Their first days as an engaged couple were carried entirely over phone screens. Karthik messaged easily, his sentences quick and polished, full of the casual English of someone who'd grown up switching between languages without thinking. Aparna typed slowly, translating each thought from Kannada in her head before sending it, her spelling uncertain, her sentences careful and stiff.
He noticed. He didn't say anything, but he noticed.
When they met in person — coffee dates in glass-fronted cafés, dinners with his cousins — he began noticing other things too. The way her saree sat a little wrong on her frame, the colours that didn't suit her, the way she stood at the edge of conversations instead of inside them. His world was full of people who wore their confidence like a second skin — cousins in ripped jeans and effortless English, friends who drifted between three languages without pausing. Aparna, gentle and warm-hearted as she was, simply didn't know how to occupy a room the way they did.
Karthik loved football with a devotion bordering on religion — Saturday matches with his club team, evenings spent debating formations with his friends. He was proud of how he carried himself. And slowly, quietly, he began to feel a small flush of embarrassment whenever he had to introduce his fiancée to people from that other, glittering part of his life.