TuHir FF:Never Your Wife Again! Ch 45 on page 83: Chai Aur Tie- Page 83

Chapter 45: Chai Aur Tie

Tulsi woke before her alarm went off, a full two minutes before, her body apparently having decided somewhere over the Atlantic that jet lag was someone else's problem now.

She lay still for a moment, taking inventory — no heaviness behind her eyes, no residue of the sixteen-hour flight anywhere in her. Just an easy, clear-headed readiness, the kind she used to associate with the morning of an exhibition, or a factory inspection, or any day that mattered enough for her body to simply show up for it.

*It starts today*, she thought, and let herself feel the small thrill of it before getting up.

She turned her head first, before anything else — some instinct already forming, new enough that she noticed herself doing it — and found him still asleep beside her, turned toward the space she'd been occupying only seconds ago, his face slack and unguarded in a way it rarely allowed itself to be awake.

She let herself look for a moment longer than she needed to. This was the first morning in six and a half years she had woken up beside him in an actual bed — not a shared armrest folded at thirty thousand feet, not a memory, but this: his face slack and unguarded, hers to look at for as long as she wanted. Five months back at Shantiniketan, and for the better part of the first month she hadn't so much as looked at him directly. She wondered, distantly, how something that she’d taken for granted for thirty-eight years, could now feel this familiarly unfamiliar and this correct at the same time.

Then, careful not to linger past the point of tenderness into indulgence — there was a day to begin — she eased herself up and out from under the duvet, easing her weight off the mattress in stages so it wouldn't dip and wake him, and padded toward the bathroom on bare feet, gathering her hair over one shoulder as she went before twisting it up into a loose bun, fingers moving through the motions without needing a mirror to guide them.

Mihir had spent the night turned toward her side of the bed, some old habit of the body outlasting even six and a half years of there being nothing there to turn toward. The mattress shifting under her weight registered somewhere below conscious thought, and he rolled slowly onto his other side, chasing the warmth that had just left it before he was awake enough to know why.

His eyes opened by degrees, still heavy with sleep, and found her a few feet away — her back to him, hands moving efficiently through her hair, the loose fall of her nightclothes catching faint light from the gap in the curtains.

He didn't call out. He didn't fully wake, not in any way he could have explained to himself if asked.

He simply watched, eyes narrowed to the thinnest possible slits, the way a man might watch something he was faintly afraid of startling — her unhurried movements, the small tilt of her head as she checked something in the mirror's edge before she'd even reached it, the whole unremarkable choreography of a woman getting ready for her day.

*Yeh sab*, he thought, and didn't finish it — didn't need to. *Hamesha*.

She reached the bathroom door and disappeared through it, and only once it had clicked softly shut behind her did his eyes fall fully closed again — not asleep, not yet, just resting there in the dark behind his own eyelids with the whole morning still ahead of them.

She was out again in under ten minutes, hair still gathered up in a loose bun, and moved straight to the closet without any hesitation about which side was hers to open.

Two sets came out onto the bed in quick succession — her own saree, blouse, and petticoat laid flat and matched with the ease of habit, and beside it, without pause, his shirt, trousers, blazer, and belt, laid out in the same neat rectangle she used to leave for him decades ago, before six years had ever come between the habit and her.

She held up two ties against the shirt, considering them both at arm's length, head tilted slightly.

Mihir, still half-behind his own eyelids, watched this through the same narrow slit he'd used before, careful not to let his breathing change.

She set the navy one against the collar and studied it, then swapped it for the maroon. The small furrow between her brows eased.

*This one*, she decided, and laid it flat across the shirt.

Something in the set of her shoulders as she did it, unhurried and certain, undid the last of his pretending. He let his eyes open properly.

"Kaise pata chala," he said, voice still thick with sleep, "maine yehi tie pehnne ka socha tha?"

She didn't turn around immediately, finishing the fold of his collar first, and when she did look at him there was no performance in it, no reaching for effect — just the plain fact of the thing, handed back exactly as he'd handed it to her last evening.

"Mujhe bhi tumhara sab pata hota hai," she said.

For a moment he only looked at her.

Then a short laugh escaped him, more breath than sound, and he pressed the back of his hand briefly to his eyes before it could turn into something else. A few weeks ago he would have needed to know if she meant it the way he'd meant it — searching her face for the layers under the words. He didn't, now. He only lay there another second, undone in the ordinary, unremarkable way a man is undone by being loved back in his own language.

"Uth jao ab," she said, already turning back to the sarees, "warna Day 1 pe hi late ho jaayenge."

He was up a moment later, stretching once with a small groan he didn't bother hiding, and headed for the bathroom.

"Chai hi banaoon na tumhare liye," she called after him, already moving toward the little machine on the counter. "Coffee ki bhi bahut saari variety hai yahaan."

"Nahi," he said, not even turning around. "Sirf chai. Tumhare saath. Coffee toh poore din milegi."

He was almost at the bathroom door when he stopped, turned back toward the intercom by the bed instead. "Actually — banati kyun ho, room service se order kar lete hain na."

He didn’t want her to work here too.

She didn't look up from the cups. She knew exactly what he was doing, and let him do it a moment longer before answering.

"Agar mujhe sahi yaad hai," she said, "toh maine kuch dino pehle suna tha — ki tumhe chai toh mere haath ki hi pasand hai."

He laughed, caught, shaking his head as he gave up the intercom and went back toward the bathroom. At the door he paused, one hand on the frame.

"Tulsi?"

"Hmm?"

"I love you.”

The door shut before she could do anything but blink at it.

"Mihir," she said to the closed door, equal parts exasperated and fond.

She turned back to the cups, and it was a full minute before she said, to no one, in a voice barely above the sound of the kettle:

"I love you too."

She'd just settled onto the sofa with both cups when he came out, still in his nightclothes, hair damp at the edges where he'd splashed water on his face, and started toward her — then stopped halfway, turning back toward his suitcase instead.

"Arre haan," he muttered, half to himself, and crouched next to it.

He came back a moment later with an armful of neatly folded shawls and a set of thermals, and set them down on the bed without ceremony.

"Yeh rahe," he said. "Shawls aur thermals."

"Thank you," she said, and meant it plainly enough that he glanced up at her. "Sach mein."

He only shrugged, the way he did whenever she thanked him for something he considered simply his job now, and finally came to sit beside her, taking the cup she held out. Neither of them had showered yet — that would come after, once the tea was finished and there was no longer any excuse to sit here a little longer.

For a while neither of them said anything. The tea was good — she'd made it exactly as she always did, no different for the marble counters and the view of the skyline instead of the garden — and he drank it slowly, watching her over the rim of his cup more than he was drinking from it.

She didn't look nervous. That was the thing he kept coming back to, turning it over like it didn't quite add up — she sat there with her ankles crossed, cup balanced easy in both hands, entirely unbothered, as if she introduced Bandhej to rooms full of strangers every other week instead of never having done it once before today.

"Tulsi."

"Hmm?"

"Nervous nahi ho?"

She considered the question properly, the way she considered most things, before answering. "Nahi," she said. "Kyun?"

He didn't have a good answer to that — only that he was, quietly, on her behalf, in a way he couldn't fully explain even to himself, and didn't especially want to.

"Bas yun hi poocha," he said instead, and drank his tea.

"Tumhari keynote address ke liye preparation ho gayi na?" she asked.

"Haan ho gayi," he said, then made a small, rueful sound into his cup. "Haalaanki — Ritik ne jo material banaya tha, uss mein se samajhna hi mushkil tha shuru mein."

She raised an eyebrow slightly, waiting.

"Yeh jo aajkal ke bachche language aur technology use karte hain," he said, gesturing vaguely as if the words themselves might clarify what he meant, "hamari generation ke liye samajhna thoda mushkil hota hai. Slides mein itne saare — kya bolte hain — animations, transitions, charts jo apne aap move karte hain. Maine do baar Ritik ko phone kiya sirf yeh poochne ke liye ki agla slide kaise aayega."

It was easy to forget, sometimes, that the material had been Ritik's to begin with — built for himself, before the last-minute switch two days before they left. Mihir had been given the finished thing and asked to make it his own with barely any time to do it either.

"Koi baat nahi," she said. "Tum sambhaal loge. Hamesha sambhaal lete ho."

He looked at her for a moment, something in his face easing at that, and didn't argue it.

They left the suite a little after eight, she in her saree with one of the shawls draped loose over one shoulder against the promised cold, he in the suit she'd laid out for him, tie knot righted by her when she saw it a bit skewed.

"Ek baat kahoon?" he said, as they walked toward the banquet hall, his hand resting lightly at the small of her back — more habit now than anything deliberate.

"Bandhej abhi international collaboration nahi dhoondh raha, mujhe pata hai. Lekin phir bhi — jitne zyada logon se baat karogi, utna accha rahega. Naye connections, naye ideas — kya pata kab kaam aa jaayen.”

She glanced at him, waiting for the rest of it.

"Bas yeh keh raha hoon," he said, and there was something careful in how he said it, like he'd thought about the shape of the sentence before letting it out, "ki mere saath mat chipki rehna aaj. Apne aap ghoomna, apne aap logon se milna. Main yahin hoon, lekin tumhe kisi cover ki zaroorat nahi hai."

It landed exactly the way he'd meant it to — not as a dismissal, but as a kind of trust, the same trust he'd been handing her in smaller doses for months now. She nodded once.

"Theek hai," she said. "Tum bhi apne logon se milo. Main dekh lungi apna."

The banquet hall was already loud by the time they stepped in — clusters of delegates in various stages of coffee and small talk, a long table of pastries nobody seemed to be eating from yet, badges catching the light every time someone turned. Mihir was pulled almost immediately into a handshake with someone he clearly recognized, already half a sentence into a greeting before Tulsi had even found her bearings.

She'd barely registered her own name tag settling flat against her shawl when a voice arrived at her elbow, bright and unhurried, the kind that assumed welcome before it was offered. The woman took a brief look at her name tag to read just her first name.

"Tulsi. I'm guessing, from what you're wearing, that you're from India?"

The woman was young, dark-haired, her own badge angled just enough for Tulsi to catch an Italian surname, and she had her hand out before Tulsi could answer.

Tulsi took it.

"I would love to hear about India from you," the woman went on, already smiling like this was the best part of her morning.

Her eyes dropped to the badge again, lingering on the second line. "And your venture too. Bandhej, is it?"

Only then did Tulsi glance toward Mihir, an old reflex not yet worn off, and found him already looking back at her, not concerned, only amused. The smallest incline of his head toward the woman, and his eyes said the rest. *Jao. Apne contacts banao khud*.

She turned back and gave the young woman her full attention.

The conversation with the Italian woman lasted a good ten minutes, and it went easier than Tulsi had expected. Her name was Giulia, she worked for a knitwear house outside Biella, and she wanted to know everything: why the resist-dye held its shape, who tied the knots, how long a single saree took.

Tulsi answered plainly, the way she'd answer anyone. Somewhere in the middle of it she realised that she'd stopped checking where Mihir was.

When Giulia was drawn away by a colleague, Tulsi turned and found herself facing a silver-haired man with a pastry plate in one hand.

"Ban-dhej," Richard Hendricks said, before she could greet him, and gave the word a small flourish. "Got it exactly right this time.”

"Perfect," Tulsi said, smiling. "Third time's the charm, then. You've been practising.”

"In the shower, mostly. My wife has opinions." He glanced around the hall. "I'd meant what I said last night, you know. I'm holding you to that session."

"It isn't for a few days yet”

"Then I'll be the first one in the room." He lowered his voice, amused. "Your husband's been cornered by the Japanese delegation, by the way. He looks like he's enjoying it."

She followed his glance and found Mihir across the hall, half-bent toward a cluster of grey suits, nodding at something with the particular stillness of a man who was listening properly. After a moment his eyes lifted, found Richard, and Richard raised his plate in salute.

"I should rescue him," Richard said. "Or be rescued. Mrs. Virani." A small nod, and he went.

*Mrs. Virani*. She let the words settle. Said aloud, in a hall full of strangers, they no longer felt like a title she was carrying for someone else's benefit, as they’d felt the last few years.

She drifted after that, one table, then another. A Portuguese cotton importer wanted to know if Bandhej ever dyed with indigo. A soft-spoken woman from Osaka admired the border of her saree and asked whether she could touch it. Tulsi let her. By the time she reached the pastry table again, nearly forty minutes had gone, and she'd collected a small pile of business cards.

It was there that she found him. He'd arrived from the other side, and he stopped beside her, close, one hand reaching past her for a plate.

"Avocado toast liya tumne?" he said, low, in her ear.

She didn't look up. "Haan. Aur tumhare liye bhi." She placed it on his plate, left her empty plate on the side counter and then lifted a smaller plate from the end of the table. "Yeh croissant mein eggs nahi hain. Maine server se pooch liya, sirf butter hai."

"Pakka?"

"Pakka."

"Aur woh wala?" He tilted his head toward a glazed pastry. "Woh toh eggs wala dikh raha hai."

"Mat lo."

"Main le bhi nahi raha tha." He took a bite of the croissant, considered it, and lowered his voice further. "Yeh toh achha hai."

"Kaha tha na."

They stood with their shoulders nearly touching, heads tipped toward each other over a pastry table. To anyone watching, they were two people sharing something they didn't want overheard.

Mihir heard it first.

It came from a few feet behind them, a woman's voice, pitched low and meant for her companion. "...Virani, the Virani Industries man, and that's — Bandhej? Not his company at all. They've been whispering for five minutes."

A pause, then a murmur in reply. Then: "Well, I did notice he had his hand on her back when they came in."

Mihir kept chewing. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a stiff older man beside the coffee urn slowly lower his cup and turn his head, his eyebrows climbing toward his hairline.

Something crossed Mihir's face, gone almost before it arrived, and then he leaned into her ear.

"Tulsi."

"Hmm?"

"Log samajh rahe hain ki hum..." He paused, and she felt his breath at her temple. "Ki humara affair chal raha hai."

*Affair*.

She stayed very still, the plate steady in her hand, while the word went through her.

*They think we're having an affair*.

For a moment she genuinely didn't know what to do with her face. Forty-four years, a houseful of children and grandchildren, and these strangers in a hotel ballroom had looked at the two of them and seen something *illicit*.

Something scandalous. The indignation rose in her, sharp and unbidden: *Hum? Hum?*

She turned her head just enough to look at him.

He was watching her. His expression was perfectly even, but his eyes weren't.

There was a glint in them she recognised, and beneath it a small uncertainty, the look of a man who had just thrown something into the air and wasn't sure whether she would catch it. He didn't know yet whether she would laugh, or go stiff and cold and walk away, or hand him back his own plate.

He didn't wait to find out. He straightened, set his plate down, and when he spoke again his voice had changed, pitched to carry, warm and courteous, the manner of a man addressing a woman he liked very much.

"Bandhej! Awesome, awesome," he said. "I was only saying this morning how much I admire your work."

Her eyebrows rose a fraction.

"And this shawl," he went on, and reached out to draw it back over her shoulder where it had slipped. His fingers lingered a moment against the fabric, and his thumb rested briefly at the edge of her collarbone. "This colour suits you far too well."

Tulsi rolled her eyes. *This man*.

The indignation held for perhaps two more seconds. Then she found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she didn't want to walk away.

*Fine*, she thought. *Perfectly okay. Two can play the game*.

She set her own plate down. She turned to face him fully, lifted one hand, and took hold of his tie.

It was already straight. She had fixed it herself in their suite, not an hour ago. She adjusted it anyway, a small, unhurried tug at the knot, her fingers smoothing the silk flat against his shirt.

"Thoda door khade raho, Mr. Virani," she said, evenly, just loud enough to carry. "Meri shaadi ho chuki hai."

Something in his shoulders let go. “Achha? Toh yeh sab kya hai?"

"Kuch nahi. Tie tedhi thi."

"Seedhi thi. Meri wife hai na, itni strict hai ki mujhe hi seedha rehna padta hai uske saamne, tie kya cheez hai.”

"Ab tie zyaada seedhi hai." She controlled the laugh that was threatening to come out any moment now, and let go of the knot and patted it once, flat. "Aur mere pati ko pata chala toh..."

"Bahut khatarnaak aadmi hai?" he offered, very solemnly.

"Kaafi khadoos. Aur uski BP ki dawai bhi mujhe hi yaad rakhni padti hai."

The laugh escaped him before he could stop it, quick, quiet, converted to an unconvincing cough. Behind them, the stiff man beside the coffee urn turned abruptly and began studying the pastry selection with the concentration of someone reading a legal contract.

Tulsi picked up another croissant and set it on his plate, entirely without expression.

"Khao," she said. "Aur mat hanso. Log dekh rahe hain."

A soft chime sounded across the hall, and the crowd began to thin toward the double doors at the far end, coffee cups abandoned mid-sentence, badges swinging.

They went together, unhurried, a few steps apart now, the way two colleagues might.

The corridor outside the conference hall was quieter, the carpet swallowing the noise of the crowd ahead. The doors stood open at the end of it, a staff member at each side, and beyond them the low murmur of a room filling up.

Just short of the threshold, Mihir slowed.

He glanced left, then right. Nobody. The last of the delegates had already gone in, and the staff at the doors were turned toward the hall, checking names off a list.

He drew her in against his side, one arm around her shoulders, brief and warm, and pressed a kiss to her temple.

"All the very best, Tulsi," he said quietly, and there was nothing teasing in it now.

She nodded, and her smile came from somewhere deep, unguarded, the kind she rarely let reach her face in public.

"Tumhe bhi," she said. "Keynote address ke liye."

She turned to go.

Then she didn't. She stepped back, rose a little on her toes, and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek, there and gone before he could register it.

By the time he had, she was already walking away from him, chin level, expression composed into perfect sobriety, a woman with nothing on her mind but the proceedings. She gave the staff member at the door a small, courteous nod, and was led inward to her place without once looking back.

Mihir stayed exactly where he was.

His hand rose, halfway, toward his cheek, and he caught it and lowered it again.

*Tulsi*, he thought, and could not have said what else was meant to follow.

Then he straightened his shoulders, smoothed the surprise off his face until there was only the composed, faintly imposing look the room expected of Mihir Virani, and walked in.

A staff member met him at the door and guided him across the hall to the other side, to one of the more prominent tables near the front.

He took his seat, and let himself look, just once, across the room, to where a small placard read Bandhej, India. Tulsi didn't look toward him. She was already engrossed in a paper from the folder in front of her.

The opening ceremony was brief. The chair, a tall Swiss woman with a voice built for large rooms, welcomed them, outlined the programme for the next ten days, and reminded everyone that the point of gathering was to leave with someone new in their phone contacts. Tulsi listened with the folder open and her pen capped.

Then the introductions began, one delegate at a time, each standing to name their house and their purpose.

Giulia went first, from the knitwear house outside Biella. She spoke warm, careful English, every consonant in its place, and Tulsi felt her shoulders come down an inch.

*Fine. This is fine. This accent is comfortable*.

The French delegate followed, and the vowels rounded and the h's went missing. She had to lean into it a little, like walking into a light wind, but the meaning arrived.

The German delegate came next, brisk and exact, and the sentences came in long, tightly packed blocks. She caught the shape of them a half-beat late each time. Her pen stayed capped.

The American went next, a man from Ohio or thereabouts, fast and cheerful. "We're kinda bullish on regional sourcing, honestly, we're a little heavy on the legacy side but we're pivoting." Every word was English. She still had to stop and translate pivoting, heavy on the legacy side, and bullish into something she could use, and by then he had moved on.

The Englishman was worse in a different way. His voice was crisp and unhurried, entirely clear, and she followed every word of it. "We've had, I'd say, a not entirely unpromising few quarters." She looked at the sentence for a moment. Was that good news or bad? She decided it was probably good. She had no idea.

*Two more, and I'll have got the hang of it*, she thought, with the false confidence of a woman about to be humbled.

The next delegate stood, a broad man in a green tie, and opened his mouth.

"Ah'm Iain, an' Ah run a wee mill oot in Paisley, noo, forty-odd year, so we dae, an' whit Ah'm efter the day is..."

Tulsi's pen, which had been halfway to the paper, stopped.

*What language is this?*

There were words in it. She was almost sure of that. They came at her in a warm, rolling stream, and she couldn't find a single edge to hold on to. She heard Paisley, and something that might have been mill, and then it was only music. She glanced sideways across the hall, the old reflex, like a woman checking a translator.

Mihir was nodding along. His pen was moving. When Iain finished with a flourish, Mihir smiled at him across the room and lifted two fingers in a small salute, as at an old friend. There was not a flicker of effort anywhere in his face.

*Forty years of clients from across the globe*, she thought. *He doesn't even know he's doing it.*

Three more introductions passed after that, and she took in almost none of them. A voice, a name, a polite ripple of applause. She sat very still with the folder open in front of her, and the ground of the morning shifted under it.

She wasn't afraid of the stage. She had said her own name to rooms before. She had a whole talk built and rehearsed, down to the length of the pauses, courtesy of Vaishnavi and Vandana, and she knew every answer to every question she could imagine.

But a panel wasn't a talk. A panel was a room full of strangers, and the questions would come from every side, live, in every accent at once, with no slide to hide behind and no one in the next chair to say *she means this*. And Vaishnavi and Vandana could coach her on what to say. They couldn't coach her ears.

*I can prepare the answers*, she thought. *I can't prepare for the question.*

"...and Bandhej, from India."

She looked up.

The chair was looking at her, pleasantly, waiting. She rose, smoothed the pleat of her saree once, and drew the shawl straight on her shoulder.

"Good morning," she said. "I'm Tulsi Virani, and I founded Bandhej six years ago, in a small workshop in Anjaar, with a handful of women who already knew more about resist-dyeing than I ever would."

Two tables to her left, the woman from the pastry table went very still. Her eyes flicked to the man beside her, the stiff one from the coffee urn, and he was already looking back at her, eyebrows climbing for the second time that morning. Virani.

Neither of them said a word. The woman lowered her gaze to her folder with the sudden interest of someone who had just remembered she was in a room full of people.

Tulsi saw all of it from the corner of her eye. Her face didn't move.

Her voice came out even and unhurried, a little slower than she spoke at home. She hadn't planned that.

"We tie, dye, and weave by hand. We have also started machine weaving some time back. We are small, and I would like to stay honest about that. I'm here to listen, and to learn from everyone in this room what I don't yet know."

She let a beat pass, then, "Thank you."

The applause was warm and a shade longer than it had been for the others. She sat, capped her pen, and folded her hands over the folder.

Then she let herself look across the hall.

Mihir was already watching her. He wasn't hiding it, and he wasn't trying to.

He sat straight-backed at his prominent table with his hands loosely folded, and his face held plain, unguarded pride, of the kind a man doesn't bother to arrange for a room.

Her eyebrows lifted a fraction. *Theek tha?*

He nodded, once, slow and certain, his eyes never leaving hers. *Bahut achha.* He was proud of the poise, the pace of her voice, the way she hadn't reached for a single word she didn't mean.

*Ten days*, she thought. *And Iain from Paisley is probably on my panel*.

The next delegate stood, a sunburnt woman with a wool house in Victoria. "G'day, Bruce Callahan's me name, we're a wool outfit outta Ballarat, mate, and we're after a few new mob to do bizzo with."

Tulsi caught *wool*. She caught *mate*. The rest went by at a speed the vowels seemed to have agreed on in advance, without consulting her.

A man from Kerry came after that, silver-haired and delighted with himself, and his English rose and fell like a song. Half of each sentence tucked itself away before it reached the end. She understood that he was funny, because the room laughed in the right places, and she understood none of the jokes.

Then a Russian gentleman with a beautiful, heavy voice and no use at all for the word *the*. Every consonant came out hard and separate, like stones set down one at a time. She caught every third word and tried to build the rest around them.

Her pen stayed capped.

*It isn't Iain*, she thought. *Iain is only the first one who showed me. He wasn't a fluke. He was a category, and there would be more of them in more rooms, all week.*

"...and Virani Industries, Mumbai."

Mihir rose, buttoned his blazer with one hand, and waited for the room to settle.

"Good morning. Mihir Virani. Virani Industries was started by my grandfather, carried forward by my father and uncles, and now my family and I are trying very hard not to drop it." He said it at his ordinary pace, not a syllable slowed or simplified, and Tulsi watched the hall follow him without effort, from Iain in his green tie to the Russian gentleman, who was actually nodding. "I'm here to learn. I speak at noon, and I'll try to be worth the wait."

A ripple of warm laughter, and he sat.

He turned his head, found her across the hall, and raised his eyebrows a fraction. *Theek tha?*

She held his gaze a moment. Then she nodded, once, slow and certain, exactly the way he had.

His mouth twitched. He looked away first.

A few more introductions followed, the larger houses this time: a Milan luxury group, a Manchester mill with four centuries of history, a Seoul textile giant whose delegate spoke a very correct English, each with a slide behind them and a name Tulsi recognised from the banner wall. She listened with half her attention. Her own turn was behind her, and for the first time since sitting down she could breathe out.

At half past eleven the chair thanked them all and released the room to tea.

Chairs scraped, the hall broke into clusters, and the murmur rose again. Tulsi collected a cup from the long table by the window and poured. She took a second cup without deciding to, and poured that one too, the way she'd have done at home.

She was turning back toward the room, looking for the grey of his suit, when a man's voice came from the other side of the tea urn. It was careful and courteous, with each word set down separately.

"Virani-san, forgive me. The lady from Bandhej, who spoke earlier. She is... your wife?"

Tulsi stopped where she was, two cups in her hands, the urn between them and her.

She could have stepped forward. She didn't.

"Yes," Mihir said. There was no pause before it. "My wife. Over forty-four years now."

"Ah." The Japanese delegate sounded pleased, and a little surprised at being pleased. "And she is the founder, as she said?"

"She is. She built it herself, from one workshop." A small breath, close to a laugh. "I'm afraid I only know how to nod when she explains the dyes."

"Very impressive. My congratulations."

"I keep telling her that," Mihir said. "She doesn't always believe me."

The cups had gone quiet in her hands. She found she'd been holding them very still, the way she held a full lamp on a staircase.

*No qualifier*, she thought. *Not 'she also does something'. Not 'she's here with me.'*

She started walking again.

He'd turned by the time she reached the end of the urn, the delegate bowing himself away with a smile, and his eyes found hers at once. He looked, for a second, like a man who wasn't sure how much had carried across the table.

She didn't tell him. She held out the second cup.

"Tumhari chai."

He took it, and their fingers met briefly around the saucer.

"Thank you," he said. Quieter, "Chai toh mujhe sirf..."

"Haan, haan," she said. "Pata hai."

They drifted a few steps from the urn, toward the window, where the crowd was thinner and the light came in flat and white off the buildings across the street.

She sipped her tea. He sipped his. Nobody said anything for a moment.

"Ek baat poochhoon?" she said.

"Poochho."

"Woh Iain. Paisley wale."

"Achha, woh." He nodded, unbothered.

"Mill ke baare mein bata rahe the. Chalis saal se chala rahe hain. Aur aaj kuch naye buyers dhoondh rahe hain, kaafi practical aadmi lagte hain."

She looked at him.

"Tumne... yeh sab samjha?"

"Haan." He frowned slightly, puzzled, as if she'd asked whether he'd noticed it was daytime. "Tumne nahi?"

"Maine 'Paisley' samjha," she said. "Aur ek shabd jo shayad 'mill' tha."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth, and he took a sip of tea to cover it. "Itna bhi mushkil nahi tha."

"Mihir." She lowered her voice, with the light exasperation of a woman who wanted a real answer. "Kaise karte ho?"

He thought about it, honestly. She watched him do it, turning the question over, looking for the mechanism, and coming up with nothing.

"Bas," he said finally, "sunte sunte aadat ho jaati hai."

"Yeh koi jawab nahi hai."

"Jaanta hoon." He spread his free hand, apologetic. "Lekin mujhe aur kuch pata hi nahi."

That was the trouble. He wasn't holding anything back. He truly didn't know how he did it, any more than she could have said how she'd learned to tell, by the smell of the vat, that indigo was ready.

*Aadat*, she thought. *Forty years of it. And I have the next ten days to manage without a free day to prepare.*

She finished her tea.

A little before noon the hall filled again, and Tulsi took an aisle seat three rows from the front.

Mihir was already at the lectern when the chair finished introducing him. He didn't look at his notes. He looked at the room first, one long unhurried sweep, and then he began.

She had heard him speak before, at shareholder meetings and family gatherings and once at a wedding, where he had made the groom's father cry. She had never watched him do this, for an audience that owed him nothing.

His chosen topic was "The Asian Century: Why India Will Shape the Future of the Global Economy”

He spoke about the century ahead the way he'd once explained a balance sheet to Gautam, plainly, with the numbers doing the persuading. A chart on the screen behind him began to animate on its own, its bars rising in sequence. He glanced back at it, once, like a man greeting an acquaintance he didn't fully trust, and carried on without missing a word.

Somewhere in the second half, Tulsi noticed the eyebrow.

His left brow lifted a millimetre before the sentence did. It was a tell she had watched for forty-four years, the small warning before a joke arrived. No one else in the room could have seen it coming.

"...and as my wife would tell you, the trick with any long partnership is to keep showing up."

*He did that on purpose*, she thought, and looked hard at her folder.

The Q&A opened with a hand at the back.

"Ah wis wonderin'," said a warm, rolling voice, "aboot the mills in the north, whit's yer take on..."

Iain. She sat up.

Mihir answered before the man had quite finished, without hesitation, in about four sentences, and Iain nodded with deep satisfaction and sat down. Tulsi hadn't caught a word beyond *mills*.

He took the next question from the Kerry man, and laughed at the punchline a fraction before the room did. He took one from the Australian, one from a slow-spoken Russian, and fielded each with the same easy courtesy, never asking anyone to repeat themselves. She watched his face, half expecting effort, and never found it.

Then the German delegate stood, brisk and exact, with a folded sheet in his hand.

"Mr. Virani. Your figures are attractive. But your ports are congested, your power supply is uneven, and your tariff regime changes with every budget. Why should a European buyer commit capital to a supply chain that cannot promise it will run on time?"

The hall went quiet in the specific way rooms do when a question is fair.

Tulsi's pen stopped.

Mihir didn't reach for the water glass, and he didn't smile it away.

"You're right on all three," he said.

A small stir passed through the rows.

"Ten years ago a container might wait a week at our ports. Today it is fewer days. It is not few enough." He rested one hand on the lectern. "The power is better and still uneven. The tariffs will change again, because budgets do. I would rather tell you where we are weak than have you find out in March."

He let that stand, and the German delegate's pen, she noticed, had started moving.

Mihir continued evenly, “But no supply chain is safe. Ask anyone who has watched a canal close. What I can offer is not a promise, it's a plan. Don't come for a brochure. Come to a factory floor, look at the roads yourself, and then decide."

The German delegate inclined his head, one crisp nod, and sat.

There was one more hand, from the front row. The Japanese delegate rose, and bowed a very little.

"Virani-san. Thank you. If I may ask a small thing." His voice was gentle. "When the roads are not yet built, what does a foreign partner do, to build trust in the meantime?"

Mihir was quiet for a second, longer than he had been for any question.

"Show up," he said. "And stay when it stops being convenient."

Nothing about his face changed, and nothing about hers. Her pen, though, had gone still against the page.

The applause, when it came, was long.

The networking lunch was a long, loud blur of names and business cards. She collected fourteen more, and she had quietly asked the server which dishes were vegetarian before Mihir could. He ate half a plate of mushroom risotto and looked at the rest as if it had personally disappointed him.

The afternoon session broke the hall into small circles of chairs and coffee tables.

Tulsi ended up in one with Mihir, a man from the Milan luxury group, and a broad Mancunian mill owner who had introduced himself that morning as Dennis.

Dennis spoke slowly, in flat northern vowels, and to her considerable surprise she caught every word. She sat back a little. A whole sentence. Then another.

"Handloom's the thing we've lost," Dennis was saying. "Can't get the hands anymore. Mr. Virani, your family, you must be sitting on generations of that."

The man from Milan nodded. Both of them had turned toward Mihir, as men do toward whoever they've decided is in charge.

Mihir didn't answer at once.

"Some," he said. "Virani Industries is mostly power looms, I'm afraid. But if it's handloom you want to talk about..." He lifted his cup half an inch toward her. "You should ask Tulsi. She's the one who runs that business."

Two heads turned.

Tulsi set down her own cup.

"Seventy-six weavers, across three clusters," she said. "All of them women. The youngest is a little over eighteen, and the eldest is seventy-one and still the fastest on the frame."

Dennis leaned forward, all the way forward. Mihir sat back, sipped his tea, and said nothing else for the next twenty minutes.

He did not even look pleased with himself.

He simply looked like a man who had picked up a dropped glove and handed it back.

The roundtable followed at half past three. Mihir was among the selected leaders. Tulsi took a chair at the edge of the room, the observer's seat, and made notes in the margin of her folder. He spoke twice, briefly. Both times she had the impression that he was listening more than talking.

At half past four the chair thanked everyone, and the hall began to empty in slow waves, cups abandoned, badges swinging free.

Tulsi had been standing for a large part of the day, and it had reached her feet. She said nothing about it. She only shifted her weight in the corridor, and by the time they reached the elevators he had taken the folders out of her arms and tucked them under his own.

His hand found the small of her back, briefly, and stayed.

The doors slid open. In the polished brass she could see the two of them, a little rumpled, side by side, name tags still on.

The doors closed.

Author's Note:

Hi everyone,

This one was pure joy to write. After everything we've been through with this family — the fights, the tears, the years and years of waiting — it felt right to give Tulsi and Mihir a day that was, for once, just theirs. No crises, no secrets, no one else's pain to carry. Just two people halfway around the world from home, learning how to be a couple again in public, one cup of chai and one straightened tie at a time.

I had far too much fun writing Iain from Paisley, if I'm honest. Poor Tulsi. If you've ever sat in a room full of accents and silently panicked while nodding along, this one's for you. I have, and trust me, you need to experience it yourself to feel that sudden stress.

There's a small moment at the tea urn I want to point to, because it mattered a lot to me while writing it. When someone asks Mihir if Tulsi is really the founder of Bandhej, he just says yes — no hedging, nothing added to make her smaller, nothing like "she also does a little something on the side." Just: she built it herself. After everything this story has put her through — years of being overshadowed by his name, even when he didn't mean for it to happen — hearing him hand her that, plainly, to a total stranger, felt like it deserved its own quiet page.

Thank you, as always, for reading, for sitting with these two through everything it took to get here. Your reviews are honestly what inspire me and keep me going — every single one means more than you know, even on the days I don't get to reply right away. This story wouldn't be what it is without you.

More soon. Sending love.

— ElitePerfumer 💛