It started, not with a gym, but with a walk.
One Saturday morning, three months after the divorce was finalised, she put on her old running shoes — the ones she had bought as a bride and never thrown out — and walked the four kilometres around her new colony park. She did not run. She could not have run. But she walked, slowly, looking at the same kind of bougainvillea she had looked at as a girl of twenty-two.
Six months later, she could walk seven kilometres without stopping. A year later, she could jog the last two. By her forty-fourth birthday, she had lost nine kilos. By forty-five, fourteen. Not because she wanted to be thin — she had stopped caring about that — but because she had begun walking, swimming, eating like a woman who lived in her own body.
The weight became a side effect of having a self again.
Her face changed. Not back into the twenty-two-year-old bride's face — that girl was gone — but into something better. The face of a woman who knew things. Whose eyes held the kind of quiet that draws people in across a room.
Vihaan, fifteen now, came to her flat one weekend, took one look at her, and said:
VIHAAN — "Amma. You look — different."
AARANYA — "Different how, kanna?"
VIHAAN — "Like you. Like the photographs of you before I was born. But also more. Like the photographs were missing something and now they are not."
[ Aaranya hugs her son. She does not say anything. Vihaan, sensible boy, does not ask why she is crying. ]
It was around this time that men began to notice her again. She did not notice them noticing. She had not been a noticed woman for so long that she had forgotten what the noticing felt like.
One of them was Aaditya Varma.