comforting, and emotionally fulfilling. honestly love to see more moments like that between them simple, intimate.

Yes - that scene was a delight to write

And the new rainbow analogy was such a beautiful way to reassure Mihir and make him feel better. It wasn't just comforting it reflected how well Tulsi understands him and knows exactly what he needs to hear in difficult moments.

Exactly what I wanted to show, so glad it landed.

The whole Virani family is after Noina in their own way. Man, she is going to be so shocked when she finally faces the consequences of her wrongdoings. I can't wait to see her realize that every move she made has slowly come back to haunt her.

She’s going to be badly trapped and all the more dangerous because of that.

Mihir is setting a very high standard for being a good husband or being a man who genuinely loves to uplift the women in his life.

Yeah right.. although Tulsi didn’t do any business earlier, but in the show, he was never shown to the kind who isn’t happy to see the woman in his life succeed in everything- he mostly supported her in everything

Excited for the birthday chapter! (I know I'm one chapter behind... lol. Catching up soon )

😊💕

Loving this whole surprise that he is hiding from Tulsi

Yes but tulsi has been filing everything she finds strange

Man, I don't think she is even considering that Mihir could do something like this for her bday by showcase her achievements to the world. That thought probably hasn't even crossed her mind.

Yes how can she even guess?

Thank you dear for this beautiful review- my replies are in red

Originally posted by: saloni_306

chap 34 : OMG... This was the chapter we had all been waiting fora major step forward in their relationship.

Hi dear, thank you for this lovely review.

Yes this was the chapter I too was waiting to write since I was writing chapter 1.

Mihir's guilt may never truly leave him, but now he has Tulsi beside him to hold his hand through it all. Eventually, everything will be okay.

Yes correct. When they’re together everything else will fall into place, slowly.

Personally, I feel connected to all the flawed characters in your story Especially Mihir. On a professional level, though, I relate can to Mitali. At least now she has Tulsi to guide her. Chalo, someone is finally helping her figure things out.

Even I like flawed characters a lot! They look more realistic! Yes Mitali was completely aimless because Noina made her like that purposely so that she can be her puppet.

Tulsi spent her whole life doing exactly what Mihir is doing now, carefully noticing and removing things that she might not like...

I’m so amazed u pointed it out.. this is exactly what I keep thinking- Mihir is now doing exactly what tulsi has done all her life.

Birthday ; the D-day Tulsi wasn't expecting Mihir to celebrate her birthday, But somewhere, in a quiet corner of her heart, she still wondered if he had forgotten. even vashnavi

Correct! She even missed the midnight birthday wish by him even though earlier she used to find it ott and ridiculous.

Mihir is such a kid. Waiting so impatiently for the newspaper... And then, in the very next moment, he can turn serious and confess his love like that. It was so romantic, yet so mature, because he finally understood the meaning of "Never your wife again." Loved the banter between them. It was the perfect balance of light-hearted, emotional, and meaningful.

Men are often like that na - they are so fixated on the thing they are trying to do that they even end up neglecting the very person they are doing it for - like he didn’t even say jai Shree Krishna properly.

Glad the entire proposal scene came out well.

She received the best gift a person like her could ever ask for. It wasn't just recognition as a businesswoman , it was recognition as a woman who represents countless other women and is changing their lives for the better. her emotions where so genuine like watching something she build in those years was beutifully written ..

I had been planning this since the beginning- in fact when I wrote her dialogues in the first chapter- pyaar hona kaafi nahi hai. Respect bhi chahiye, trust bhi chahiye..that time only I had planned this is how he’ll show his respect- by publicly getting her the respect she deserves. The exact shape of how - that came to me only recently - i think Bpatil/Vibrant gave me this idea or it came when I was exchanging pms with her - we were ideating

Loved the story

Thank u, thank you so much

Hopefully, now we'll get more banter and romantic moments rather than angst. I loved the angst too, but I think everything between them has finally been resolved, and they've earned this phase of happiness.

Yes at least in the next chapter - uske baad dekho😉

Noina (aur main) inko khushi se rehne denge?

Thank you soooo much for this review- my replies are in red..

Originally posted by: fan_fiction123

Chapter 34… What a beautiful chapter. ❤️

Hey dear, thank you for this beautiful review! I am so glad you found this chapter beautiful

The whole chapter and this story has now taken one complete journey about love, healing, and quiet understanding. Awaiting more 😍🤩

Yeah this chapter is more about healing than any previous chapter. I think you saw this chapter very clearly for what it does

I loved how Gautam-Damini, Tulsi-Mitali and TuHir, all the storylines reflected same healing theme but in different ways. Damini and Gautam taking their first real steps back toward each other, Tulsi helping Mitali rediscover her own identity and dreams, and Mihir quietly working behind the scenes to celebrate Tulsi in the way she has always deserved.

Yes correct- three different threads of healing - entirely different but still interconnected. Also it’s about the identity of the 3 women:

Damini’s identity as a bahu versus her identity as a wife
Mitalis identity

Tulsis identity

The TuHir proposal scene was absolutely lovely, 🤩 but what stayed with me even more was the Gazette surprise. The fact that Mihir went to such extraordinary lengths to ensure Tulsi received recognition entirely on her own merit, while keeping himself invisible, showed just how much he has grown. His terrible attempt at pretending to be surprised behind the Times of India was both adorable and so very Mihir in the show 😄 Can’t hide anything for long from Tulsi 😅

Yes so glad the proposal scene came out well and so that gazette scene was very difficult to think thru first and then write- I has to rewrite it multiple times to get it write.

Now the Mihir in my story will be very similar to the show’s Mihir

Tulsi slowly piecing together the truth without confronting him was just as beautiful. 😃😍 Their silent understanding at the end said far more than words ever could.

Just like a typical wifey naa? She pieced together every small thing that happened over a month - but let’s him have his pretense for now.

My favorite line has to be “Ekdum paaku.” It became so much more than a callback to the proposal and show’s flashback. It perfectly captured the trust, promise, and quiet love that defines them now.

Yes even I love that ekdum paaku so much - for exactly the same reasons you wrote - that’s why I ended with a callback to it

Awaiting long chapter you promised 😃

Bas maybe by noon - if all the reviews have been responded to and I find a good title while proofreading

Thank you so much Again- my replies in Red

Next chapter by evening

Chapter 35: Pehli Date

He had taken the supplement from her hands with that same performance of discovery — *arre, yeh kya hai* — but the performance didn’t survive past the first paragraph.

He was reading it now. Actually reading it, the way she read things, weighing each line before letting his eyes move to the next.

None of the material itself surprised him. He had gathered most of it himself, over those three days in Anjaar — the old registers with Aarti until his eyes ached, the resist-tie pattern and its forty years, the karigar’s daughter’s wedding photograph, the names of every one of the First Ten and wherever they’d ended up,scattered across the world. He knew these facts the way you know something you’ve held in your own hands.

What he hadn’t known — what he had handed over entirely, with no way to control any of it — was what Joshi would choose to do with what he’d gathered. Which detail would open a section and which would close one. Whether the numbers would come before the names or after. Whether any of it would carry the weight it deserved, or whether it would flatten somewhere along the way into something dismissible and forgettable, the way pieces about Bandhej so often had before. Joshi had made his terms plain that first morning at the Juhu café — *Main ye apne terms pe hi karoonga, Mr. Virani.* He had said it again at a subsequent meeting when Mihir had wanted to discuss the structure with him. *Aapko approval ka koi haq nahi hoga* — and Mihir had agreed because there had been no option to keep Dr. Joshi onboard, and had then spent ten days simply not knowing.

He turned the page and found the wedding photograph again — this time inside Joshi’s sentences, not his own memory of finding it — and something in his chest loosened by a full degree.

This was almost exactly how he’d hoped it could read, if it read well at all.

Founder. No qualifier before it, no qualifier after. The acknowledgments, thanking the artisans first, in language cleaner than anything he could have written himself. That much, at least, he had asked for directly — the only specific request he’d made of Joshi in all their conversations, the one thing he hadn’t been willing to leave to chance.

The three months on the floor, learning the pattern — he had given Joshi the number of months; he hadn’t given him the sentence that made those months feel like devotion rather than an entry in a timeline. That sentence was entirely Joshi’s own.

He made a small sound at that — something between a laugh and a breath he hadn’t quite planned to release — and then again, quieter, further down the page.

Small, involuntary sounds. Relief translating itself into noise before he could organize it into anything more presentable.

Tulsi watched him over the rim of her cup.

She couldn’t have said what, exactly, the sounds meant — only that they weren’t performance. A man reading for effect doesn’t exhale like that, doesn’t let his shoulders drop half an inch without noticing they’ve dropped. Whatever he was reading, he was reading for the first time, and something in it was landing on him the way it might land on anyone encountering it fresh.

But he had a hand in this. That much she already knew.

The two facts sat next to each other without resolving into one shape. He hadn’t written it — that much seemed clear, watching him. But not writing it didn’t mean he hadn’t built the room it was written in, and she still had no way of knowing how large that room was, or where its walls actually stood.

He turned another page. Read something. His eyes came up, unfocused for a second, somewhere past her shoulder, toward the door.

Then they came back to her, and whatever had been building in him while he read arrived now, without warning, in the middle of a sentence that had clearly meant to be about something else entirely.

“Yeh — yeh Joshi ne kaafi—” He stopped.

Tried again, gesturing vaguely at the page. “Itna community impact. Wow.” A short breath, almost disbelieving at his own words, like even he’d noticed how inadequate they were for what he meant. Somehow seeing them written like that — in Dr. Joshi’s own words, not his — had made him fully realise the scale of what she had built.

“Tulsi.” Her name came out lower than the rest, like it had cost him something just to say it plainly. “Mujhe—” He stopped again, his jaw working slightly, as though the sentence he’d actually intended had simply stopped being available to him somewhere between his chest and his mouth. “Oh my God! I am so proud.”

She looked at him.

Something in her throat closed before she could organize it into words. A single tear slid down her cheek, and she let it — didn’t reach to wipe it, didn’t trust her own hand not to shake if she tried. She only nodded, once, because there was nothing available to her right now that would come out as a sentence.

He watched her nod, watched the tear, and said nothing more — as if some instinct in him understood that anything further right now would be one word too many.

The moment held there a while, the two of them simply looking at each other across a table with a newspaper full of things she had built with her own hands.

But why did he need to do this at all, she thought, once the tightness in her throat had eased enough to let a thought back in. If it was true — if all of it was true regardless of whether Joshi wrote a single word — then why did it need arranging? Why did it need him, calling someone, sitting across a table she’d never see, asking a stranger to look at her life and say so, in print, in a national paper, on this exact date?

She reached for the chai cups instead of an answer, needing something for her hands to do. She uncovered her own first, the saucer set aside, and drank — the warmth of it settling something in her that the question hadn’t managed to.

He watched her a moment before uncovering his own cup and drinking, unhurried, as if giving her whatever room she needed before either of them spoke again.

“Ye article—” he said finally. “Bandhej ko sahi dhang se present karta haina?”

He did want to know. That much, at least, wasn’t cover for anything.

She held his gaze a moment longer before she answered.

“Haan.” A pause, her eyes dropping briefly to the page in his hands before returning to his face. “Jis kisi ne bhi research kiya hai — bahut thorough aur depth mein kiya hai.” She thought about his trip to Gujarat, weeks ago, that he’d called a supply chain visit and had not, apparently, taken him anywhere near a supplier. “Usne ye socha hai kya daalna hai — aur kya nahi daalna hai.” She was now certain about the bell on that phone call that he’d tried to deflect by abruptly cutting the call— bronze, specific, six years of morning prayer folded into one sound she had, until now, been trying to convince herself she’d imagined. “Bahut soch samajh ke plan kiya hai — usne.”

*Usne.*

She said it once, evenly. Then again, a fraction harder, though her voice never actually rose.

He heard it both times. She watched him hear it.

“Haan,” he said, a little too quickly. “Dr. Joshi bahut capable lagte hain. Conclave mein mile the tab bhi — kaafi impressed lag rahe the tumhare kaam se.” A small shrug, offered like it might dilute something. “I guess — tabhi hi unhone decide kiya hoga.”

“Bina meri permission ke?” She set her cup down without quite meaning to make a sound with it, though it made one anyway. “Ya mujhe bataye? Kuch ajeeb lag raha hai, Mihir.”

He looked down at the supplement in his lap, as if it might, at this late stage, offer him a line worth borrowing.

“Shayad doosre cooperative members ki permission lee ho,” he said.

“Acknowledgements mein jo naam hain — Aarti, Vaishnavi—”

He didn’t finish that sentence either. There wasn’t, really, anywhere left for it to go.

She watched him not finish it, and said nothing to help him.

She still couldn’t quite decide what to feel about it all. On the one hand, she could clearly see his love for her and genuine pride in what she’d built. On the other she couldn’t understand why he had to do this. She let it go for now.

No one said anything for a few minutes, both silently sipping their tea.

“Main tees copies mangwa raha hoon,” he said after a while. “Pandrah Bandhej mein le jaana — office mein rakhne ke liye. Aur bhi chahiye toh bolo.”

She looked up from her cup. “Itni copies ka kya karenge? Jinhe padhna hoga, woh khud padh lega. Gazette daily aata hai — sab ke paas already hoga jo textile ya business se juda hai.”

“Phir bhi.” He said it simply, without pushing the word too hard. “Kabhi na kabhi kaam aa jaati hain — rakhe hui copies. Aaj nahi toh saal baad. Koi client aaye, koi naya investor, koi purana supplier jo bhool gaya ho tumne kya banaya hai — tab dikhane ke liye kaam ka hai.”

A pause.

Then he continued.

“Aaj jitni chahiye mil jaayengi. Baad mein hume chahiye hongi toh mushkil hoga milna.”

It was such an ordinary, practical thing to say that she almost missed what was underneath it — that he was already imagining a future in which this article would need to be produced, again and again, as proof of something. Not for her. For anyone who required convincing.

“Bees copies,” she said, not quite believing him.

“Bees se kam mein kaam nahi chalega,” he said, entirely serious now. “Factory mein bhi rakhni hain. Aur Anjaar mein bhi. Kal ya parson koi aur bhi maang sakta hai—” He let the sentence trail off rather than name anyone in particular.

She shook her head slightly, but something in her had softened by a degree she wasn’t yet ready to name.

Neither of them heard the footsteps on the stairs — four sets, moving too fast to be careful, the particular thunder of children who have been told to walk nicely and have already forgotten.

The balcony door banged open.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY NANI!” Garima was already airborne by the time she finished shouting it, launching herself the last few feet with the complete trust of a child who has never once considered that someone might not catch her.

She landed in Tulsi’s lap at the same moment three more voices arrived behind her — Akshay, Madhvi, Timsy, all shouting some version of “Happy birthday, Baa!” in the overlapping, un-synchronized way of children who had clearly rehearsed this exactly once, in the hallway, thirty seconds ago, and were now performing it for the first and only time with no regard for order.

Four sets of arms found her at once. Small hands gripping her saree, her shoulders, whatever they could reach. The chair rocked slightly under the sudden weight of an ambush this size.

Tulsi’s cup would have gone straight off her grip and onto the floor — she felt it tip in her hand, felt the coming loss of it as a certainty rather than a possibility — but Mihir’s hand was already there, closing around the cup and lifting it clear before it had traveled an inch, the movement so quick and so unthinking that neither of them registered it as anything other than reflex.

“Arre, arre,” Tulsi said, laughing despite herself, one arm coming around Garima, the other trying and failing to locate all three remaining children at once. “Gir jaate sab! Dheere—”

“Happy birthday, Baa!” Timsy said again, apparently satisfied that the sentiment was worth repeating regardless of whether anyone had heard it the first three times.

“Suna, suna, mera bachcha,” Tulsi said, pressing a kiss to the top of whichever head was closest — Madhvi’s, she thought, though it was difficult to be entirely certain in the tangle. “Thank you, sab ko. Itni jaldi kaise ready ho gaye aaj?”

“Mummy ne bola time pe niche aana hai,” Akshay reported, with the gravity of someone relaying classified information, “lekin humein pehle aapko wish karna tha, toh hum bhaage.”

“Aur breakfast baad mein bhi ho jaayega,” Madhvi added, as if this settled the matter beyond further discussion.

Mihir, still holding Tulsi’s rescued cup in one hand, watched the four of them arrange and rearrange themselves in her lap and around her chair with the particular helplessness of a man who knows better than to interrupt something this joyfully out of his control. He set the cup down on the table, out of range of any more small elbows, and said nothing — simply watched her laugh, properly laugh, for the first time all morning.

“Nani, chalo andar!” Garima was already tugging at her hand, half off the chair again. “Aapko hamara gift dena hai. Hum sabne milke banaya hai — aapko pata hai?” A dramatic pause, entirely for effect. “Ekdum giant size ka hai!”

“Arre,” Tulsi said, laughing, letting herself be pulled up out of the chair by four insistent hands. “Tum log itne chhote ho, aur gift giant size ka hai? Ab toh dekhna hi padega — chalo, dikhao.”

She rose, already half-turned toward the door, four children reorganizing themselves around her like satellites finding new orbits — and then she stopped, and turned back for just a moment.

The rose sat where she’d left it on the table, the stem still faintly bent from having spent the morning in his pocket. She picked it up, careful of the petals, and looked at him once.

A small smile. He looked back at her and returned her smile. Nothing more was needed.

He picked up the newspaper from the table and followed her in, unhurried, the supplement folded now under his arm rather than held up.

“Woh kya hai?” Madhvi asked, eyes immediately on the rose in Tulsi’s hand, the way children notice new objects before they notice anything else.

“Flower hai,” Tulsi said. “Rose.”

“Haan, lekin kisne diya?” Garima pressed, already fairly certain of the answer and asking anyway, the way children do when they want the satisfaction of being told what they already suspect.

“Dadu ne diya hoga,” Timsy announced, before Tulsi could decide how much of an answer to give.

“Papa bhi mumma ko dete hain birthday pe,” Madhvi said, matter-of-fact, filing this under things she already understood about the world.

“Aur gift bhi dete hain,” Akshay added, not to be left out of the observation.

Garima looked up at Tulsi with the particular directness only a five-year-old can manage without any weight attached to it. “Nanu ne aapko gift kya diya?”

Tulsi glanced back, briefly, at Mihir — walking a step behind them with the newspaper under his arm, giving no indication at all of how loaded a question this actually was.

“Tumhare Nanu ne mujhe aaj bahut bade do surprises diye,” she said.

Four faces turned up to her at once. “Kya? Kya diya?”

“Pehle tum log ka gift dekh loon,” she said, steering the question away as easily as she might have steered a runaway trolley, “phir main tumhe bataungi ki mujhe kitna bada surprise mila hai. Deal?”

It worked exactly as well as she’d hoped it would. Four children, already more interested in showing off their own gift than pursuing hers, surged ahead toward whatever waited inside.

-----

She had barely taken two steps past the balcony door when she saw the rest of them — the whole family gathered in the hallway just beyond, waiting, clearly having heard the children’s charge towards the balcony and correctly guessed what it meant. Damini smiling warmly. Shobha hovering near the stairs. Ritik already grinning. Pari, dressed for the factory but not yet gone, holding what looked like a folded saree in a cloth bag.

The moment the family began to converge — Shobha stepping forward first, arms already lifting for the customary embrace — Garima planted herself directly in front of Tulsi like a small, immovable gatekeeper.

“Nahi, nahi, nahi!” she said, both arms spread wide, blocking a grown woman more than twice her height with the complete confidence of someone who has never once doubted her own authority. “Pehle hamara gift!”

“Haan,” Akshay confirmed, folding his arms, positioning himself beside his cousin as reinforcement. “Humne pehle bola tha.”

“Sabse pehle humne wish kiya balcony pe,” Madhvi added, as if presenting evidence in a case that had already been decided. “Toh gift bhi hum sabse pehle denge.”

Shobha’s arms dropped, laughing, retreating half a step under the sheer conviction of four small children who had clearly discussed this strategy in advance and were now executing it with total unity. “Theek hai, theek hai — tum log pehle.”

Timsy, apparently unwilling to leave anything to chance, took up a position directly behind Tulsi, both small hands pressed flat against her back, gently but firmly propelling her forward — away from the assembled family and toward wherever the giant gift was actually waiting.

“Chalo Baa, idhar,” Timsy said, with the seriousness of an usher performing an important function. “Sab log baad mein.”

Tulsi looked back over her shoulder at the rest of them — Mihir included, still a step behind with the newspaper under his arm, watching the whole procession with open amusement — and found herself being steered down the hallway by four children who had, in the space of about ninety seconds, successfully rearranged the entire household’s morning around themselves.

“Ek minute toh do,” she said, laughing, “main bhaag toh nahi rahi.”

“Jaldi,” Garima said, unmoved, already several steps ahead and beckoning. “Aapko dekhna hai na kitna bada hai.”

The dining table came into view before Tulsi quite understood why they were heading toward it — and then Madhvi and Akshay put a chair behind Tulsi. Garima climbed the chair and then her hands were over Tulsi’s eyes from behind, small fingers pressed flat against her eyelids with far more force than was strictly necessary.

“Aankhein band, Nani! Band karo!”

“Band hain, band hain,” Tulsi said, laughing, raising her own hands to steady Garima’s rather than fight them off. Around her she could hear the scrape of something large being unrolled, Akshay and Madhvi’s voices overlapping in urgent, whispered instruction to each other — “Idhar se pakad, idhar se” — and Timsy narrating the entire operation to no one in particular. “Ekdum seedha rakhna, tedha nahi.”

“Ab?” she asked, after what felt like a reasonably patient interval.

“Nahi! Abhi nahi!” Garima’s hands pressed down harder, as if Tulsi might see straight through her palms if she relaxed even slightly.

There was more shuffling. A chair scraped. Somewhere behind her she heard Mihir’s low voice — “Careful, careful, corner mudh na jaaye” — apparently unable to resist supervising, and Damini’s soft laugh at whatever he’d just said.

Finally, Garima’s hands lifted.

“Ab kholo!”

Tulsi opened her eyes to find the entire dining table gone — not literally, but entirely obscured, buried under a single enormous card that didn’t so much sit on the table as consume it, spilling over every edge and hanging down nearly to the floor on both sides. It had clearly begun life as several large sheets of chart paper taped and layered together until they’d become one continuous surface, larger than anything she’d have thought four children capable of managing without adult intervention, though the crookedness of a few of the tape seams suggested the adult intervention had been kept to a strict minimum.

She stood there a moment, taking in the sheer size of it before her eyes had even settled on what was drawn across it.

“Yeh—” She looked around at the four of them, all watching her face with identical, barely-contained anticipation. “Yeh tum sabne banaya?”

“Haan!” all four said at once, with varying degrees of volume, Garima’s easily winning.

She stepped closer, and the card resolved itself slowly, piece by piece, into what four very different sets of hands had made of the same idea.

At the center — clearly the part that had taken the most negotiation — was a single large drawing of Tulsi herself, rendered in the confident, slightly alarming proportions only children attempt: a round face with an enormous smile, a saree colored in careful crayon stripes of teal and maroon that Tulsi recognized, with a small jolt, as unmistakably a Bandhej saree she wore frequently to work. Someone had taken real care over the border pattern. She suspected Madhvi.

Around this central figure, the card broke into visible territories, the way four children’s drawings on one page always did — each artist claiming a corner and defending it fiercely.

Garima’s section, unmistakably, was the largest and the most colorful, done in her particular heavy-handed crayon style, every available inch filled in so that no white space remained anywhere near her. At the top, in large, uneven letters that had clearly been sounded out one at a time: **HAPPY BIRTHDAY NANI I LOVE YOU SO MUCH.** Beneath it, a drawing of the two of them holding hands, both figures roughly the same height despite the considerable actual difference, with a small sun in the corner wearing, for reasons known only to Garima, sunglasses.

Akshay and Madhvi had claimed the opposite side, their section noticeably neater, the letters more carefully formed, evenly spaced — the twins’ work always did carry the faint competitive precision of two children who checked each other’s progress constantly. **HAPPY BIRTHDAY BAA**, in Madhvi’s rounder handwriting, and beneath it, in Akshay’s blockier print: **BEST BAA IN THE WORLD.** Between the two captions, they had drawn Bandhej itself — a lopsided but recognizable factory building, complete with a row of tiny stick-figure women at sewing machines, and a small speech bubble coming from one of them that said, in letters so small Tulsi had to lean in to read them, **LOVE YOU BAA.**

Timsy’s contribution occupied the bottom corner, considerably smaller than the others, done with the singular focus of the youngest child determined not to be crowded out. A single, careful rainbow — bigger than any rainbow Timsy had drawn before, arcing determinedly across a small patch of blue sky, every color present and correct. Beneath it, laboriously printed, letters wandering slightly uphill: **HAPPY BIRTHDAY BAA. NEW RAINBOW FOR YOU.**

Tulsi’s hand went to her mouth before she’d quite decided to let it.

She looked at the rainbow a long moment — Timsy’s rainbow, the one that had been smudged by a jealous classmate weeks ago, redrawn now bigger and brighter and offered up, without any explanation attached, as a birthday gift. Timsy hadn’t said a word about why. Didn’t need to. Only stood there now, watching Tulsi’s face with the same anxious hope every artist has, waiting to see if the thing that mattered most to them had landed the way they’d hoped.

It had.

“Yeh—” Tulsi’s voice came out thinner than she meant it to. She crouched, bringing herself level with Timsy’s face. “Yeh tumhara naya rainbow hai?”

Timsy nodded, solemn. “Pehle wale se bhi acha hai.”

“Haan,” Tulsi said, and had to stop and breathe for a second before she could say anything else. “Bahut hi acha hai, mera Bachcha.”

Tulsi straightened, wiping quickly at the corner of her eye before any of the four could catch her at it properly, and looked over toward Vrinda, who was already half-anticipating the request before it arrived.

“Vrinda,” Tulsi whispered, “chocolates.”

Vrinda immediately went to the kitchen counter where the chocolates were waiting for exactly this moment and picked them up.

Tulsi turned back to the children, composing her face into something more manageable. “Jiski drawing mujhe sabse zyaada achi lagi hai,” she announced, with the exaggerated gravity of a judge delivering a verdict, “usko chocolates milenge.”

Four faces turned instantly serious, each child recalculating, in real time, exactly how confident they were allowed to feel.

She went to Timsy first, crouching again, and pulled the child into a proper hug before pressing a kiss to the top of the head. “Sabse acha rainbow,” she said, quiet, just for Timsy, and pressed the first chocolate into small waiting hands.

Garima was next, already vibrating with anticipation, arms thrown around Tulsi’s neck the moment she turned. “Aur sabse zyaada colorful drawing,” Tulsi said into her hair, kissing her forehead, and Garima’s answering grin nearly split her face in half as she took her chocolate and darted half a step back, triumphant.

Akshay accepted his hug with slightly more dignity, standing straighter as Tulsi kissed his forehead. “Bandhej wali factory bahut achi banayi,” she told him, and watched him try, and fail, to suppress how pleased that made him.

Madhvi came last, folding into the hug with the same careful precision she brought to everything else. “Aur letters sabse neat the,” Tulsi said, and Madhvi actually smiled at that — a real one, not the polite one she sometimes gave when she suspected praise was being distributed equally rather than earned.

Satisfied, thoroughly bribed, and no longer remotely interested in anything beyond the chocolate in their own hands, all four scattered toward the far end of the room, already comparing notes on who had gotten which flavor.

By the time Tulsi looked up again, the room had filled in around her.

Daksha Chachi and Gayatri Chachi had made their way downstairs at some point during the chaos of the card and the chocolates, and now the whole family stood gathered in a loose half-circle — Shobha, Ritik, Angad, Vrinda, Pari still in her factory clothes, Damini a step behind Mihir — all of them clearly holding themselves back only until the children’s ceremony had properly concluded.

Tulsi went first to the two chachis, bending to touch first Daksha Chachi’s feet, then Gayatri Chachi’s, the gesture unhurried, entirely without performance.

“Khush raho, beta,” Daksha Chachi said, her hand resting a moment longer than necessary on Tulsi’s head, something warm and unguarded in her voice these days that hadn’t always been there. “Bhagwan tumhe sab kuch de — jo tum deserve karti ho.”

Gayatri Chachi’s hand found her shoulder next, drawing her up gently. “Aaj ka din tumhara hai,” she said, quieter, something in her tone carrying its own private weight — the particular gentleness of a woman still working her way back into a family’s good grace, treating every small kindness offered to her as a thing not to be taken for granted. “Thakurji tumhe saari khushiyan den, Tulsi.”

The rest came in quick succession after that — Shobha’s embrace warm and lingering, Ritik’s quick and easy with a teasing “Happy birthday, Maa. Aap aaj bhi sweet 16 lagte ho” that made her swat lightly at his arm, Angad and Vrinda touched her feet and then hugged her together, Damini’s feet touching and hug carrying its own quiet gratitude these days that Tulsi had come to recognize without needing it explained — a flurry of voices all saying some version of the same thing at once, the ordinary warm noise of a house properly celebrating someone.

Pari, still visibly dressed for the factory floor, was the last to step forward, and did so with an apologetic half-smile already in place.

“Sorry, everyone,” she said, glancing briefly at the room, “mujhe factory ke liye late ho raha hai — toh pehle main apna gift de doon, Mumma?”

“Haan, beta, zaroor,” Tulsi said, already curious — now Pari rarely asked for anything out of turn in recent times, and the slight edge of nervousness in her voice was new.

Pari held out her phone instead of any wrapped object, the screen already open to something.

“Yeh dekhiye,” she said.

Tulsi took the phone, frowning slightly, and found herself looking at a photograph of a bill — Bandhej’s own letterhead at the top, an itemized list of fabric, thread, dye, all the small material costs of a garment. Her eyes went to the total, then to the name at the bottom of the invoice.

*Paid by: Paridhi Virani.*

“Yeh—” Tulsi looked up. “Pari, yeh kya hai?”

“Swipe kariye,” Pari said, instead of answering directly.

The next photograph was another bill entirely — this one for something Tulsi had never seen itemized in her life: an estimated charge for the use of Bandhej’s equipment, its space, its electricity, calculated, it seemed, down to the hour.

“Aur yeh?” Tulsi asked, more confused now than she had been a moment ago.

“Ek aur dekhiye,” Pari said, and swiped for her this time, pulling up a third image — a payroll screenshot, HR’s own internal system, Pari’s name on it, and beside it a column that read, in small unambiguous print: *Salary deduction — 2 hrs/day — 25 days.*

Tulsi stared at the screen. Then at Pari. Then back at the screen, as if a second look might rearrange the numbers into something that made sense.

“Pari,” she said slowly, “mujhe kuch samajh nahi aa raha. Yeh sab kya hai?”

Pari didn’t answer.

Instead, she reached behind her — to where Vrinda had been quietly holding something wrapped in plain cotton cloth, waiting for exactly this moment — and took it from her, unwrapping it herself rather than handing it over wrapped.

The saree unfolded slowly in her hands. Pink and green, the two colors woven together in a combination Tulsi had never once seen come out of Bandhej’s usual palette — bold where the factory’s signature teal was usually restrained, unmistakably the choice of someone young enough to trust her own instincts over convention. The bandhej work across it was dense, careful, and — Tulsi’s eye caught this immediately, professionally, before anything else — not entirely even. A slight inconsistency in the tie-work along one border, the kind of thing only a founder’s eye would notice and only a founder’s eye would forgive, because that particular imperfection was the unmistakable signature of hands still learning.

“Maine banaya hai,” Pari said, holding it out now with both hands, her earlier composure finally cracking at the edges. “Khud. Shuru se — dyeing, tying, sab kuch. Bandhej ke material se, Bandhej ki machines pe — jo bills maine abhi dikhaye, woh isi ke liye the. Maine sab kharch khud diya. Apni salary se.”

She paused, and when she continued her voice had gone quieter, less rehearsed than the rest of the presentation had sounded.

“Mujhe laga — agar aap ke liye kuch banaoon, toh sahi tareeke se banaoon. Chori se nahi. Isliye maine sab kuch pay kiya — material, machine time, apna kaam karne ka time bhi.” A small, uncertain smile. “Pata nahi yeh procedure sahi hai ya nahi — lekin mujhe laga aapko dikhana zaroori hai ki maine kuch churaya nahi. Sab kuch — sab kuch mera hi hai. Meri mehnat, mere paise, mera time.”

Tulsi looked at the saree in Pari’s hands, then at Pari’s face — flushed now, waiting, the particular vulnerability of someone who has made something with her own two hands and is about to find out whether it was good enough.

Tulsi didn’t answer right away.

She closed the distance instead, both hands coming up to Pari’s face, tilting it up slightly the way she might have done when Pari was much younger and had come to her with some smaller worry entirely — and only then did she speak.

“Pari.” She held her daughter’s face a moment longer. “Tune kuch bhi galat nahi kiya.”

Pari’s breath caught, visibly, at that — as if she’d been holding it since the question left her mouth.

“Bills dikhana, material ke paise dena, apni salary katwana — main soch bhi sakti thi meri Pari itni samajhdaar, itni responsible ho jaayegi,” Tulsi said. “Lekin tune ye sab kiya, kyunki tu chahti thi ki yeh cheez poori tarah se teri ho — teri mehnat se banayi hui, meri di hui koi cheez nahi. Aur isse zyaada sahi tareeka kya ho sakta hai kisi cheez ko banane ka?”

She let go of Pari’s face, finally, and took the saree from her hands instead, holding it up properly now, letting the light catch the uneven border work along one edge.

“Yeh,” she said, running a thumb gently over the slight inconsistency in the tie-work, the flaw Tulsi’s own eye had caught first, “yeh dikhata hai ki yeh haath naye hain. Seekh rahe hain. Aur mujhe iska ek bhi hissa perfect nahi chahiye tha, Pari — mujhe sirf yeh chahiye tha ki yeh tumhara ho. Poora, sach mein, tumhara.”

She paused, something almost wry entering her voice now. “Bandhej mein saal bhar mein kai naye karigar aate hain, sab apna pehla kaam leke aate hain — thoda kaccha, thoda imperfections wala. Main unhe kabhi wapas nahi bhejti sirf isliye ki border ekdum seedha nahi hai. Ye dekhke itna acha lag raha hai ki mere paas shabd nahi hain.”

Pari laughed then — a short, relieved sound, half a sob still caught somewhere in it.

“Aur,” Tulsi added, folding the saree carefully back over her own arm, unable to entirely keep the amusement out of her voice now, “tumne mujhse zyaada soch aur mehnat lagayi hai iss saree mein, jitni maine kabhi apni khud ki kisi saree mein nahi lagayi hai. Ye color combination maine kabhi nahi socha hota. Bahut acha lag raha hai.”

A pause. Then she continued in a mock-serious voice, “Mujhe darr lag raha hai ab — factory mein sabko pata chal gaya toh, sab apni salary katwa ke gifts banane lagenge.”

“Mumma!” Pari swatted lightly at her arm, laughing properly now, the tension of the last several minutes finally, visibly, draining out of her shoulders.

“Main nikalti hoon,” Pari said, glancing at the time on her phone, already half-turning toward the door. “Warna late ho jaaoongi.”

“Ek panch minute ruk ja, Pari,” Tulsi said.

Pari turned back, faintly confused. “Ok, Mumma.”

Tulsi was already moving — saree gathered in her arms and again picking up the rose, this time from the dining table, in her hand — toward her room before anyone could ask why, leaving the rest of the family to fill the space she’d left behind. Mihir’s eyes followed her the whole way, noting the rose particularly, though he said nothing.

By the time she came back out, wearing the saree Pari had just given her — the pink and green catching the morning light differently now than it had folded over her arm — no one so much as glanced her way.

The whole family had migrated to the article instead, crowded loosely around Angad, who was reading a section aloud while Shobha leaned over his shoulder, and Mihir, phone already at his ear, was mid-instruction.

“—haan, thirty aur bhejna. Aaj hi. Jitni jaldi ho sake—”

“Papa, forty order kar do,” Angad called over without looking up from the page. “Extras rakhne honge — relatives, Bandhej ke clients, sabko chahiye hongi.”

“Chalo, forty hi bhej do,” Mihir said into the phone, entirely absorbed.

It was Pari, standing slightly apart from the scrum around the newspaper, who noticed first.

“Mumma—” She stopped entirely. “Yeh?”

The single word cut cleanly through the noise, and one by one the rest of them turned — Shobha first, then Angad, then Ritik, until the whole room had reoriented itself toward Tulsi standing in the doorway in the saree her daughter had made with her own hands, the pink and green catching every eye in the room at once.

“Arre, kitni sundar lag rahi hain Mumma!” Shobha said, already crossing to her.

“Pari, tune banayi hai yeh?” Ritik asked, genuinely impressed, examining the border work from a step away.

Mihir set the phone down without finishing whatever he’d been saying into it, and crossed the room to Pari directly, pulling her into a hug before he’d said a single word.

“Pari.” He held her back by the shoulders after, looking at her properly, something open in his face that hadn’t been there, quite this easily, in longer than either of them would say aloud. “I’m so proud of you. Mujhe yakeen nahi ho raha ki yeh tumne banayi hai — bahut sundar hai.”

For a moment Pari didn’t answer. She only looked at him — at her father, holding her by the shoulders, saying her name the way he used to say it years ago, before Noina, before the six and a half years, before the particular careful distance he’d kept from her since learning what her hand had had in creating the distance between her parents. *Papa is my friend,* she used to tell people, once, a lifetime ago. She hadn’t let herself miss that sentence out loud in a very long time, knowing she no longer deserved his friendship.

“Thank you, Papa,” she managed finally, her voice not entirely steady.

He held her gaze a second longer — enough, perhaps, for both of them to understand everything neither of them was saying — then let her go, the moment folding itself back into the ordinary noise of the room.

Pari turned to Tulsi. “Mumma, yeh kyun pehen li aapne?” She gestured at the saree, faintly bewildered. “Yeh toh bahut simple hai. Aaj toh kuch special pehenna chahiye na aapko.”

“Isse special kya hi ho sakta hai mere liye,” Tulsi said.

“Mumma,” she hugged her mother.

-----

Pari was halfway to the door again when Damini caught her arm.

“Ek kaam hai,” Damini said, keeping her voice light, giving nothing away. “Aaj bhi ek ghante ki salary katwa do na — thoda aur ruk jaa.”

Pari blinked. “Kyun, Bhabhi? Mujhe factory jaana hai—”

“Bas thoda aur ruk ja,” Damini said again, not quite answering the question, something carefully casual in how she said it that Tulsi caught immediately, even if no one else did.

Pari looked between Damini and Tulsi, clearly sensing there was more to this than it appeared, but finding nothing in either face that would explain it.

“Ek din chalega,” Tulsi said, “lekin roz ki aadat mat bana lena.”

“Nahi, Mumma,” Pari said, still faintly puzzled but unwilling to press further, “aadat nahi padegi.”

Then, Tulsi let herself be steered back toward the dining table instead, where the rest of the family had already begun drifting back, breakfast and gifts both still waiting beneath the enormous card.

Angad went first, presenting a neatly wrapped box with the particular formality of a man who had rehearsed his line and intended to deliver it properly.

“Yeh Vrinda aur mera gift hai,” he said, then paused, glancing at his wife. “Actually — idea Vrinda ka tha. Maine sirf execute kiya.”

Vrinda, ever practical, unwrapped it herself rather than let the suspense drag. Inside was a set of professional organizers — leather-bound, compartmentalized, the kind used for tracking orders, samples, correspondence. “Aap ke liye ek, aur Bandhej ke senior admin staff ke liye baaki,” Vrinda explained. “Maine socha, isse aap sab ki files wagere thodi zyaada organized rahengi.”

“Bahut kaam ka hai,” Tulsi said, turning one over in her hands, genuinely pleased. “Thank you, Vrinda. Aur Angad — execute karne ka bhi credit lena chahiye tumhe.”

Angad grinned, visibly relieved to have gotten his line right.

-----

Ritik stepped forward next, holding a handbag — clearly custom-made, the stitching clean and professional, the Bandhej logo embroidered onto the front in neat, even thread.

“Maa, yeh maine banwaya hai,” he said, holding it out. “Special order pe. Bandhej ke logo wali.”

Tulsi took it, turning it over, examining the logo with the same appraising eye she’d brought to Pari’s saree earlier — then noticed, opening it, that the inside was divided into several distinct compartments and pockets, each sized differently, clearly designed with a purpose in mind rather than left generic.

“Itne saare compartments,” she said, looking up at him.

“Haan,” Ritik said, a little sheepish now. “Yeh wala idea mera tha — socha aapke paas hamesha bahut saara saaman rehta hai, phone, cash, samples, kaagaz — sab bikhar ke rehta hoga bag mein. Toh maine bola order dete waqt, alag alag pockets bana do, sab organize rahe.”

“Aur logo?” she asked. “Yeh idea kiska tha?”

Ritik hesitated, then admitted it easily enough. “Woh Munni ka idea tha. Main confused tha kya gift dun aapko — usse poocha, usne bola Bandhej ka kuch banwao. Aur usne last time dhyaan diya tha ki aap ka handbag purana hua hai.”

Something in the room shifted very slightly at that — Mitali’s eyes flicking briefly toward Ritik, then away, and Tulsi noticing it the way she noticed most things now, without remarking on any of it.

“Bahut sochke banaya hai,” Tulsi said, turning the bag over once more, genuinely pleased. “Munni ko bhi thank you kehna meri taraf se.”

Ritik’s smile at that came a shade quicker, and a shade warmer, than the moment strictly required.

-----

Shobha came forward next, holding a flat, rectangular box, her own eyes already a little bright before she’d said anything at all.

“Mumma, yeh mera gift hai,” she said, handing it over carefully, as though it might be fragile in ways that weren’t obvious from the outside.

Tulsi unwrapped it to find a digital photo frame, sleek and modern, already switched on — and the moment she looked at the screen, she understood why Shobha’s eyes had already been wet.

Photographs cycled across it, one after another, slow and unhurried. Old ones — Tulsi in her twenties, laughing at something the camera hadn’t caught. The children as babies. Ritik’s graduation. Pari’s sixteenth birthday. A dozen ordinary afternoons that no one had thought important enough to remember taking a picture of, and yet here they all were, thousands of them, apparently, cycling in an endless, patient loop.

Tucked into the box beside the frame was a small card, Shobha’s handwriting careful and slightly uneven, as if she’d started it more than once before settling on these words.

*Mumma, ye family, ye saari khushiyan — aap hi se hain.*

Tulsi read it once, then looked up at Shobha, who was already reaching for her own dupatta to press against her eyes.

“Shobha,” Tulsi said, her own voice unsteady now, “yeh sab photos—”

“Maine sabse maangi,” Shobha said. “Sabke phone se, purane albums se — jitni mil sakti thi. Kuch toh Baa ke time ki bhi hain.”

Tulsi set the frame down carefully on the table, unable to look away from it for more than a few seconds at a time, watching photograph after photograph of a life she had, for six and a half years, believed she might never be part of again.

She reached for Shobha instead of trying to say anything else, and held her for a long moment, both of them quietly crying now, the photo frame continuing its patient loop beside them, indifferent to the moment it had just caused.

-----

Mitali had been standing a little apart from the rest through all of it — close enough to watch, far enough to not quite be part of the circle — and with each gift, something in her posture had drawn in a fraction more.

Vrinda’s organizer set, thought through and practical. Ritik’s handbag, custom-made with real care behind every compartment. Shobha’s photo frame, thousands of photographs assembled into something that had made even Tulsi cry. Each gift arriving with its own history, its own labor, its own proof of having been considered.

Her own gift sat folded in the pocket of her pants — an envelope, nothing more, a few pages of handwriting she’d rewritten thrice already and still wasn’t sure was enough. Beside everything she’d just watched unfold, it felt suddenly, achingly small. A letter. Not a saree someone had woven with her own hands. Not something bought, even — just words, and not particularly well-arranged ones at that.

She pressed her hand briefly against the pocket, as if to check the envelope was still there, and then let her hand drop, deciding — for now, at least — to keep it exactly where it was.

-----

Mihir’s phone had been buzzing intermittently through most of this, and he’d been silencing it each time with a quick, practiced motion, barely glancing at the screen before pocketing it again. He didn’t answer. He simply thumbed it silent, over and over, each time with a fraction more force than the last, and returned his attention to whatever gift was being unwrapped as if nothing had interrupted him at all.

Tulsi caught it the third time it happened — his jaw tightening for just a beat before the phone went dark again — and felt the first small prick of unease, though she said nothing yet.

-----

It was into this — the phone buzzing again somewhere in his pocket, silenced again without so much as a glance this time, Mitali’s hand drifting back toward her own pocket every few minutes without her quite noticing she was doing it — that the doorbell rang, and Kamla came through a moment later carrying a courier package, addressed in a hand Tulsi immediately recognized, postmarked from somewhere in the United States.

“Karan Bhaiya aur Nandini Bhabhi ka hoga,” Shobha said, already smiling. “Unhone bola tha kuch bheja hai mumma ke liye.”

Tulsi took the package, working the tape loose carefully, and had just lifted the lid off the cardboard box inside when Mihir’s phone rang again. This time he didn’t even reach for it properly — just pressed the side button through the fabric of his pocket, silencing it without ever taking it out, his face giving away nothing at all as he leaned in instead to see what Tulsi was unwrapping.

Inside the box, covered in bubble wrap was a frame — simple, dark wood, glass front — and inside it, a clipping from what was clearly a local New Jersey newspaper, the print smaller and the layout plainer than the Gazette’s polished spread, but unmistakably about Bandhej all the same. A short piece, tucked into a lifestyle section, about a small Indian textile brand whose work had begun appearing in a boutique two towns over from where Karan and Nandini lived — someone there had apparently done their own research and included a paragraph about the cooperative in Anjaar, about the founder’s story, condensed into a few careful sentences by someone who had never met her and had clearly still been moved enough to write them anyway.

Tucked into the frame’s edge was a small card in Nandini’s neat, looping handwriting.

*Maa, ye ek New Jersey ke local newsletter mein dikha. Itni door baithkar bhi, aapka naam yahan tak pahunch gaya. Bahut garv hota hai humein. Happy birthday. — Karan, Nandini, Parth, Samaira and Ronak.*

Tulsi read the card twice, something in her chest settling into a quieter, steadier warmth than the earlier gifts had managed — not the overwhelming, tearful kind, just something plain and glad.

“Itni door se,” she said, mostly to herself, turning the frame over in her hands, “aur phir bhi—”

She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. Shobha, standing beside her, only nodded, understanding exactly the shape of what had gone unsaid.

Shobha then noticed something else in the cardboard box, “Mumma ye aur bhi kuch hai.”

A handcrafted photo album titled The Moments We Couldn’t Share With You, filled with photographs and memories of Parth, Samaira and Ronak’s childhood milestones—from first days of school and birthdays to ordinary family moments—each accompanied by short notes they wrote for Baa about wishing she had been there to share them.

Tulsi turned the pages slowly, lingering over each photograph as though trying to make up for years she had never lived beside them. By the time she reached the end, her vision had blurred beyond reading, and she simply gathered the album to her chest, holding it there for a long, silent moment.

-----

Before anyone could move toward the chachis’ gifts, the front door opened again — no knock, no announcement, the particular ease of people who considered themselves close enough to the house not to need one — and Vaishnavi and Aarti came in together, both dressed properly for the occasion, both a little out of breath, as if they’d rushed the last stretch from the auto.

“Kaki!” Vaishnavi reached her first, bending immediately to touch Tulsi’s feet before Tulsi could stop her, then straightening and pulling her into a hug tight enough to lift her slightly off balance. “Happy birthday!”

Aarti followed, the same gesture, the same warmth, murmuring her own wishes into Tulsi’s shoulder before letting go.

They turned next to the chachis, touching their feet in turn — “Baa,” both girls called them, the term having settled naturally into place somewhere over the past months — and received their blessings with the easy familiarity of people who had visited this house often enough to no longer feel like guests in it.

Then, last, they turned to Mihir.

Both girls bent to touch his feet as well — a formality, brief, unremarkable to anyone watching.

But as Vaishnavi straightened, her hand came up for half a second, thumb and index finger pinched together — *perfect* — flashed low, between them, angled toward him and nowhere else.

Aarti’s followed almost immediately after, a thumbs-up held just as briefly, just as low, meant for exactly one person in the room.

Mihir’s mouth twitched — the barest suppressed acknowledgment — before he schooled his face back into something neutral and reached out to pat Vaishnavi’s head instead, murmuring something about how well the factory floor shoot must have gone, loud enough for anyone listening to hear only that.

Both girls, satisfied that Tulsi’s attention was elsewhere — occupied, as it seemed to be, with settling Nandini’s frame carefully onto the sideboard — melted back into the general noise of the room without another glance exchanged.

Tulsi had seen all of it.

She said nothing. She only added it, quietly, to everything else she’d been collecting since the balcony that morning — the gestures, the deflections, the small unguarded signals passed between people who thought no one was watching closely enough to catch them.

A lot of them, she thought, seem to know something she had only just begun to understand the shape of.

-----

Daksha Chachi came forward next, holding a small, worn velvet box — old, the kind that had clearly seen decades pass rather than been bought yesterday for the occasion.

“Tulsi,” she said, and something in the way she said the name carried more weight than it usually did. “Yeh Baa ka tha.”

Tulsi looked up sharply.

“Unhone mujhe dia tha,” Daksha Chachi went on, “bahut pehle — jab main byah ke iss ghar mein aayi thi. Kaha tha, jab sahi mauka aaye, jo tumhe iske layak lage, use de dena.” She opened the box herself, revealing a delicate gold bangle, old-fashioned in its design, clearly handcrafted rather than mass-produced. “Maine bahut saalon tak socha ki sahi mauka kabhi aayega ya nahi. Ab lagta hai — aa gaya.”

Tulsi’s hand went to her mouth, the gesture entirely unplanned.

“Chachi, yeh—”

“Rakh lo,” Daksha Chachi said, closing Tulsi’s fingers gently around the box before she could protest further. “Baa khush hoti agar dekh paati ki kiske haath mein gaya.”

Tulsi held the box a moment, unable to speak, and then simply reached for Daksha Chachi instead, the embrace saying what neither of them had quite managed to put into words — something between two women who had, over the past few months, slowly rekindled whatever had once stood between them.

Gayatri Chachi came forward at last, holding a thick, bulky envelope rather than anything wrapped — the kind that clearly held papers, several of them, judging by its weight.

“Mera gift thoda alag hai,” she said, a little nervous, holding it out with both hands. “Aaj tumhe kholne ki zaroorat nahi hai.”

Tulsi looked at her, then at the envelope, faintly puzzled.

“Aaj toh tumhe time nahi milega iske liye,” Gayatri Chachi went on. “Ek do din mein — kabhi jab do teen ghante ki fursat mile, tab kholna. Aaram se, akele. Aaj ka din bahut busy rahega tumhare liye — yeh cheez abhi ke liye nahi hai.”

Something in her tone made it clear this wasn’t modesty about the gift’s size or significance — if anything, the opposite. Whatever was inside, it needed room and quiet that today wasn’t going to offer.

Tulsi held the envelope for a moment, feeling its weight, understanding — without yet knowing what it contained — that this was not something to be waved away or unwrapped between one gift and the next.

“Ji, Chachi,” she said, and reached for her instead of the envelope’s contents, pulling her into a hug she hadn’t planned but that felt, suddenly, necessary.

Gayatri Chachi held on a beat longer than the embrace strictly required, something unspoken passing through it that neither of them put into words.

-----

Mitali had barely worked up the courage to present her envelope when Tulsi’s phone rang, and she smiled the moment she saw the name.

“Gautam!” she said, answering. “Kaisa hai beta?”

“Happy birthday, Maa,” he said, his voice slightly muffled, some background hum of traffic or an engine running beneath it.

“Drive kar raha hai kya itni subah subah?” she asked.

“Nahi, nahi — car bech di maine,” he said. “Cab mein hoon abhi. Nayi lene ka soch rahe hain, dekh rahe hain kaunsi acchi rahegi.”

“Achha,” Tulsi said. “Aur kab aa raha hai Mumbai?”

There was the faintest pause before he answered — too brief for her to name it as anything, though she’d remember it later.

“Abhi toh bahut time tak koi travelling ka plan nahi hai,” he said. “Kaam kaafi hai yahan.” A small, deliberately awkward laugh followed. “Sach kahoon toh, Maa, mujhe samajh hi nahi aaya aapko kya gift doon aaj — bahut socha bhi, kuch theek nahi laga. Maine Damini ko bol diya hai, dono ki taraf se woh kuch de degi. Lekin agar aapko kuch chahiye — kuch specific — toh bata do mujhe.”

She didn’t hesitate.

“Tu jaanta hai mujhe tujhse kya chahiye,” she said. “Ghar aa jaa, Gautam. Hamesha ke liye.”

“Maa!” His voice climbed, exasperation arriving right on cue. “Phir wohi baat. You know—” He stopped himself, and when he spoke again his voice had gone brisk, businesslike. “Achha, mera destination aa gaya. Baad mein baat karta hoon, theek hai?”

The call ended before she could answer.

Tulsi lowered the phone, something faintly deflated in her expression — the particular disappointment of having reached for something and found the door closed on it, gently, but closed all the same.

“Kya hua?” Shobha asked.

“Kuch nahi,” Tulsi said. “Gautam ka phone tha. Wish kiya. Lekin—” She didn’t finish the sentence, simply set the phone down.

Almost exactly a minute later, Gautam walked in — not with one overnight bag, but with two large suitcases behind him and a third bag slung over his shoulder, the kind of luggage that made it immediately clear this wasn’t a stop between flights.

The room needed a second to catch up. Ritik got there first.

“Bhaiya?!” he said, already laughing, then stopping short as his eyes went to the suitcases. “Itna saara samaan? Kitne din ke liye aaye hain?”

“Hamesha ke liye,” Gautam said simply, setting the bags down.

The room went very still for a moment.

“Gautam—” Tulsi’s hand had gone to her mouth. “Tu—”

“Wapas aa gaya, Maa,” he said, crossing to her, setting aside the last bag before bending to touch her feet. “Shantiniketan mein hi rehna hai ab. Permanently.”

He straightened and pulled her into a proper embrace, and this time there was no performance left in it at all — only the plain fact of a son coming home, all the years and one phone call’s worth of pretending finally behind him.

“Happy birthday,” he said, quieter now, into her shoulder. “Sach mein. Aur — ab kisi ko pasand ho ya na ho lekin week mein 2-3 baar sooji ke dhokle bana dena — kyunki aaj se main bhi ghar aa gaya hoon.”

Tulsi laughed, something wet and helpless in it, and held on tighter.

Damini, standing a little apart, was failing entirely to keep the smile off her face — though hers, Tulsi now understood, wasn’t just the smile of someone who’d known about a surprise. It was the smile of someone who had known, for longer than tonight, exactly what today would mean for the rest of her own life.

“Tumhe pata tha,” Tulsi said to her, delighted and accusing in the same breath. “Isliye Pari ko rok rahi thi—”

“Bilkul pata tha,” Damini said. “Maine hi plan kiya tha — warna ye toh decision lene ke baad bhi pata nahi kitna time leta execute karne mein.”

Gautam looked sheepish at that, “Damini!”

Once the noise of arrival had settled — the suitcases moved aside for the moment, everyone finding their seats again around the table — Gautam glanced at his father.

“Ek baat batani thi,” he said. “Bangalore travel karna padega shayad, kaafi baar — kuch cases wahan abhi bhi pending hain. Lekin naye cases wahan ke lene band kar diye hain maine. Ab naye cases yahan ke hi loonga. Mumbai ko hi base banana hai ab.”

Something crossed Mihir’s face — quick, unguarded flash of relief and happiness before he composed it into something steadier.

“Toh phir,” he said, “Virani Industries mein legal director ki position khaali hai. Tere liye hi wait kar rahi hai, jab se Hemant Delhi move hua hai.”

Gautam shook his head, gently but without hesitation. “Nahi, Dad. Thank you — lekin main apni practice khud chalana chahta hoon. Independent hi rehna hai.”

Mihir looked at him a moment, something in his expression settling into quiet respect rather than disappointment.

“Theek hai,” he said. “Jo bhi tujhe sahi lage.”

Tulsi hugged Gautam once more. “Lagta hai,” she said, her voice catching slightly, “aaj mujhe sab kuch mil gaya.”

She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t need to — the words carried everything the morning had already handed her, folded into one sentence for the one person who had just, without knowing it, been the final piece of it.

Gautam, in Tulsi’s embrace, caught Mitali still struggling to come forward with the envelope in her hand.

He pulled back slightly to look at his mother, something gentler passing over his face, though he couldn’t have known the full shape of what she meant. “Sab kuch nahi, maa,” he said, smiling. “Abhi Mitali ka gift bacha hai. Aur cake.”

Mitali came forward hesitantly, the envelope now held out in both hands, her earlier composure clearly costing her something to maintain.

“Maa,” she said. “Maine kuch likha hai aapke liye. Please — apne room mein padhiyega.”

Tulsi took it, feeling its slightness against everything else the morning had produced — a saree, a bangle that had once been Baa’s, a bag with pockets designed around her own daily clutter, a photo frame holding thousands of memories. Just an envelope, thin, unremarkable from the outside.

Mitali laughed then, short and self-deprecating, before Tulsi could say anything.

“Pata hai Maa?” she said. “Main khud ko shopping mein expert maanti thi. Yehi toh ek skill thi mere mein. Lekin do baar aapke liye kuch lene gayi — phir bhi koi gift nahi mila jo yeh express kar paaye ki aap mere liye kya maayne rakhti hain.”

The room had gone quiet around them, everyone else’s gift-giving momentarily paused to make room for this.

Tulsi held the envelope a moment longer, then reached for Mitali’s hand instead of answering right away.

“Mitali,” she said. “Tumne kabhi socha hai ki jo cheez sabse zyaada maayne rakhti hai, woh kisi dukaan mein nahi milti?” She tightened her hold slightly on the girl’s hand. “Tumhe khud ko sirf shopping expert maanne ki zaroorat nahi hai. Tum kuch aur bhi ho — bahut kuch aur ho. Yeh,” she lifted the envelope slightly, “shayad tumhe abhi samajh nahi aa raha, lekin yeh kisi bhi khareedi hui saree ya bag se zyaada hai mere liye. Kyunki yeh sirf tumhara hai. Kisi dukaan se khareeda nahi gaya.”

Mitali’s eyes had gone bright, and she said nothing, only nodded, not quite trusting her voice yet.

Tulsi looked at her a moment longer, then said, lighter now, though every word of it entirely serious underneath:

“Agle birthday pe mujhe tumhari apni kamaayi se kuch chahiye.”

The room, which had gone quiet for Mitali’s moment, went quiet again for an entirely different reason.

“Apni kamaayi se?” Shobha repeated, glancing between Tulsi and Mitali. “Mitali kuch kar rahi hai? Job ke liye apply kiya kya, ya koi business—”

“Jab shuru hoga,” Tulsi said, before Mitali had to find an answer of her own, “tab sabko apne aap pata chal jaayega.”

She said it plainly, closing the door on further questions without making it feel like a door being closed, and turned back to Mitali with a small, private smile — the kind meant only for the two of them, holding a promise neither of them had explained to anyone else yet.

Mitali, for the first time all morning, looked like she believed she might actually deserve some part of what was being said about her.

-----

By the time the cake was brought out — Damini’s own work, baked without maida the way the house had come to prefer these past months, decorated with a careful hand that had clearly taken real time over it — the four children had already finished their breakfast under Vrinda’s watch and came tumbling back in at the first mention of cake, as if they’d been listening for the word from another room entirely.

“Ek minute,” Tulsi said, before anyone could reach for a knife. “Kamla ko bulao.”

Kamla arrived a moment later, wiping her hands on her saree, faintly unsure why she’d been called into the dining room rather than simply bringing something in and leaving again.

“Janamdin mubarak ho, Madam. Aapne bulaaya?” she said, bending immediately to touch Tulsi’s feet.

Tulsi caught her before she could fully straighten, pulling her into a quick, warm side-hug instead. “Haan Kamla, cake kaat rahe hain. Chal, idhar aa.”

Kamla’s face did something complicated — pleasure and mild embarrassment both at once — before she allowed herself to be tugged closer to the table.

It was into this that the front door opened without a knock, and Munni came through carrying a steel dabba held out slightly ahead of her, as if presenting it were the whole point of arriving.

“Malkini,” she said, mock-affronted, “mere bina cake kaatoge aaj?”

“Munni!” Tulsi’s whole face lit at the sight of her. “Aajaa, aajaa.”

Munni set the dabba down on the table and opened it with a small flourish — gujiya, neat rows of them, golden and carefully sealed at the edges.

“Maine khud banayi hain,” she said, unable to keep the pride out of her voice. “Aapse hi seekhi thi, yaad hai? Woh Holi wale din.”

“Yaad hai,” Tulsi said, something soft crossing her face at the memory. “Tab toh yeh itni gol nahi bani thi tumse.”

“Ab ban jaati hain,” Munni said, entirely undeterred, “practice ho gayi hai.”

Ritik, who had gone very quiet the moment Munni walked in, finally found his voice. “Mujhe bhi taste karne dena,” he said, already reaching for the dabba before anyone else could.

“Aapko sabse aakhir mein milegi,” Munni told him, swatting his hand away without looking at him properly, though the corner of her mouth was fighting a smile the whole time she said it.

Garima, Timsy, Akshay, and Madhvi had by now arranged themselves in a tight, impatient semicircle around the cake, four pairs of eyes fixed on the knife Damini was holding out toward Tulsi.

“Sab log ready?” Tulsi asked, taking the knife, letting all four children’s small hands come to rest over hers on the handle — Garima’s first, then the rest crowding in until there was barely room for the knife itself beneath the pile of hands.

“Ready!” they said, more or less together, and the room counted down the way it always did for the children’s benefit, and the knife came down together, and for one full, complete moment, the entire room — family, chachis, Kamla, Munni, the four children, Gautam only just home, Mihir’s phone finally, blessedly, silent in his pocket — simply celebrated.

-----

Tulsi cut the first small pieces and went to the children first, feeding each of them in turn — Garima practically climbing into the gesture, Timsy solemn about it as always, Akshay and Madhvi each waiting their turn with visibly strained patience.

Gautam was next, still faintly disbelieving of his own presence here, opening his mouth for the piece she offered with something like relief on his face. Damini followed.

“Bahut accha bana hai cake,” Tulsi told her, and Damini’s answering smile carried more in it than the compliment alone accounted for.

Shobha, then Angad and Vrinda together, then Ritik, grinning the whole time.

Mitali came next, and Tulsi fed her a noticeably smaller piece than everyone else had received.

“Dieting chal rahi hai na?” Tulsi said, entirely straight-faced, and Mitali laughed despite herself, catching the deliberate smallness of the portion at once.

Pari, then Munni, both receiving their pieces with the same warmth as everyone before them.

Tulsi turned, finally, toward Mihir — and found herself, instead, drawn first toward the chachis, the old habit of seniority asserting itself before she’d consciously decided anything.

“Mihir ko khilao pehle,” Gayatri Chachi said, before Tulsi could offer her a piece, something knowing and warm in the way she said it.

Tulsi glanced at her, faintly caught out, and turned toward Mihir with the smallest trace of shyness in it — an odd thing, after everything the morning had already held, to find herself shy over cake. But it was the first time in so many years that the family will see something like this, she thought.

He took the piece from her hand before she could fully offer it, feeding her first without a word, his eyes on her the entire time. Only then did she feed him in turn, the room watching the whole small exchange with open, unguarded happiness.

Shobha’s face had gone distinctly teasing, her mouth already opening around whatever comment she’d clearly been saving up — but one look from Gayatri Chachi, sharp and immediate, cut it off before a single word escaped her. Shobha subsided, biting back a grin instead.

-----

Once everyone including Kamla had been fed, Tulsi set the knife down and moved toward the kitchen out of pure habit, already thinking ahead to breakfast — only for Damini and Shobha to intercept her before she’d taken more than a few steps.

“Aaj kitchen mein nahi jaana hai aapko,” Shobha said, physically turning her back toward the table. “Humne sab sambhal liya hai. Breakfast bas aane hi wala hai.”

“Aaj ka din aapka hai, Maa,” Damini added. “Kitchen hum pe chhod dijiye.”

Tulsi opened her mouth to protest and found there wasn’t really anywhere for the protest to go, both women having already positioned themselves firmly between her and the doorway.

“Main bachchon ko school drop kar deta hoon,” Ritik said, checking his watch, already moving toward the door. “Late ho rahe hain.”

The reaction was immediate and unanimous.

“Nahi!” Garima said, planting herself in place with the same conviction she’d brought to the balcony ambush earlier. “Aaj school nahi jaana! Hum Nani ke saath rehna chahte hain!”

“Haan,” Timsy agreed, folding her arms. “Aaj enjoy karna hai.”

“School nahi!” Akshay and Madhvi added, more or less in unison, the twins’ rare full agreement clearly meant to settle the matter beyond discussion.

Tulsi crouched slightly, drawing all four small, mutinous faces toward her.

“Suno,” she said. “Main bhi aaj kaam pe jaa rahi hoon. Sab log jaa rahe hain — Dadu bhi, Pari bua bhi, sab. Sabko apna kaam karna hai aaj bhi.” She tapped Garima’s nose lightly. “Toh tum sab bhi apna kaam karoge — school jaana, jaldi se padhai khatam karke aana. Hum sab jaldi jaldi apna kaam nipta ke jaldi wapas aayenge. Aur phir shaam ko — khoob enjoy karenge. Poori shaam. Deal?”

Four faces considered this solemnly.

“Poori shaam?” Garima asked, needing the terms confirmed properly.

“Poori shaam,” Tulsi promised.

There was a brief, visible negotiation happening across four small faces — weighing the injustice of school against the promise of an entire evening — before Timsy, apparently deciding on behalf of all four, nodded first.

“Theek hai,” she said. “Lekin poori shaam.”

“Poori shaam,” Tulsi said again, and straightened, satisfied, as Ritik ushered four still-faintly-grumbling children toward the door.

-----

By the time the last of the children had been bundled off with Ritik, and the house had begun its slower slide back into ordinary Saturday rhythm, the rest of the family settled around the table for the breakfast that had, technically, been waiting since morning.

Tulsi had barely pulled out her chair when Mihir came to stand beside her, something faintly apologetic already in his posture.

“Sorry, Tulsi,” he said. “Aaj breakfast skip kar sakti ho? Bandhej mein jaake kuch kha lena wahan.” He paused, the excuse arriving with just slightly too much rehearsed ease. “Actually, meri ek urgent meeting aa gayi hai — toh socha, mandir chalte hain pehle, phir tumhe thoda jaldi Bandhej drop kar doon, agar tumhe theek lage. Phir main apni meeting ke liye nikal jaunga.”

*Urgent meeting. Aaj ke din, Saturday ko.* Tulsi looked at him a moment, the sentence sitting exactly as unconvincingly in her ears as everything else he’d said this morning had. She didn’t ask what meeting, or with whom, or why it required skipping breakfast specifically rather than simply happening after. She had, by now, developed a fairly precise sense of what “urgent meeting” meant when it came from him, and precise or not, she found she didn’t mind following it.

“Theek hai,” she said simply, pushing her chair back in. “Chalte hain.”

He checked his phone once more on the way to the door — a habit she’d noticed all morning, though she’d assumed, until now, that it was Noina’s calls he kept silencing. This checking had a different quality to it, though; not the tight, controlled irritation of before, but something closer to relief, a small private satisfaction crossing his face before he pocketed the phone again.

Tulsi went to her room quickly and shifted the contents of her handbag to the new bag gifted by Ritik, and came out quickly.

The doorbell rang almost at the exact minute they reached the door themselves.

Kamla answered it, and came back holding a courier package — the return address unfamiliar, the packaging heavier and more careful than the earlier one from Karan and Nandini had been.

“Aapka hai,” Kamla said, handing it to Tulsi.

Mihir glanced at it, then at his watch, then back at Tulsi, entirely too casually for it to be entirely casual. “Taiyaar ho? Niklen?”

She looked at the package in her hands, then at him. “Yeh kya hai?”

“Mujhe kaise pata hoga,” he said, already reaching for the car keys. “Haath mein rakh lo — car mein dekh lena.”

*Pata nahi*, she thought, following him out to the car, the package cradled against her side. *Use article mein kya likha jayega, yeh bhi pata nahi tha. Ab iska bhi pata nahi. Bahut saari cheezein ho rahi hain jinka use pata nahi hai — aur phir bhi inn sabki timing itni sahi kaise ho jaati hai.*

She didn’t say any of it aloud. She got into the car instead, the package on her lap, and worked at the tape with one careful fingernail as he pulled out of the gate.

Inside was a book — heavy, hardbound, the cover a deep indigo with the Bandhej logo embossed simply at its center, no other text at all. She opened it, and the first page held only a short note, printed rather than handwritten, from an institution she’d never heard of: the Institute for Enterprise & Heritage Studies, informing her that it was their honour to publish this volume, that copies would be sent to leading textile institutes around the world, that the research had been conducted with the full cooperation of Bandhej’s cooperative members. It also said they were thankful to eminent textile historian Dr. Harshvardhan Joshi for sharing his own independent research with their team.

She turned the page, and then didn’t stop turning them for a long while.

Photographs she recognized and photographs she didn’t. The Anjaar workshop from angles she’d never seen it photographed from. A full chapter on the natural dye process, illustrated step by step. The First Ten again, but expanded now — more photographs, more names, more of the specific history she’d carried in her own memory for years finally set down in permanent print, bound between hard covers, sent to institutes she would likely never visit in person.

By the time the car slowed for a light somewhere past the second flyover, her eyes had begun to blur slightly at the edges, and she found herself sniffing once, quietly, trying to keep it contained.

Mihir, without looking away from the road, reached into his pocket and held out a folded handkerchief.

“Arre, kya hua?” he asked, all innocence, glancing at her now with a concern that would have been convincing if she hadn’t already spent the entire morning collecting evidence to the contrary.

Tulsi took the handkerchief, dabbed once at her eyes, and didn’t answer the question directly at all.

“Kuch nahi,” she said. “Bas — kitabein kabhi kabhi bahut zyaada keh deti hain.”

He glanced at her again, visibly thrown by the answer, some new uncertainty crossing his face — the look of a man trying to work out whether he’d just been complimented or quietly caught, and unable to settle on which.

She said nothing further, and let him sit with it the rest of the drive.

They reached the temple a little after, and the familiar quiet of it settled over both of them the way it always did — shoes left at the entrance, the walk across cool stone, the bell she rang herself this time, its sound entirely unremarkable to her compared to the one that had followed her for weeks now. They stood before the idol together, hands folded, and prayed the way they always did on days like this — no words exchanged, none needed.

Afterward, they came out to the small courtyard and sat, as they usually did, on the worn stone bench beneath the old neem tree, the coffee table book still resting on Tulsi’s lap, the morning’s heat not yet fully arrived. She had somehow forgotten to, or didn’t want to, leave it in the car.

She looked at the book a moment. Then at him.

“Mihir,” she said.

He looked up, slightly uncomfortable with the way she’d taken his name.

“Yeh tumne kiya na?” Tulsi said.

She didn’t specify what. She didn’t need to. Her hand rested flat on the cover of the book in her lap, and something in the stillness of the gesture made the question larger than the book alone — larger, even, than the article. It sat there, waiting, the way a door sits open long enough for someone to decide whether to walk through it.

“Tulsi?” Mihir said, and the uncertainty in his voice was not performed this time. “Kya?”

“Yeh sab.” She gestured, faintly, at the book, then toward the temple behind them, then, more vaguely still, at the whole shape of the morning. “Article. Yeh kitab. Aaj ka poora din.” Her voice stayed even, but something underneath it had gone very still, very careful. “Sach batao mujhe. Kitna kiya tumne isme?”

For a moment he didn’t answer.

She watched him decide — the same decision she’d watched him make once already this morning, over chai, when he’d feigned ignorance. Only this time there was no chai to reach for, no children to interrupt, nowhere left in the conversation for either of them to hide.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“Tulsi? Maine kuch—”

“Jhoot mat bolna.” She cut him off, quiet, but with an edge underneath the quiet that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

“Mandir mein hain hum. Paap lagega.” A pause, and when she continued her voice had dropped further still. “Pehle bhi — Anjaar ke mandir mein khade ho ke tumne jhoot bola tha mujhse. Yaad hai?”

Something shifted across his face — the specific discomfort of a man realizing the ground he’d thought was still uncertain had, in fact, already given way some time ago, and he simply hadn’t been told.

He tried, visibly, to find some lightness to stand on.

“Arre,” he said, attempting a smile that didn’t quite arrive properly. “Tumhare Thakurji se meri baat ho gayi hai. Unhone mujhe uss jhoot ke liye maaf kar diya.”

Tulsi didn’t smile back.

She simply looked at him — the same steady, unreadable stillness she’d held all morning, over the article, over the “proud” line, over every deflection he’d tried since the balcony — and let the silence do what her words weren’t going to do for him this time.

He held her gaze for a second, then looked away first, out toward the temple gate, his jaw working the way it had earlier that morning when the right sentence had refused to arrive on time.

“Poora batana padega?” he asked, something almost plaintive in it now.

“Bilkul poora,” Tulsi said. “Ek bhi detail miss karoge, toh phir mujhe zindagi bhar mujhe manaate rehna.”

“Arre, arre—” He held up both hands slightly, as if warding off the threat of a lifetime’s worth of apology. “Theek hai, bata raha hoon.” A breath. “Lekin please — mujhe galat mat samajhna. Tumhe zaroorat hi nahi thi mere kuch bhi karne ki. Tumhe waise hi yeh recognition mil raha tha, der saver mein hi sahi. Maine sirf itna kiya ki — aaj ke din mile.”

“Yeh meri samajh pe chhodo,” Tulsi said, evenly, not letting the justification land anywhere it could take root. “Ab seedha seedha batao.”

He looked at her a moment longer, and then, finally, seemed to understand there was no version of this conversation left where he got to arrange the terms of his own confession.

“Kareeb dedh do mahine pehle se main soch raha tha,” he said, “tumhe kya birthday gift doon.”

“Matlab,” Tulsi said slowly, “Dhuleti se bhi pehle se?”

“Haan.”

She went very still at that, some private recalculation happening behind her eyes — pushing the timeline back further than she’d allowed herself to imagine, past the Dhuleti teeka, past the balcony reconciliations, back to a point when the ground between them had still been far more uncertain than either of them liked to admit now. She said nothing, only waited for him to continue.

“Kuch samajh hi nahi aa raha tha,” he said. “Phir socha — Bandhej se related kuch ho. Uss din yaad hai jab main andar aaya tha factory mein? Maine sab logon ka tumhare saath behavior dekha — usmein kuch alag hi tha. Yeh koi regular worker-employer relationship nahi thi.” He paused, choosing his next words carefully. “Main yeh toh usi din samajh gaya tha ki Bandhej kuch special hai — jis din Virani Industries Bandhej ke saamne haar gayi thi uss exhibition mein. Lekin jab main factory aaya toh laga jaise yeh sirf ek business nahi hai. Kuch aur hai. Jise main poori tarah, gehrai mein utar ke samajhna chahta tha.”

He glanced at her briefly before continuing, as if checking whether he was still allowed to.

“Bas isiliye pehle Vaishnavi se, phir Aarti se coordinate kiya — aur Anjaar gaya, sab samajhne ke liye. Tab tak news article ka idea kahin na kahin dimaag mein baith chuka tha. Toh jab Anjaar gaya, tab tak ek general idea tha ki mujhe kya information, kya details collect karni hain.” A short breath. “Sach bataoon toh, kaafi high expectations leke gaya tha. Phir bhi bahut saare surprises mile. Maine kabhi socha bhi nahi tha ki koi ek insaan itna zyaada contribution de sakta hai society mein — community ko iss tarah uplift kar sakta hai.”

“Maine akele kuch nahi kiya,” Tulsi said, before he could go any further down that particular road. “Un ladkiyon ne bhi bahut mehnat ki hai.”

He looked her for a moment before continuing.

“Maine dekha sab,” he said, “unki mehnat. Unka dedication.” He shook his head slightly, still visibly caught somewhere between the memory and the words for it. “Vaishnavi jis tarah har chhoti detail ke peeche bhaagti hai. Aarti jis tarah records sambhalti hai, purane karigaron se abhi bhi utni hi izzat se baat karti hai jitni pehle din karti hogi. Woh saari auratein jo apne ghar ki pehli earning member banne ke liye Bandhej mein aayi thi — unka poora confidence, unka self-respect, sab tumhi se aaya hai.”

He paused, something more deliberate entering his voice now.

“Unhe empower karna, unhe confidence dilana — warna chhote shehar ki saamanya pariwaar ki ladkiyon mein itni capabilities develop hona, unmein itna confidence possible hi nahi hai.” He looked at her directly now, something almost stubborn in his expression, as if daring her to disagree. “Tum kuch bhi keh lo, Tulsi — lekin you can never convince me ki yeh sab tumhari wajah se nahi hai.”

Tulsi didn’t have an answer ready for that. Whatever she might have said seemed too small against how plainly, how certainly, he’d said it — and she found herself, instead of arguing, reaching for the safer edge of the conversation still left unresolved between them.

“Toh,” she said, “uss conclave mein Dr. Joshi ka mujhse milna — coincidence nahi tha?“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“Woh,” Mihir said, “bilkul coincidence tha. Sach kahoon toh, uss din mujhe khud pehli baar pata chala ki Dr. Joshi naam ka koi insaan exist karta hai.” He allowed himself a small, rueful smile at that. “Jab maine dekha ki unki itni high credibility hai, itne credentials hain — laga yehi sahi insaan honge iss article ko front karne ke liye.”

He paused, choosing the next part more carefully.

“Aur jab maine dekha ki woh kitne impressed the tumhare kaam se — jis tarah baat kar rahe the tumse, jitne genuinely interested lag rahe the — tabhi maine decide kiya ki inhi se approach karna hai. Lekin thoda time laga mujhe uss decision tak pahunchne mein. Aur conclave mein — unka direct contact number lene ka mauka bhi nahi mil paaya mujhe.”

“Toh phir?” Tulsi asked, when he paused a beat too long.

“Phir kismat ne saath diya,” he said, something almost sheepish in it now. “Unhone tumhe apna card diya tha — yaad hai? Woh card tumhare purse se gir gaya tha, wapas aate waqt, car mein. Driver ne subah mujhe laa ke diya.” A small pause. “Maine card ka photo le liya.”

Tulsi’s eyebrows rose slightly at that, though she said nothing yet.

“Phir card tumhe wapas de diya maine, taaki tumhe pata nahi chale,” he went on. “Aur usi subah Dr. Joshi ko phone kar diya. Bola mujhe unse urgently milna hai.” He exhaled, something in the memory clearly still carrying its own small adrenaline. “Pata chala woh usi raat kahin travel kar rahe the. Toh main bhaag ke gaya unse milne — ek café mein, jahan unki pehle se koi aur appointment thi. Wahin beech mein thoda time nikala unhone mere liye.”

“Tumhare kehne pe woh maan gaye?” Tulsi asked.

“Nahi,” Mihir said, plainly, without trying to soften it. “Bilkul nahi maane, pehle toh.”

He shifted slightly on the bench, settling into the fuller account now that the confession had already begun.

“Woh bahut resistant the shuru mein. Bole ki woh kisi ke kehne pe kaam nahi karte. Lekin phir unhone khud hi bola ki woh bhi Bandhej ke baare mein likhne ka soch hi rahe the — shayad ek do mahine baad karte, apni marzi se. Kutch waise bhi jaane wale the kisi aur project ke silsile mein, aur unhone mujhe bataya ki agli subah hi tumhe phone karne ka soch rahe the — poochhne ke liye ki Anjaar workshop dekh sakte hain kya.”

He paused, letting that sit a moment.

“Aur unhone bahut saaf keh diya mujhse — ‘Main apne terms pe hi karoonga.’ Apni independent research karenge, khud decide karenge kya likhna hai. Meri approval bhi nahi lenge — final draft bhi mujhe nahi dikhayenge, kuch nahi.”

A pause. Something in his face shifted, weighing whether to continue.

“Lekin kyunki unhone meri request maan lee thi ki aaj ke issue mein ye article aana tha, aur time bahut kam tha — isliye woh bahut reluctantly, sirf itna maane ki mera research unke liye ek base ki tarah use ho sakta hai. Bas itna.”

He looked at her a moment longer, then decided, visibly, to give her the rest of it too.

“Aur ek request aur ki thi maine unse,” he said. “Acknowledgements ke baare mein.” He hesitated. “Mujhe pata nahi tha ki woh meri yeh request accept karenge ya nahi.”

“Aur yeh coffee table book?” Tulsi asked.

“Jab se Anjaar se aaya,” Mihir said, “tab se laga ki Bandhej jis tarah ki entity hai — sirf ek article kaafi nahi hoga. Kuch permanent hona chahiye.” He glanced at her briefly. “Dr. Joshi se poocha — unhe koi objection toh nahi, apna research iss institute ke saath share karne mein. Unhone agree kiya.” A pause. “Aur maine iss institute ke senior executives ke saamne jaake ek presentation diya. Phir final decision unka tha.”

He stopped there, having reached, it seemed, the very end of what he had to confess.

Tulsi sat with it a moment, the coffee table book still resting in her lap, its weight suddenly meaning something different than it had in the car. An article was one thing — an opportunity opened, a door left for someone else to choose to walk through. But this was a man standing in front of strangers, building a case, on her behalf, for something to exist permanently in the world. Not opening a door. Building the room the door led to.

“Poochh sakti hoon,” she said slowly, “yeh sab karne ki tumhe kya zaroorat thi?”

It wasn’t sharp. It wasn’t even, quite, hurt. It was, more than anything, the sound of someone genuinely trying to understand — the same question that had been sitting in her all morning, since the balcony, finally given a voice instead of being folded back down with the chai.

Mihir looked at her for a long moment before he answered, something in his face working through several possible versions of a response before settling, finally, on the truth as plainly as he could manage it.

“Tulsi,” he said, “jab bhi Bandhej ke baare mein kuch chapta hai — kahin bhi, kisi bhi paper mein — mera naam kahin na kahin aa hi jaata hai. ‘Virani Industries ke Chairman ki patni ka business.’”

Something flickered across his face, not quite a wince. “Aur sach kahoon toh — yeh mujhe hamesha irritate karta tha. Kyunki yeh sirf galat hi nahi hai — yeh chhota bhi kar deta hai. ‘Business’ keh dete hain sab. Jaise Bandhej sirf ek company hai, profit-loss hai.” He shook his head slightly. “Woh nahi jaante — yeh ek poora ecosystem hai. Auratein apne pairon pe khadi ho rahi hain isse. Ghar chal rahe hain. Kisi ki beti ki shaadi tootne se bach rahi hai kyunki uske paas apne kamaye hue paise hain.” He paused. “Yeh sab kabhi kisi article mein aata hi nahi tha. Sirf mera naam aata tha.”

He stopped there, and when he continued, his voice had dropped, something harder to say working its way through.

“Aur sach yeh bhi hai, Tulsi. Log mera naam likh dete hain — lekin jo padhne wale hain, woh yeh nahi jaante ki iss sab mein mera contribution zero hai. Ya shayad usse bhi kam.” He made himself look at her as he said it. “Tum Anjaar bilkul khaali haath gayi thi. Agar maine tumhe kuch diya tha uss waqt — toh sirf dukh diya tha. Bas itna hi mera ‘contribution’ tha.”

His jaw tightened.

“Toh jab log mera naam padhte hain kisi article mein — jaise main iss safalta ka koi hissa hoon — mujhe sach mein sharam aati hai. Kyunki main nahi tha. Kahin nahi tha. Tumne akele banaya, akele sambhala, akele bada kiya — aur phir bhi duniya mera naam dhoondh hi leti thi kisi na kisi tarah.”

He looked at the book resting in her lap, then back at her, something steadier finally returning to his voice.

“Toh maine socha — iss baar, poori tarah peeche hat jaata hoon. Sirf tum. Sirf woh auratein jinki zindagi tumne badli.” He paused. “Aur yeh bhi socha — jab yeh chhapega, jab log padhenge ki ek akeli aurat ne kya bana diya, kitni ladkiyon ko, kitni auraton ko himmat milegi apna kuch shuru karne ki. Yeh sirf tumhari kahani nahi rahegi phir. Kisi aur ki bhi shuruaat ban sakti hai.”

“Mihir,” she said. “Kabhi yeh socha hai tumne — ek pujari ki beti ko textile business ki itni samajh aayi kahan se?” A small pause. “Adhtees saalon mein tumhari baaton se. Uss waqt consciously samajh nahi aa raha tha ki main dheere dheere tumse seekh rahi hoon — sirf jo baatein casually sun liya karti thi, unhi se.”

She let that sit a moment, nothing more added to it.

Something shifted in his face as the words landed — the particular stillness of a man being handed back something he’d been certain he no longer had any claim to. He didn’t argue with it, didn’t deflect it the way he had almost everything else this morning. He only looked at her, something raw and unguarded moving behind his eyes, as though the sentence had reached somewhere his own guilt had kept carefully sealed off.

Her hand found his, resting on the bench between them, and stayed there.

Then, quieter, she moved on.

“Toh chhupa kyun rahe the mujhse?”

He turned his hand over slightly, not pulling away from hers, but needing something to look at that wasn’t her face — his eyes dropping to where their hands rested together instead.

“Sach yeh hai ki main nahi chahta tha tumhe yeh lage ki main yeh sab guilt mein kar raha hoon. Ya kisi cheez ki bharpaayi karne ke liye.” He exhaled. “Kyunki haan — mujhe guilt hai. Bahut zyaada. Aur haan, main chahta hoon har us dukh ki bharpaayi karoon jo maine tumhe diya hai — har din, jitna ho sake.” He finally looked up at her. “Lekin yeh — yeh uske baare mein nahi hai, Tulsi. Yeh guilt se nahi aaya. Agar main tumhe bata deta ki main yeh sab karwa raha hoon, toh tumhe hamesha lagta rehta ki yeh mera koi ek aur ‘sorry’ kehne ka tareeka hai. Aur yeh sorry nahi hai. Yeh sach hai. Jo bhi likha gaya — jo bhi print hua — woh sach hai, bina kisi guilt ke bhi utna hi sach hota.”

He paused, letting that settle.

“Isiliye chhupaya. Taaki jab tum padho, toh sirf sach padho. Mera guilt uske beech mein na aaye.”

Tulsi didn’t answer right away.

She sat with everything he’d said, turning it over slowly, the way she turned over most things that mattered — and then, without announcing the decision, she scooted closer on the bench, winding her arm through his, letting her head come to rest against his shoulder.

They sat like that a moment, the temple courtyard quiet around them, the coffee table book still resting closed in her lap.

“Thank you,” she said finally, quiet. “Uss article ke liye. Iss kitaab ke liye.” A small pause. “Aur aaj ki subah ke liye.”

Something in him eased visibly at that — his shoulders dropping the way they had earlier over the supplement, a small, relaxed smile beginning to form.

“Lekin,” she said, before the smile could fully arrive, “please — ab aur kuch aisa mat karna.”

He turned slightly to look at her, the smile catching itself halfway.

“Bandhej sirf mera nahi hai,” she said. “Saari ladkiyon ka bhi hai — aur unke liye yeh recognition achha hai. Khaas kar ke Vaishnavi — bahut ambitious hai woh. Lekin ab, future mein, agar koi recognition mile — toh main chahti hoon khud mile. Apni worth pe. Apne kaam se.”

“Recognition toh abhi bhi Bandhej ko apni worth pe hi mila hai, Tulsi,” Mihir said, not quite arguing, just laying the point down plainly. “Yehi toh main tumhe bata raha tha.”

“Jaanti hoon,” she said. “Lekin phir bhi.”

He looked at her a moment longer, then nodded, something settled and unbothered in the gesture.

“Okay. Kuch nahi karoonga.” A small pause, and when he continued, his voice had taken on a quiet certainty. “Kyunki main jaanta hoon — yeh toh bas shuruaat hai. I know for sure, tumhara yeh venture bahut aage tak jaayega.”

A pause settled between them, comfortable, unhurried — and then, without lifting her head from his shoulder, she spoke again.

“Lekin ab bhi tum woh nahi de rahe,” she said, “jo main kab se maang rahi hoon.”

Mihir went very still.

He drew back slightly, enough to look down at her properly, something close to alarm crossing his face — the rapid, anxious recalculation of a man trying to locate the exact request he’d somehow missed amid everything else this morning had already asked of him.

“Kya?” he said. “Jaldi batao. Jitni jaldi ho sake, main dena chahta hoon tumhe.”

She tilted her head up just enough to look at him properly, something gentle in her expression now, nothing like the alarm on his.

“Maine tumse kaha tha,” she said, “apna guilt chhod do. Aisa toh nahi tha ki sirf main hi taklif mein thi un chhe saalon mein. Tum bhi the. Shayad mujhse bhi zyaada.” She held his gaze steadily. “Toh ab — apna guilt jaane do.”

Something in him seemed to fold inward at that, some old, familiar weight returning to sit behind his eyes.

“Kaash yeh itna aasan hota,” he said quietly.

“Tumhe hi shauk tha na courtship ka,” she said, and just like that, the heaviness in her voice gave way to something lighter, almost teasing. “Toh ab tumse koi easy cheez toh nahi maangoongi na?”

He huffed something that was almost a laugh, caught off guard.

She let the pause stretch a beat longer before adding, entirely deadpan, “Aur waise bhi — iss tarah courtship ka maza hi kya aayega?”

Whatever he’d been about to say dissolved instead into a wholehearted laugh — the kind that came easily now, more and more often these days, nothing careful or measured about it.

“Arre,” he said, shaking his head, something delighted still lingering in his voice. “Bahut demanding nikli tum toh.”

She smiled against his shoulder, satisfied, and let a comfortable quiet settle over them again — until she straightened slightly, wiping at the corner of her eye where an earlier tear had long since dried but left its trace.

“Ab aur nahi rona mujhe,” she said, mostly to herself. “Hadd hai — sab log birthday ke din mujhe rula rahe hain.”

“Sorry, Tulsi,” Mihir said. “Yeh possible nahi hai.”

She turned to look at him properly, thoroughly confused now. “Kya matlab? Abhi tak tumhare surprises khatam nahi hue? Ya aur rulaoge mujhe?”

“Rulaoonga nahi,” he said, entirely too pleased with himself. “Lekin tumhare aansoo zaroor niklenge.”

She stared at him, trying to make the two halves of that sentence fit together and failing entirely. “Yeh kya—”

But he was already standing, checking his watch with theatrical urgency. “Arre, chalein? Mujhe der ho rahi hai. Tumhe fatafat drop karke pahunchna hai.”

But when he started driving, the road didn’t lead to her factory. And though she was thoroughly confused, he gave her nothing the entire drive.

Every question she asked — kahan ja rahe hain, yeh raasta toh Bandhej ka nahi hai, Mihir seedha seedha batao — met some deflection so absurd, so deliberately unhelpful, that she gave up trying to extract a straight answer somewhere around the third traffic signal.

“Bas thoda aur,” he kept saying, or, “New shortcut hai, patience rakho,” or, once, entirely unhelpfully, “Left ya right — dono mein se ek toh hoga.”

By the time the car finally slowed, she had stopped asking altogether, watching the streets instead, trying to place them — and then, all at once, she did.

The chaat stall. Her chaat stall, the one she’d been coming to since before she was married into this family, tucked into the same corner it had occupied for decades, the same cart, the same faded signboard, the smell of it reaching the car even before he’d fully parked.

She turned to him, more confused now than she’d been the entire drive.

Mihir got out first, came around, and opened her door. “Utro.”

“Lekin tumhari meeting—” she started.

“Yehi toh hai meeting,” he said, holding out a hand to help her down. “Aur tumhe toh pata hai — mujhe tumhari aankhon mein swaad ke aansoo dekhna kitna acha lagta hai.”

The stall owner recognized her before she’d even fully stepped out of the car — a wide, gap-toothed smile breaking across his face, the particular delight of a man greeting a customer he hadn’t seen in far too long.

“Arre, madam, aap!” he said, already reaching for a plate. “Kitne saalon baad! Kaisi hain aap?”

“Bahut achhi hoon,” Tulsi said, something warm and a little disbelieving crossing her face as she took in the familiar cart, the same steel containers, the same small stool she used to perch on years and years ago. “Aapko yaad hoon main?”

“Bhool sakte hain kya,” the man said, already spooning pani puri shells onto a plate with practiced speed. “Aapki wahi order — extra teekha pani, papdi chaat mein dahi zyaada.”

Tulsi turned to look at Mihir, something between disbelief and delight in her expression. “Tumne yeh bhi—”

“Arre nahi, main toh aaj sirf laaya hoon tumhe yahan — aur kuch nahi,” Mihir said, holding up both hands in mock innocence. “Baaki sab ise khud hi yaad tha.”

They found a small plastic table at the edge of the stall, the kind that wobbled slightly if you leaned on it wrong, and Tulsi sat, still shaking her head slightly at the whole unlikely morning.

There had been a time, she thought, watching him settle into the chair across from her, entirely at ease, already gesturing the stall owner over for a second round of pani puri before the first had even arrived, when getting him here had meant pleading. Convincing. A dozen small negotiations just to get him to agree to something this simple — a plate of pani puri at a roadside stall, nothing more. He used to worry about the crowd, the hygiene, what people would say, seeing the Virani name at a cart like this. She’d stopped asking, most years, rather than fight for it.

Today he had brought her here himself. Hadn’t needed asking at all.

She said nothing about it aloud. She only watched him a moment longer than the scene required, something quietly full in her chest, before the first pani puri arrived and swept the thought away entirely.

The first pani puri arrived, and she ate it the way she always had — quick, decisive, no hesitation — and the reaction came almost immediately: her eyes widening, one hand flying up to fan at her own mouth, the sharp intake of breath that came with pani made properly, dangerously spicy, exactly the way she liked it.

“Arre!” she said, half-laughing, half-gasping, her eyes already beginning to water in earnest.

“Wohi toh,” Mihir said, watching her with unconcealed satisfaction, “swaad ke aansoo.”

She swatted at his arm without any real force behind it, reaching for the water bottle Mihir had already set down beside her, laughing through the burn of it, her eyes bright and streaming now for the most uncomplicated reason the entire morning had offered.

“Bahut saalon baad,” she said, once she’d recovered enough to speak, “itna teekha khaya hai.”

“Toh ab jab chaho aa jaayenge,” Mihir said, already gesturing for a second plate of dahi puri. “Main promise karta hoon.”

They sat there a while, working through pani puri and then papdi chaat, the papdi crunching loudly enough that conversation kept breaking off mid-sentence into laughter, the sharp tang of tamarind and the cool bite of yoghurt trading off with each bite — an entirely ordinary, entirely perfect stretch of time, unburdened, for once, by anything that needed confessing or forgiving.

-----

Once they were settled back in the car, plates cleared, the stall owner waving them off with a promise that Tulsi would return sooner this time, Mihir’s phone buzzed.

He glanced at it, and whatever ease had settled into his face over the last half hour disappeared instantly.

Noina’s name lit the screen. Again. He simply cut it yet again.

A moment later, it rang again. He silenced the call without a second glance, sliding the phone face-down onto the dashboard, and turned to her instead, something deliberately light in his voice, as if trying to hold onto the last of the morning’s ease before it slipped away entirely.

“Ek treat dogi ?” he said. “Tumhari birthday treat.”

Tulsi raised an eyebrow, amused. “Mera hi birthday hai, aur treat mujhe deni hai?”

“Bilkul,” he said, entirely unbothered by the logic of it. “Tumhara birthday hai — ek treat toh banti hai mere liye.”

She rolled her eyes, shaking her head. “Theek hai. Kya chahiye?”

“Ek Lunch date,” he said. “Kahin achhi jagah. Sirf hum dono.”

She was about to agree when something occurred to her, and her expression shifted slightly.

“Ek order complete karna hai aaj,” she said. “Bandhej mein. Bhool hi gayi thi main.” She glanced at him. “Thoda late chalega?”

“Daudega,” he said easily, “waise bhi abhi kaafi heavy ho gaya hai” — a hand gesturing vaguely at both their stomachs — “thoda time lagega hi digest hone mein. Kitne baje pick karoon tumhe?”

She considered it a moment. “Kareeb paune do?”

“Okay,” he said.

The phone buzzed again on the dashboard.

“Kaun call kar raha hai baar baar?” Tulsi asked, though she could guess. “Subah se dekh rahi hoon.”

Mihir hesitated — the same brief flicker of the old instinct to deflect, silence it, keep the morning intact a little longer — before he reached for the phone, unlocked it and held it out to her instead.

Seventeen missed calls, all since morning, all from the same name.

“Ek WhatsApp message bhi hai,” he said quietly. “Dekh lo.”

She opened it.

*Main Virani Industries mein apna stake chhodne ko taiyaar hoon, lekin tumhe aaj hi mere ghar aake mujhse milna padega. Aaj midnight main out of country jaa rahi hoon. Kab wapas aaoongi, pata nahi.*

Tulsi read it twice, her expression giving away almost nothing.

“Woh jaan boojhke aaj ke din kar rahi hai yeh,” Mihir said, his voice low, controlled in the way it got when he was working hard to keep it that way. “Mujhe nahi lagta woh kahin jaa rahi hai. Sirf aaj ka din kharab karna chahti hai hamare liye.”

Tulsi lowered the phone slowly, something settling into place behind her eyes.

“Haan,” she said. “Aur mujhe lagta hai — woh yeh dikhana chahti hai mujhe. Ki aaj bhi, mere birthday ke din, ek phone call, ek message — aur tum uske ishaare pe uske darwaze tak pahunch sakte ho. Ki abhi bhi kahin na kahin, uske haath mein tumhari dor hai.” She looked at him. “Bas itna sabit karna hai use. Baaki kuch nahi.”

She said it plainly, without particular anger in it — the flat, clinical read of someone who had spent enough years studying Noina’s methods to know exactly what she was reaching for this time.

A pause.

“Lekin Mihir,” she said, “agar woh genuinely apna stake chhodne ko taiyaar ho toh?” She turned to face him properly now. “Socho zara — uss aurat se hamari jaan chhoote, aaj. Kitni badi tension khatam ho jaayegi hamari life ki.”

“Noina kabhi genuine ho hi nahi sakti,” Mihir said, immediate, certain. “Main akela usse kabhi nahi milna chahta. Agar milna hi pade toh tumhare saath hi jaaoonga. Aur main nahi chahta ki aaj ke din uska manhoos saaya tumpe pade.” His jaw set. “Bas — aaj nahi hoga yeh. Iss baar main use apne maqsad mein kaamyaab nahi hone doonga. Bas.”

But Tulsi pressed on, steady, unwilling to simply let the stake offer disappear untested — reasoning through the practical weight of it, the years of financial entanglement it would finally end, the peace it would buy the whole family if it was real — until, gradually, his resistance began to give way, not because he’d stopped worrying, but because he could no longer argue with the sense of it.

“Theek hai,” he said finally, quietly. “Chalo.”

“Ab,” Tulsi said, already thinking three steps ahead, “jab uska phone aaye, toh bata dena — saade chaar baje tum aaoge. Papers taiyaar rakhe. Notary tum bula lena.” She paused. “Usko idea mat aane dena ki main bhi chal rahi hoon.”

He looked at her, faint surprise crossing his face at how quickly she’d assembled the whole plan.

“Aur,” she added, “tum khud se call mat karna use. Uska aane dena. Mujhe yakeen hai woh zaroor karegi.”

The factory came into view a few minutes later, and as Tulsi stepped out of the car, she spotted Vaishnavi and Aarti just arriving themselves — Gayatri Chachi, apparently, having refused to let either of them leave the house without breakfast first.

“Kaki!” Vaishnavi called, already crossing toward her, Aarti a step behind. Her eyes went past Tulsi to the car, to Mihir still seated inside. “Uncle, aap bhi chaliye na thodi der — celebrations ke liye.”

Mihir shook his head, staying where he was. “Nahi, main nahi aaoonga. Tum logon ka waqt hai yeh — apni Kaki ke saath. Main beech mein nahi aaunga.”

“Arre, aao na,” Tulsi said, leaning back toward the car window. “Ab toh tum inn ladkiyon ko jaante ho ache se —”

“Yeh sirf tumhara hai, Tulsi,” he said, gently but without moving. “Tum jao. Main bhi thoda office hoke aata hoon.”

She looked at him a moment longer, decided not to argue, and turned to follow Vaishnavi and Aarti toward the entrance — and it was in that same moment that Mihir saw them.

A small cluster of people near the gate, cameras already raised, microphones already extended, the particular hungry energy of press that had smelled a story and converged on it faster than anyone could have accounted for. Someone shouted Tulsi’s name. Another voice called out something about the Gazette article, about Bandhej, about whether she’d comment.

Mihir was out of the car before the second voice had finished.

“Andar jao,” he said to the three women, already moving to place himself between them and the gathering crowd, one hand raised toward the factory’s security guard, who was already jogging over. “Jaldi.”

Between the two of them, they got Vaishnavi, Aarti, and Tulsi inside within seconds, the gate swinging shut behind them, leaving Mihir alone on the outer side of it, facing a dozen raised phones and at least three microphones now angling toward him instead.

“Sir, Bandhej ke baare mein—”

“Tulsi ji ka statement chahiye—”

“Kisi ko force nahi kar sakte aap,” Mihir said, his voice carrying easily over the noise, flat and final. “Agar, aur jab bhi Tulsi ji kuch kehna chahengi, woh khud press conference bulaayengi. Tab tak — koi statement nahi hai. Kisi ka bhi.”

He held his ground, unmoving, until the energy of the crowd began to shift — the particular deflation of people realizing there was nothing left to extract here today. One by one, cameras lowered. The questions thinned, then stopped.

Only once the last of them had begun drifting back toward their vehicles did Mihir finally turn away, pulling out his phone.

Ritik picked up on the second ring.

“Factory ki security badha do,” Mihir said, without preamble. “Abhi. Jitni jaldi ho sake.”

His phone rang before he’d even fully turned back toward the car.

“Tum andar kyun nahi aaye?” Tulsi’s voice came through, tight with worry. “Mujhe laga tum peeche hi ho. Tum theek ho na? Press wale—”

“Haan, bilkul theek hoon,” Mihir said, already walking back toward the car, keeping his voice even for her benefit. “Woh log gaye. Aur Ritik se keh diya hai security badhane ke liye.” A pause. “Tum sab log bhi thoda alert rehna.”

“Hmm,” she said, the single sound carrying more than agreement — something close to relief, still not fully settled.

“Main nikalta hoon,” he said.

“Phone pe apna live location share karna mere saath,” she said, before he could hang up.

He almost smiled at that, despite everything. “Karta hoon.” A beat. “Lunch pe — sorry, date ke liye milte hain.”

Even now — phone still warm against her ear, the gate behind her only just having swung shut on a dozen raised cameras a couple of minutes ago — something in her eased at the word, the smallest, most involuntary smile tugging at her mouth before she could stop it.

“Date,” she repeated, mostly to herself, shaking her head slightly. Only he could manage that — turning a moment this tense into something almost giddy, without either feeling canceling the other out.

“Kya hua?” he asked, catching the pause.

“Kuch nahi,” she said, the smile still audible in her voice even as she tried to sound composed. “Bas — apna khayal rakhna. Milte hain.”

She lowered the phone slowly, and for just a second, standing there with Vaishnavi and Aarti waiting a few steps away, the morning’s tension and the morning’s happiness sat together in her chest without either one needing to give way to the other.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

-----

At quarter to two, Mihir pulled up outside the factory gates, scanning the street once, carefully, before getting out — no cameras, no lingering press, only the ordinary Saturday traffic of the road outside. Whatever security Ritik had arranged in the intervening hours seemed to have settled the matter, at least for now.

Tulsi came out a few minutes later, and stopped short at the sight of him.

He’d changed — out of the casual t-shirt he’d worn all morning and into something considerably more deliberate, a crisp shirt, sleeves rolled with just enough care to look effortless rather than fussed over.

“Tum ghar jaake taiyaar hoke aaye kya?” she asked, sliding into the car, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice.

“Date hai,” Mihir said simply, as if this explained everything, pulling back out onto the road. “Thoda toh effort banta hai.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

She didn’t know how to respond to that.

“Tum taiyaar nahi hogi?” he asked, glancing at her as he drove.

She looked down at herself — Pari’s saree still on her, the one she’d promised to wear the whole day. “Yeh hi pehnungi,” she said. “Pari se wada kiya hai.”

“Jaanta hoon,” he said, and something in the easy certainty of it told her he’d already accounted for this. “Isiliye kuch aur leke aaya hoon.”

He reached behind his seat while still keeping half an eye on the road, and produced a small cloth pouch, setting it on her lap.

Inside was a set of jewelry — not the champagne diamonds from the conclave, something simpler, older, pieces she recognized instantly as her own, from her own almirah.

“Shobha ko bola nikaal ke de,” he said. “Ghar gaya tha thoda jaldi — taiyaar hone ke liye.”

She lifted one earring out, turning it over, something rising in her chest that she couldn’t yet name. “Tumne kab—”

“Bas,” he said, waving off the question before it could fully form. “Pehen lo. Time kam hai.”

She fastened them with careful hands, the movement of the car making it slower going than it should have been, and had just finished when he reached into his shirt pocket and produced something else — a small, packaged wet tissue first, offered without comment, and then, once she’d used it to wipe away the last traces of the morning, a tube of lipstick.

Red.

She looked at it in his outstretched hand for a long moment before taking it.

*Shobha ne kaha hai date pe lal lipstick lagana.* Her own voice, from years and years ago, asking him for a comment or compliment so small, so easily given, and receiving instead only *jaldi karo, niklo* — irritation dressed as haste, a door closing before she’d even finished knocking on it.

“Yeh—” She looked at him. “Yeh tumhe kaise —”

“Tum pe red lipstick suit karti hai toh Shobha se kaha ki tumhare room se leke mujhe de,” he said, eyes on the road, something almost shy in his demeanor.

She said nothing further, only opened the small mirror on the back of the sun visor and applied it carefully, watching her own reflection change in small, specific ways — earrings, bangles, red on her mouth — none of it hers to have asked for once, all of it simply given now, unasked, entirely without friction.

The radio came on a moment later, his hand reaching for it without thinking, some old habit of filling a silent car — and the opening bars of a song caught her before she’d even registered which one it was.

*Hum tere pyaar mein saara aalam kho baithe.*

Her breath caught, memory rising fast and unbidden — this exact song, years ago, a car very much like this one, her own voice once full of everything she hadn’t been able to say to him directly, singing along for him and his hand reaching for the dial not to join her but to silence her. *Disturb ho raha hai driving mein.*

The car slowed for a signal up ahead, then stopped.

And into that stillness, unprompted, Mihir began to sing along — his voice genuinely good, steady and unhesitating, entirely unbothered by the fact that this was, by any reasonable measure, a female solo. He didn’t attempt to lower the octave or make light of it. He simply sang it the way it was written, eyes leaving the road now that there was nothing ahead but a red light, turning instead to look at her as the line arrived.

“Ab tum saa jahan mein koi nahi hai,” he sang. “Hum toh tumhare ho baithe. Hum tere pyaar mein saara aalam kho baithe, kho baithe.”

He wasn’t looking at the road at all now. He was looking at her — steadily, openly, something in his eyes so full it hardly needed the song underneath it to carry the meaning.

Tulsi stared at him, something in her chest cracking open entirely — the same song, the same line, the same stretch of stopped traffic that had once held only his irritation and her retreat, now holding nothing but this: a man singing to her, unguarded, in broad daylight, at a red light, utterly unconcerned with how it looked.

She didn’t say anything about the memory. She didn’t need to. She looked outside the window while surreptitiously wiping a tear away.

Behind them, a car honked — the signal had turned green — and Mihir broke off mid-line, laughing at himself, pulling forward as the song continued on the radio without him.

“Kya hua?” he asked, glancing at her, catching the look on her face.

“Kuch nahi,” she said, her voice not quite steady. “Bas — gaana achha hai.”

He smiled, entirely unaware of everything the moment had just quietly repaired, and reached over to turn the volume up slightly instead of down.

-----

Noina had gotten to know about the article at seven that morning, on a phone whose battery had been dying since the night before, in a flat that had grown steadily emptier as she’d sold off, quietly, the last of what still held any resale value.

A colleague had messaged her without comment — *aaj ka Gazette supplement dekha?* — and she had opened the hitherto untouched newspaper expecting some small, containable irritation, another instance of the Virani name attaching itself to something and multiplying, the way it always did. Never in her wildest imagination had she thought it would be about Bandhej. Nor had she expected the sheer scale of it.

Her hands too unsteady to read it properly in order, she’d scrolled backward through it first — the acknowledgments before the opening, the ending before the middle — and the images landed on her out of sequence, each one its own small, disorienting blow before she’d even understood what she was looking at.

An entire section thanking artisans and dye workers by name, ahead of everyone else, as though the help were the point of a business rather than simply its labor. She read the line twice, uncomprehending. *Who credits the lowly help first?*

Photographs of some workshop in Anjaar, a place she had never once bothered to visit or think about in all her years of circling this family, now spread across a national supplement as though it were a site of pilgrimage. A woman she had spent over seven years systematically dismantling, now written up as some kind of quiet folk hero — *preservationist*, the article had called her, as if she’d built a temple rather than a business.

And then, near what she finally understood to be the beginning, filling half the first page: a photograph of Tulsi mid-work at the factory floor, her face lit with none of the coldness or desperation Noina had once paid four newspapers handsomely to manufacture.

Noina stared at the photograph a long moment, something ugly gathering behind her eyes as she looked at it — at that face, unbothered, unbroken, radiant in a way Noina hadn’t seen it look even in the old photographs from before any of this had started. She wanted, looking at it, to reach through the page itself. To wipe that ease off with her own hand, the way she’d once wiped six years off this woman’s marriage, her home, her place in her family — all of it, and still, six years and a public humiliation later, here the woman was, smiling out of newsprint like she’d never lost a single thing.

*How is she still like this,* Noina thought, teeth set. *After everything I did. After everything I am still doing. How does nothing ever stay broken on her.*

That was its own particular wound, deeper than the acknowledgments, deeper than the workshop she’d never bothered to see. Barely three weeks after Tulsi had returned to Shantiniketan, Noina had built an entire coordinated campaign to have this exact woman’s face printed across the city in ruin — four newspapers engineered in a single morning, a mob assembled between her factory and Shantiniketan, ink meant for her face that had landed, in the end, on someone else’s back instead. She had used the press as a weapon, precisely and expensively, and it had cost her everything to watch it fail. Now the same machinery — bigger, more prestigious, entirely unbought — had turned itself toward Tulsi on its own, without a single rupee of Noina’s money behind it, and had made her not a headline of scandal but of triumph.

*Even the newspapers hate me more than they love her,* she thought, and could not decide, staring at the photograph, whether the thought made her want to laugh or break something.

She had known for two, perhaps three days now that Mihir’s offer was the only door left standing. The numbers had made that clear well before the article arrived to make it sting further — every other avenue closing steadily, one after another, until only his stake buyout remained as anything resembling a way out. And still, something in her had held back from picking up the phone and simply accepting it. Some last, stubborn refusal to let go of the one thing that still tied her, on paper if nothing else, to this man — Mihir Virani, to Virani Industries, to the boardroom, to whatever remained of the version of herself that had once belonged there.

She still carried, somewhere beneath all of it, the number he’d once offered her — three times market value, laid on the table with a coldness she’d mistaken, at the time, for something she could still work with. Take this offer, he’d told her, *warna tumhe sadak par laane mein humein der nahi lagegi.* She remembered exactly how she’d answered him — reaching for him then, right in front of Tulsi, her index finger trying to reach seductively for his face, her voice dropping into something meant to unsettle rather than persuade. *Mera stake — doongi as our wedding gift.* She remembered, too, the disgust that had moved across his face in the half-second before he’d stepped back from her entirely.

She had thrown that offer away for the pleasure of one small, ugly performance.

It did not occur to her now, three days into her slow surrender, that the offer itself might no longer exist in the same shape it once had. She held onto the number the way a person holds onto the last version of a story that still lets them win.

Seeing the date on the article’s masthead had settled the question for her in a way three days of mounting desperation hadn’t managed to.

*Aaj Tulsi ka birthday hai.*

Two things would happen today, she decided, staring at the photograph until the ink of it blurred slightly at the edges. She would save her business. And she would take today from Tulsi — this one day, out of all the days left for this family to shower their flowers and their cake and their unbearable, undeserved happiness on her and lodge herself inside this day like a blade left in a wound, so that whenever Tulsi looked back on this birthday for the rest of her life, some part of it would still bleed.

The calls had started at seven-thirty.

Seventeen of them, spaced with the particular restlessness of someone dialing not because she expected an answer but because the act of dialing itself was doing something for her — a small, repeated assertion that she still had a number that could reach him, still occupied space in his day whether he answered or not. The WhatsApp message had gone out somewhere around the ninth call, the stake offer typed and sent almost before she’d fully decided to mean it.

She had meant some of it. She did, genuinely, need to sell. That part, at least, wasn’t performance.

The banks had swallowed the rest of her morning.

She had gone in at ten with a folder of documents she’d assembled and reassembled a dozen times over the past week, and had been shown, over the course of nearly four hours, exactly how little any of it mattered anymore.

The junior executive who’d first seen her had barely glanced at the papers before explaining, in the flat, apologetic tone reserved for people who no longer needed to be handled carefully, that her existing facilities were already beyond the revised risk threshold. The relationship manager she’d escalated to had kept her waiting forty minutes before informing her that new lending had been suspended for her account pending review — a review, he implied without quite saying so, that had less to do with her financials than with whatever conversations had apparently been happening on golf courses she hadn’t been invited to. By the time she reached the branch manager, the man had barely bothered to hide his impatience, glancing twice at his watch while she spoke, finally telling her — not unkindly, which was somehow worse — that under current circumstances, the bank simply couldn’t be seen extending further credit to her.

She’d tried a second bank after that, and then, out of something closer to instinct than strategy, a third, walking distance apart, each visit shorter than the last, each answer arriving faster, as if word had somehow already traveled ahead of her through whatever channels these things traveled.

By one o’clock she was sitting in her car outside the third bank, the engine off, the heat building steadily around her, staring at nothing.

Every door that should have opened had instead confirmed, one after another, in language ranging from clinical to openly dismissive, that she had run out of places left to go.

There was, as there had always eventually been, only one door remaining.

At two o’clock, she picked up the phone.

-----

The restaurant Mihir had chosen sat tucked into a quiet lane, the kind of place that didn’t need a sign large enough to be seen from the road because everyone who mattered already knew where it was. He parked, came around to open her door, and they’d barely crossed to the entrance when Tulsi’s steps slowed.

“Noina ka call aaya kya?” she asked.

Mihir checked his phone out of habit more than expectation, and stopped.

The screen was lit, Noina’s name across it, the phone buzzing silently in his hand.

He looked up at Tulsi. She held his gaze, something settled and certain in her expression — not the tension of earlier that morning, but the particular calm of someone who had been expecting exactly this, at more or less exactly this hour.

“Utha lo,” she said quietly.

He answered without a greeting, the phone barely at his ear.

“Bako.”

Noina’s voice came through clipped, the anger in it only barely restrained beneath something that wanted to sound businesslike and kept slipping. “Maine tumhe subah se itni baar call kiya. Message bhi dekha hoga tumne.”

“Dekha,” Mihir said, flat, already turning slightly toward the restaurant’s entrance as the host stepped forward with a small, welcoming smile.

“Toh?” A pause, some scraping sound in the background. “Aaj hi milna hai mujhe tumse—”

“Saade chaar baje,” Mihir said, cutting across her. “Aaoonga. Papers taiyaar rakhna — notary main arrange kar doonga.”

He was already turning toward the entrance as he said it, the phone still at his ear, when the host stepped forward.

“Mr. Virani,” the host said, warm and practiced, “welcome to Amaya. Aapki aur Mrs. Virani ki table taiyaar hai.”

Mihir ended the call without another word, sliding the phone into his pocket in the same motion.

He turned to the host with an easy smile, entirely different from the flat coldness he’d just carried through the phone, and offered his arm to Tulsi.

She took it, but not without a small, amused roll of her eyes, leaning in to whisper, “Mihir, kuch zyaada nahi ho raha aaj?”

“Courtship ki pehli date hai, Tulsi,” he said, entirely unbothered, already leading her inside.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

On the other end of the line, in a car still idling outside the third bank, Noina sat holding a dead call, the last few words she’d caught before it cut still ringing in her ear — not from Mihir, whose voice had already gone cold and final, but from whoever had spoken just behind him in that last second.

*Welcome to Amaya.*

She knew the place. Everyone who mattered did — and it wasn’t far, not from here, not from anywhere in this part of the city.

She sat with it a moment, something cold and deliberate settling over the earlier anger, replacing it entirely.

She started the car and pulled out, already turning in the direction of Amaya, with no clear idea yet of what she meant to do once she got there.

She only knew that she couldn’t sit still with it — the thought of the two of them in there right now, alone, away from the whole noisy sprawl of that family, away from anyone who might earlier have made room for her too when she’d still had any right to be included. A birthday should have belonged to the entire house — children, cake, everyone crowding around the same table. Instead they’d slipped off somewhere quiet, somewhere private, somewhere built for exactly two people who wanted nothing and no one else in the room with them.

That was what she couldn’t sit with. Not the marriage. Not even, really, the money. Just that — the sheer, deliberate intimacy of it, chosen and guarded and entirely closed to her.

She didn’t know what she’d do once she reached Amaya. She only knew she was already driving there.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

-----

**Author’s Note:**

And that’s Chapter 35 — if it felt like a lot, that’s because it was. This one ended up more than double my usual chapter length, and even then I could have written more. There was simply too much happening in this one day — the article, the gifts, Gautam, the temple, Noina — to cut it down without losing the shape of the day itself, so I let it run long instead.

This chapter took a lot out of me to write, and I hope that comes through in the reading. If it did — if any of it stayed with you — I’d really love to hear it in detail in your reviews. Given how much longer this one is, I’m hoping the reviews can match that a little too. I read and respond to every single one, and the longer, more thought-out ones especially are what keep me going through chapters like this.

Thank you for reading all the way through — see you at Chapter 36.

— ElitePerfumer

Hey! I just finished reading Chapter 35 and wanted to take the time to write a proper review because this chapter really deserved one. “Pehli Date” turned out to be one of the most emotionally satisfying chapters in the story so far.

What impressed me most was how you managed to pack so much into a single day without it feeling rushed or overwhelming. The chapter beautifully balances big emotional payoffs with quiet, intimate moments. From the very beginning, Mihir reading the newspaper supplement and those small involuntary sounds of relief and pride were so well written. You could feel his genuine awe at Tulsi’s achievements and how deeply he understands her. The temple conversation later, where he finally opens up about everything he did behind the scenes — the article, the coffee table book, his trip to Anjaar — was a highlight for me. It gave Mihir real depth and showed his growth, while Tulsi’s calm strength and her request for him to let go of his guilt felt very true to her character.

The family scenes were pure joy. The children’s giant handmade card, with each kid’s unique contribution (especially Timsy’s rainbow), was adorable and heartfelt. Pari’s saree gift, made with her own hands and paid for from her salary, was such a powerful moment of growth for her. I loved how Tulsi responded — acknowledging the imperfections as proof that it was truly hers. Gautam’s surprise return with the suitcases was a wonderful payoff after all the tension with him, and the way it tied into Damini’s quiet happiness added another lovely layer.

Even the smaller details shone — the way the family gathered, the gifts from Shobha, Ritik, Vrinda and Angad, and Mitali’s thoughtful letter. You gave every relationship space to breathe. The Noina subplot at the end added necessary tension and realism, showing that not everything is perfectly resolved yet, which made the celebratory moments feel even more earned.

Your writing continues to impress with its emotional honesty and attention to cultural nuances. The chaat stall date at the end was the perfect way to close the chapter — simple, nostalgic, and full of the kind of everyday happiness this couple has been working toward. It was a beautiful reminder that love can also be found in the small, familiar things.

Overall, this chapter left me with a warm, hopeful feeling. It showed healing, growth, pride, and love in a way that felt authentic to these characters. Thank you for writing something so heartfelt. I’m really looking forward to Chapter 36 and whatever comes next for this family!

This is the only review I could manage not getting spammed so couldn’t give a more detailed one!