Chapter 1: The Diary and the Engagement

When we started talking about marriage, I happened to come across the diary Arjun had kept when he was sixteen. The smell of dust and old ink clung to the air as I flipped through his diary, grounding me in the quiet mess of his old room.

In India, old diaries are rarely left lying around. But I suppose some truths have a way of finding you, no matter how carefully you think you’ve hidden them. The battered brown notebook, its corners softened by time, turned up between Arjun’s old physics textbooks. Maybe fate wanted me to read it—or maybe my own curiosity led me there, as if my heart had been restless for answers I never wanted to face.

"She’s so moti, and she keeps staring at me. Yaar, it’s just too much."

The words stung, the way a slap does when you least expect it, their cruelty sharp and unmistakable. In our culture, people rarely say such things out loud—at least, not where anyone else can hear. But sometimes what’s written in secret is harsher than anything said in the open. My fingers went cold. I pressed my palm against my dupatta, trying to steady my breath, the ceiling fan overhead suddenly sounding louder in the silent room.

"I found a girlfriend, hoping she’d give up and stop looking at me like that."

Those lines felt like a knife. The words seemed to echo in my chest, like the echo of the pressure cooker whistle in the kitchen during exam season, relentless and unavoidable. I never realized I could be someone’s burden, that my feelings would make someone so desperate to escape.

The complaints in his diary stopped on May 13th.

I remember that date so well, not only because it was written in his cramped handwriting, but because the events of that day changed the course of my life. The heat that day was unbearable, the kind that made your back sticky and your mood short. Still, I pushed all that aside for him. That was the day I ended my weightlifting career to save him.

I vaguely remembered, during my first year in college, he had asked me: "Do you want to be together?"

His voice had trembled a little, like he was afraid I’d say no. The canteen smelled of frying samosas and old steel trays. Arjun’s voice was barely louder than the buzz of the ceiling fan. It was in the college canteen, in between bites of aloo paratha. When I said yes, it was as if a huge weight had finally been lifted from his shoulders. He exhaled so loudly, even the chaiwala looked over, amused.

I thought we loved each other.

Love, the way Bollywood teaches us, is all passion and poetry. I believed in it, even when reality was so much greyer than the silver screen. I thought our story was that kind of romance.

But in the end,

It turned out to be nothing more than years of him struggling, trying to repay a debt of gratitude.

Suddenly, it all felt meaningless.

Everything felt hollow—like the feeling after the Ganesh Visarjan, when the streets are empty but the sound of dhol still rings in your ears. I broke off the engagement and left the Sharma family.

A few months later, one night, he parked downstairs at my apartment and waited.

Our old Maruti Suzuki was idling under the flickering street light, the security guard pretending not to notice the scene unfolding. Seeing the man beside me, his eyes turned red.

"Who is he?"

His voice was raw, as if he’d spent hours rehearsing this confrontation in his head. "Is he your boyfriend?"