BANDHAN🩷

MAIN CHARACTERS

Paakhi Sharma is twenty-five and teaches English Literature at one of the most prestigious schools in Shimla. She is the sort of person who gets completely flustered when all eyes are on her, apologises when someone bumps into her and keeps a mental tally of everyone's favourite comfort food.

She has always been perfectly happy with a small, predictable life. School corridors, Jane Austen novels, lesson plans and Sunday morning pastries from Trishool Bakery are enough to make her feel at home. She likes knowing which students will forget their homework, which colleague takes her tea without sugar and which book she can reach for when the world becomes a little too loud.

Paakhi is also wonderfully, hopelessly human.

She loses her phone inside her own handbag at least thrice a week. She spends far too much time worrying about whether her students understood Shakespeare's The Tempest. When she is nervous, she trips over her own feet and then spends the next two minutes pretending it never happened and forgets about it.

She is thoughtful, but not always confident. She remembers the little things about everyone else while constantly second-guessing herself. If someone is uncomfortable, she notices. If someone hasn't eaten, she worries. If someone is upset, she will probably find a way to make them feel better, even if she has no idea what to say.

Her problem is that she has never been very good at doing the same for herself.

Shimla has always been her safe place. It is comforting in a way that makes her feel like she knows exactly where she belongs but then she finds herself leaving it all behind.

She gets married and her husband is a man she barely knows.

Mumbai is nothing like the life she left behind. It is loud, crowded and impossibly fast, with unfamiliar streets, unfamiliar faces and a home that does not quite feel like home. Even her marriage feels strange because she has suddenly been asked to build a life with someone who is still, in all the ways, a stranger to her.

For a girl who finds comfort in stories, real life is proving to be terribly inconvenient.

Books have endings but people's stories don't.

Paakhi has always believed that if she is kind enough, careful enough and considerate enough, things will eventually fall into place. Mumbai is about to teach her that life does not always work that way.

She is not glamorous or effortlessly confident. She does not walk into a room and command attention. In fact, she would probably rather find the nearest corner and hope nobody notices her.

She is awkward and anxious, sometimes painfully so, but there is a stubborn little strength hidden underneath all that nervousness.

She just has not discovered it yet and perhaps that is exactly what makes her worth knowing.

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃𓂃 ོ☼𓂃𓂃 ོ☼𓂃𓂃 ོ☼𓂃𓂃 ོ☼𓂃𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

Shivaansh Oberoi is a man of few words, but the words he does speak are usually enough.

At thirty-one, he is a multi-billionaire who has built a life far beyond anything he imagined growing up. He came from a middle-class family, had a loving home and grew up knowing what it meant to have people who cared about him. There was nothing tragic about those years, nothing that made him bitter or hardened.

That came later.

Shivaansh was twenty-five when he lost the woman he loved.

She was the only girl he had ever allowed completely into his life, the one who knew him without the money, the reputation or the controlled exterior. With her, he had been different. Softer. Happier. He had allowed himself to imagine a future, something he had never thought much about before.

Losing her was something he never learned to speak about, and with time, he stopped living.

Six years later, he has built a life that revolves around work, routine and privacy. He spends long hours at his desk, checks his emails at two in the morning and drinks his coffee strong and black. He likes coming home to silence, dislikes unnecessary conversations and has little interest in letting people know more about him than they need to.

So when his family suggests an arranged marriage, he reluctantly agrees because he knows how much it means to them. He does not expect anything from the marriage beyond and he certainly has no intention of turning it into something else.

Shivaansh rarely smiles, dislikes surprises and has no patience for small talk. He does not lose his temper easily either. When something bothers him, he tends to become quieter rather than louder, choosing distance over confrontation and silence over explanations.

There is a certain steadiness to him that people often find intimidating, is rarely uncertain about what he wants and once he makes a decision, very little can persuade him to reconsider it.

His family is one of the few exceptions.

He has loved, he has lived and he has lost. Now, he has no interest in repeating any of it.