Before any of this — before the kilos and the silences and the men at her door — there was a girl. Her name was AARANYA which means forest, and she was so radiant in her twenty-second year that the photographer at her engagement said he had run out of film three times because he kept stopping to look at her.
She had her grandmother's collarbones — the ones that looked like architecture. Her hair fell to her waist and held a faint smell of jasmine no matter what shampoo she used. Her laugh did not sound like a laugh; it sounded like good news arriving.
She had two degrees. She had topped her economics class. She had been offered a scholarship to study in Delhi. She had turned it down — not because anyone forced her, but because she had fallen in love.
His name was Rudraksh Iyengar. He was an architect, four years older, with the kind of jaw that made aunties at weddings forget what they were saying mid-sentence. They had met at a friend's sangeet. He had spilled rasam on her white kurta. He had apologised for ninety seconds. By the eighty-ninth second, she had decided she would marry him.
On the night they got engaged, they sat alone on the terrace of her parents' house. The whole colony had gone home. The lamps were still strung up. She remembered every word of that conversation for the rest of her life:
RUDRAKSH — "Aara, do you know what I was thinking, sitting there on the swing while the priest droned on?"
AARANYA — Just smiled and nodded no
RUDRAKSH — "I was thinking — this is the last evening I will spend looking at this woman from the outside. From tomorrow, I belong on her side of the room."
[ She does not answer for a moment. She looks at him. ]
AARANYA — "Rudra. Promise me one thing."
RUDRAKSH — "Anything."
AARANYA — "Promise me you will still see me when I am tired. When I am ordinary. When I am no longer this girl in this saree."
RUDRAKSH — "Aara. I will see you on the day you are old and silver-haired and have forgotten my name, and I will still think — this is the most beautiful woman in any room I have ever walked into."
She believed him. She had no reason not to. He was twenty-six. She was twenty-two. They had no idea, either of them, that promises made at twenty-six are written on a softer kind of paper than the years that follow.