Chapter 1

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For Gopi Thatha. You're the reason for every good-ish thing that I am today, Thatha. I love you.

*****

Door number one of Neighborly Nest was mostly quiet.

And staying truthful to its name, families that inhabited the nine flats of Neighborly Nest were unbelievably amicable to each other. Well, except the plump girl that always wore PJs, her wavy hair resting down her shoulders and her newest Pariah pup, Kabaddi.

Dhriti Praneshwar was not particularly in contempt with her flatmates nor did she purposefully hate them.

She always attended community meetings—disinterested, though—just like any other dutiful resident would do; followed the motor operation timing rightly according to her given schedule to pump water to the colossal water tank in their terrace. Whenever one of the aunties from the first floor (she did not know which flat from the first floor) offered her prasadam from the nearby community temple, she politely obliged by rubbing a streak of viboothi on her plain forehead. She remembered attending that one kid's birthday party in seven months of moving into this apartment—during which she chose to return awkward smiles at her neighbors while holding the paper plate with a piece of birthday cake, mostly by standing aloof in a group of people who were ecstatic to be living in the same flat.

Dhriti was not ecstatic. Not about the flat. Not about any aspect of her life, at the moment.

Maybe, a teeny tiny ecstatic about her two months old Indie pup, Kabaddii, who just had an accident free night and had learned to pee right on the diaper pad inside her crate.

Ever since Dhriti moved out of her parents' place—where they'd live with her—to her parents' another place where she lived alone, tackled to pay her own bills along with rent to her mum, she was used to these scuzzy mornings.

On mornings that weren't really scuzzy, there'd be a disagreement turned irrelevant argument between her boyfriend and her. She'd always feel a meticulous depletion out after one such episode. But they were a couple. Couples fought. And this was not a fairy tale. It was as simple as that to her, when the exhaustion wasn't really simple to brush away.

Otherwise, she would be predominantly occupied in writing columns about empathy, kindness, self-love and all those things that she reckoned the world needed more of, for a few noteworthy English magazines; and writing the first draft of her own third book (Don't ask how the first two books sold! You wouldn't want to know.)

While she was not buckled down at her laptop riveted in threateningly looming deadlines, she'd be in her humble kitchen, standing amidst the noise of the elderly exhaust fan, experimenting recipes of her favorite food bloggers, and packing it three separate dabbas—after saving herself a token of it—for her boyfriend, who often wasn't satiated with her cooking, and for her two best friends, Kannan and Zainab. 

With her theatre acting classes keeping her busier, Dhriti barely had the time and energy to wantonly socialise with her neighbors.

Except for one time.

Just before she decided she was adopting a forty-five days old Indie pup, she was told to produce a no objection letter with all of her flatmates signed in it.

Dhriti bedamned her fate—she'd to walk up to each doorstep to get it done—but managed to pull it off.

It was from the first time she'd gone to the NGO to look at the newest litter of pups. There was one distinct hyper-active, tan with white pup, with one ear erect and the other one adorably floppy had stolen her heart—and now, her bed too, perhaps.

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