"Main Mera Dil Aur Tum Ho Yahaan
Phir Kyun Ho Palkein Jhukayein Wahan
Tum Sa Haseen Pehle Dekha Nahin
Tum Isse Pehle The Jane Kahaan
Jeene Laga Hoon Pehle Se Zyada
Pehle Se Zyada Tum Pe Marne Laga Hoon"
~Jeene Laga Hoon: - Atif Aslam, Shreya Ghoshal 

The decision about Jodhpur happened on a Tuesday.

We were sitting with a wedding planning document open on the laptop—Ritika had organized it within forty-eight hours of the announcement and it was already more comprehensive than anything I could have built in a month. Venue options. Timeline. Checklist. A tab labeled 'Kashvi decisions' which Ritika had populated with questions and then left entirely blank for answers, because even Ritika understood that some things needed to wait.

"The haveli," I said.

Aadyant looked up from his phone.

"For the wedding. It should be at the haveli." I paused. "Your home should be part of this. It already—it already feels like mine in some way. And the fort in the background, the courtyard, the jasmine—" I stopped. "It's right. Isn't it?"

He set his phone down.

Something in his face went very still in the way it did when something had moved him that he wasn't prepared to show entirely.

"Yes," he said, after a moment. "It's right."

"Will your father—"

"Baba will be more than happy to host. He's been waiting his whole life to host something like this at the haveli." The corner of his mouth curved. "He's going to have opinions about the courtyard lighting."

"Let him. It's his home."

"It's your home too, now."

I looked at him.

"Your home should be part of this," he repeated, softly, back at me. "Thank you for that."

~

Kritika aunty arrived two weeks after the announcement.

She came straight from the airport on a Tuesday afternoon while I was the only one home—Kashvi was in class, Aadya was at a study session. I had approximately fifteen minutes to prepare for the first time Kritika Singh, the woman who had raised Kashvi through the worst years of her life, would assess me without her niece in the room.

I made chai.

This was, I had learned, always the right move.

She arrived at the door with a single carry-on and the expression of a woman who had been doing everything herself for a very long time and was good at it. She was not physically imposing. She was, however, immediately the most formidable person in the room.

"Aadyant," she said. Not a question.

"Kritika Aunty. Welcome. The chai is almost ready."

She sat at the kitchen island and looked around the penthouse with the careful attention of someone who reads spaces.

"Kashvi's sketches," she said, noting the designs pinned near the window.

"She prefers the morning light there."

"Her guitar."

"She plays most evenings. Aadya requests songs and Kashvi acts annoyed and then plays them anyway."

She was quiet for a moment.

"You know her," she said. Simple observation.

"I'm learning her," I said. "I think that's different. And more accurate."

She picked up the chai I set in front of her.

"She told me about the decree," she said. "The royal provision."

"Yes."

"And she told me that when you told her about it, the first thing you said was that it changed nothing about how you felt, and that she was under no pressure whatsoever."

"That's true."

"Is it? Because there was pressure. The kind built into a situation whether anyone intends it or not."

I held her gaze. "Yes. There was structural pressure. I couldn't eliminate that. What I could control was making sure she knew it was entirely her decision, and that I meant it, and that if she had said no, I would have found another solution."

She looked at me for a long moment.

"What solution?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said honestly. "But I would have found one. Because she matters more than the decree."

Silence.

"She matters more than the throne," she said, testing it.

"She matters more than all of it. Yes."

Another silence. Aunty drank her chai.

"I have been her only family for three years," she said eventually. "Her parents—" She stopped. Started again. "She has been mine to protect. And I am handing that protection over to you."

"You're not handing it over," I said. "You're adding me to it. She still needs you. She always will."

She looked at me.

Then she nodded, once, with the finality of a decision.

"Okay," she said. "Tell me about Jodhpur. I've never been to Rajasthan."

~

The guest list was my decision.

Aadyant had laid out the document and then stepped back entirely. Not passive—present, available for every question, ready to call his parents whenever I needed confirmation on the Jodhpur side. But the list was mine to build.

The Rathore family: all of them. That was simple.

The friend group: all of them. Also simple.

My Bua: obviously.

And then: no one else.

No extended Rathore relatives beyond the immediate family. No one from my father's side. No one from my mother's.

I sat with the document open for a long time.

My parents weren't on it.

I thought about what that meant. About whether it was anger or self-protection or something more complicated—the decision to have only the people who had actually showed up, and to keep the day clean of unresolved things.

It felt right.

And if part of me felt the absence of what should have been there—a mother helping with the outfit, a father at the door—I let that feeling exist without making it into anything more than what it was: a grief. Small and real and mine.

I typed the last name and closed the tab.

Done.

~

I noticed it around the third week of planning.

Every decision—flowers, ceremony layout, menu, music, the exact placement of the mandap in the courtyard—I was following her lead. Completely. Not because I lacked opinions but because I had realized, somewhere between the venue decision and the first call with the Jodhpur event coordinator, that this was hers to shape.

She noticed.

I was standing in the kitchen when she said, without preamble: "You're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"Following my lead on everything. Agreeing with everything I say. You haven't told me a single preference in three weeks."

"Because I don't have strong preferences about marigold arrangements—"

"Aadyant. I know you have opinions about everything. What's happening?"

I looked at her.

"This is yours," I said. "The wedding. The day. All of it—you've been so careful about claiming things for yourself, about choosing things that are genuinely yours and not performed or pressured. I didn't want to be another source of pressure. Even gentle pressure." I paused. "I just want to be there. That's all I want from this day. You, and me, and the people we love. The flowers are irrelevant."

Kashvi looked at me for a long moment.

Then she picked up the planning document and put it in my hands.

"Tell me what you want the music to be," she said. "And if you say 'whatever you want' one more time I'm going to make Vihaan choose."

I laughed.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. The music."

I told her what I wanted. She wrote it down.

And the planning became ours, properly, from that evening on.

~

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