"Mehndi laga rakhna
Doli saja ke rakhna
Mehndi laga rakhna
Doli saja ke rakhna
Lene tujhe o gori
Aayenge tere sajna"

~ Mehendi Lagake Rakhna: - Lata Mangeshkar, Udit Narayan~

~Three Days Before the Wedding~

The mehendi artist had arrived at seven with two assistants and a calm that suggested she had done this ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more. She set up in the inner courtyard, mixed her paste, and looked at my hands with the professional assessment of someone reading a canvas.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"Traditional Rajasthani patterns on the right. Punjabi jaal on the left." I paused. "And somewhere in the right hand—I'll show you where—I want a name hidden. So that you would only find it if you were looking."

The artist looked at my right palm.

"Here," I said, pointing to the centre, where the lines crossed. "Woven into the design. Small enough to miss unless you know it's there."

She smiled like she had done this before.

"Whose name?"

"Aadyant."

She smiled again. Picked up her cone.

"He won't know it's there?"

"Not unless someone tells him."

"Does anyone know besides you?"

I looked across the courtyard at Ziva, who was already vibrating with the knowledge and had sworn on her sketchbook to say nothing.

"One person," I said. "But she can be trusted."

Ziva, from across the courtyard, made a very solemn face.

The artist bent her head over my hand and began.

~

Aadya read to me while the mehendi dried.

Not a book—she made up a story. An elaborate, completely fictional account of how Aadyant had behaved on the first day of college, which I knew from personal experience was mostly wrong and also very funny. Ziva provided interruptions and corrections. Ritika fact-checked.

Three hours passed like twenty minutes.

When the artist finally stepped back and held up a mirror, I looked at my hands for a long moment.

Rajasthani florals on the right—intricate and dense, layered in the way of old patterns that had been refined over generations. Punjabi jaal on the left, fine and geometric, like the lace my grandmother had kept in a drawer.

And somewhere in the centre of my right palm, woven so carefully into the design that it looked like it had always been there:

A A D Y A N T.

Waiting to be found.

~

~The Evening: - Sangeet~

The haveli courtyard at night was something that deserved its own chapter.

String lights everywhere—Aadyant had spent two hours arguing with the lighting people and achieved something that looked like a thousand stars had descended and made themselves at home. The fort was visible above the rooftops, lit gold against the dark sky, present and patient. Marigolds still from the previous days. The fountain in the center, the sound of water threading through music.

Everyone was dressed up.

Not formally—this wasn't a court ceremony. But the kind of dressed-up meant people had given thought to being present for something.

Kashvi wore green. Dark bottle-green salwar with gold at the edges, her mehendi hands visible, her hair loose. She arrived in the courtyard and the lighting caught the gold and for a moment everyone looked at her at once.

~

The friend group's performance was, in the most loving and accurate terms, a disaster.

Vihaan had choreographed it. This was the first mistake. The second mistake was that he'd kept the full choreography secret from everyone except Shivansh, who had clearly suffered through rehearsals in dignified silence. The third mistake was that it involved three costume changes, which nobody had been warned about.

It was also, genuinely, the funniest thing I had ever seen in my life.

Aashika had prepared a filmed section—a montage of everyone's most embarrassing moments from the past year, soundtracked with something that was either deeply ironic or sincerely earnest and worked both ways. Ritika's contribution was a three-minute spoken-word piece about the legal implications of marriage that she had written herself and delivered completely straight-faced, which received more laughter than anything else on the programme.

Shivansh, at the end, quietly sat at the harmonium that nobody had noticed being set up and played something so beautiful and simple that the whole courtyard went still.

"What was that?" I asked him afterward.

"Something I wrote," he said. "For the two of you."

I didn't have words.

"Thank you, Shivansh."

"Don't thank me. Just be happy."

~

My speech was supposed to be funny.

I had planned it to be funny. I had a full structure: funny opening, funny middle section, funny callback, then a brief genuine closing moment. I had rehearsed it. I had timed it. It was seven minutes, well-paced, and would make everyone laugh.

I stood up and looked at Kashvi.

She was sitting between Bua and Dadi, her mehendi hands in her lap, looking at me with an expression of warm and slightly apprehensive anticipation. Like she trusted me but wasn't entirely sure what I was about to do.

I forgot the funny opening.

"My brother is the most important person in my life," I said instead. "He has been, since we were ten seconds old. And for the last eighteen years I have known, with complete certainty, exactly who he is."

I looked at Kashvi.

"And then he met you. And I discovered there were parts of him I hadn't known yet. Softer parts. The part of him that makes kadhi chawal from memory because you mentioned it once. The part that sits on the studio floor at midnight doing nothing except making sure you aren't alone while you work. The part that—" my voice was doing something I hadn't planned, "the part that learned the exact difference between your 'I'm fine' and your 'I'm actually fine' before I did, and I've known him his whole life."

The courtyard was very quiet.

"I said I was gaining a sister," I said. "And I am. But what I want to say—what I actually want to say, behind all the jokes I had planned—is that you gave me back a version of my brother I didn't know was missing. A complete one. And that is not a small thing. That is the biggest thing."

I raised my glass.

"To Kashvi," I said. "Who sees him. And to Aadyant, who finally let someone."

The courtyard raised its glasses.

Kritika Aunty, I saw from across the room, was looking with eyes that were very bright.

Dadu, at the far table, raised his glass precisely one centimeter. Which, for him, was a standing ovation.

~

It was Aadyant who found the corridor first.

The haveli had them in abundance—long, stone-floored passages between rooms, lit by old lamps, quiet in the middle of the loudest events. I had come looking for a minute of cool air and found him already there, leaning against the wall, jacket collar loosened, expression suggesting he had had the same idea.

We were not supposed to be spending time alone together in the final days before the wedding. There was a half-joking, half-serious traditional element to this that both families were enforcing with varying levels of commitment.

We looked at each other.

"This is technically fine," Aadyant said. "We're in a corridor."

"Technically fine," I agreed.

Neither of us moved.

"Aadya's speech," I said.

"I know."

"She forgot the funny opening."

"She forgets things when she's feeling something strongly."

"She loves you very much."

"I know." He paused. "She loves you too. In a way that I think surprised her with how quickly it happened."

I looked at my hands.

He went very still.

"Is that—" he started.

"Your name is in there," I said. "Hidden in the mehendi pattern. In the centre. The artist put it exactly where I asked."

He reached out slowly. I held my hands up toward the corridor lamp.

He looked. For a long moment. His face doing something very quiet and very particular as he found it—worked through the pattern, traced the shapes, arrived at the letters.

"Kashvi."

"It's right in the centre. You'll always be right there."

He was quiet for a long moment.

"I don't know what to say to that."

"You don't have to say anything."

He brought my hands up and pressed his lips, very gently, against the centre of the pattern.

Against his own name.

I stood in the stone corridor of a two-hundred-year-old haveli with the sounds of the sangeet behind us and felt something so large and complete it didn't have a name.

"Three more days," he said against my hands.

"Three more days," I said.

~

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