"Kabhi jo baadal barse
Main dekhu tujhe aankhein bharke
Tu lagti hai mujhe pehli baarish jaisi
Pyaari si, sundar si, meri lagti hai"
~ Kabhi Jo Baadal Barse – Arijit Singh

Aadyant told me he wanted to tell my parents.

Not as a question. He put it gently, the way he said things that mattered, sitting across from me at the kitchen island with his coffee going cold.

"They should know," he said. "Not for them. For you. You're going to go through something large, and you should not have to carry the weight of them not knowing on top of everything else."

I looked at my hands.

"I'm not ready to call them."

"I know." He paused. "I could do it. If you want. Tell them. And then it's done."

I thought about it for a long time.

"Okay."

He called my father the next morning while I sat on the balcony in the California sun, close enough to hear if I needed to, far enough to have air.

The call was twenty minutes.

When he came out, he sat beside me and didn't say anything immediately.

"How did they take it?" I asked.

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Your father cried."

I looked at the city.

"And my mother?"

"She asked if you were eating enough." A pause. "Three times."

Something moved through me. Not forgiveness, not yet, not fully. But something.

Two days later, my mother called my number directly.

I let it ring twice.

Then I picked up.

"Kashvi," she said.

Just my name. The way she used to say it when I was small, before everything went wrong.

"Hi, Maa," I said.

She was quiet for a moment. Then: "I know I don't have the right to ask this. But can I—is it okay if I call? Sometimes. Not always. Just—to ask how you are."

My throat was very tight.

"Yes," I said. "You can call."

"Thank you." A pause. "How are you feeling? The sickness, is it—"

"Getting better," I said. "Week by week."

"Good." Another pause. "Kashvi. I—" She stopped. Started again. "I am so sorry. For everything. I know it doesn't fix anything. But I wanted you to hear it from me directly."

I closed my eyes.

The California morning around me. Aadyant inside, giving me privacy.

"I heard it," I said.

We talked for twenty-three minutes.

Not about everything. Not the big things. Just—small things. Safe things. The beginning of something that might, slowly, become more.

When I came back inside, Aadyant looked at my face.

He didn't ask.

He just opened his arms.

I walked into them.

"Thank you," I said, into his shoulder. "For calling them. For opening the door."

"It was always your door," he said. "I just knocked."

~

Kashvi moved her classes online at twelve weeks.

The fatigue was significant. The mornings were hard. And some days the energy just wasn't there, and she would look at herself in the mirror with an expression I had started to recognize and dread—the one that wasn't sadness exactly, but the beginning of it.

I came home one evening to find her standing in front of the bathroom mirror in one of my shirts, holding the hem away from her stomach, staring at herself.

"Hey," I said, from the doorway.

She didn't look at me.

"I look so different," she said.

"You look beautiful—"

"Don't do that." Her voice was flat. Not angry. Just tired. "Don't say the automatic thing."

I came in. Stood beside her at the mirror so she could see both of us.

"Okay," I said. "What do you want me to say?"

"The truth." She gestured at herself. "I'm getting bigger and my body doesn't feel like mine and I know it's supposed to be like this, and I know it's beautiful in theory but right now I just feel—" She stopped. "Fat. I just feel fat. And I know that's wrong to say—"

"It's not wrong to say."

She looked at me in the mirror.

"You're allowed to feel what you feel," I said. "You don't have to perform gratitude about your own body."

"But it is—it's doing something extraordinary—"

"Yes. And it's also your body and you get to have complicated feelings about it." I turned her gently away from the mirror to face me. "You are allowed to have difficult days. You are allowed to not love every part of this."

She looked at my chest. Not at me yet.

"But for what it's worth," I said, "when I look at you I see the person who has been carrying our child with more grace and more strength than I could manage in a lifetime." I put my hands on either side of her stomach. "This is you. This is still you. You didn't disappear. You expanded."

She looked up.

"That's almost a good line," she said.

"Almost?"

"The expanded part was slightly clinical."

I laughed.

She laughed too, a little, which was what I had been working toward.

"I love you, not your body" I said. "In every version it has ever been and every version it is going to be. That is not the automatic thing. That is just true."

She was quiet for a moment.

Then she leaned her forehead against my chest.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Thank you."

"Anytime. Every time. As many times as you need."

~

The cravings arrived at week thirteen and made themselves completely at home in our nights.

The first one was mango pickle. Eleven-thirty PM.

"We don't have it," Aadyant said, already sitting up.

"I know. You don't have to—"

"Do you want it?"

I didn't answer.

He got up.

He drove to three places before he found a twenty-four hour grocery with mango pickle in stock. He came back at twelve-forty-five with two jars—different brands, in case I had a preference—and found me sitting up in bed waiting.

And I took one look at him.

His slightly dishevelled hair. The jacket he'd thrown over his pyjamas. The fact that it was almost one in the morning and he was holding two jars of pickle with the expression of a man who had accomplished something.

I burst into tears.

"Hey—" He was beside me in seconds. "Hey, what happened, is something hurting—"

"I'm sorry," I sobbed. "I'm so sorry, you drove out in the middle of the night for pickle and you have an eight AM class and I keep doing this to you and—"

"Kashvi." He put the jars down and took my face in both hands. "Look at me. Stop apologizing."

"But you—"

"Listen." He was very gentle and very firm. "You are growing an entire human being inside your body. Every single second of every single day, without a break, you are doing the most extraordinary thing a person can do. You are tired and uncomfortable and your body is working harder than I can even imagine." His thumbs moved against my face. "I drove to get pickle. That is so small compared to what you are carrying. So small it doesn't even register."

"It still matters that you—"

"You are my goddess," he said, simply. "You are building our child. I am the one who fetches things. Those are not comparable roles and I would not trade mine for anything. But please understand: you are the miracle here. Not the pickle run."

I stared at him.

"You called me a goddess," I said.

"I meant it."

"It's one in the morning and I'm crying and I haven't brushed my hair since yesterday and I smell like warm milk—"

"My goddess," he said, without missing a beat.

I laughed through the crying. It came out slightly ugly and completely genuine.

He handed me the jar. Put the spoon in my hand. And sat beside me at one in the morning while I ate mango pickle directly from the jar, and looked at me like I was something magnificent.

"Both jars?" I asked, between spoonfuls.

"I wasn't sure which brand you wanted." He shrugged. "I wasn't going to get it wrong."

I looked at him.

This person who drove to three shops at midnight for pickle so he wouldn't get the brand wrong.

"I love you," I said. "An embarrassing amount."

"Good," he said. "Eat your pickle."

~

He started talking to the baby at week fourteen.

I discovered this on a Thursday morning when he thought I was asleep.

The curtains were still drawn. The room was grey-light. And his voice was low and completely conversational, like he was picking up a thread:

"Good morning. It's raining. Your mother had the mango pickle again at midnight. I'm not keeping count but that's four times this week. She's not sorry and neither am I."

I did not move.

"Your Dadu is going to love you so much and pretend very hard that he doesn't, which is just how he is. Give him time. He comes around. Your Dadi is going to love you loudly and with zero restraint. Your Chachu Ivaan is going to be absolutely unhinged with excitement. I want to prepare you for that."

A pause.

"I've been writing things down for you. A notebook. Things I want you to know. About your mother. About this family you're arriving into. About what it felt like to find out you were coming." Another pause, quieter. "I don't know how to explain what happened inside me when I found out. I've been trying to write it for weeks. I might not ever find the right words. But I'm trying."

I pressed my face into the pillow and smiled until my cheeks hurt.

~

She caught me in the sixteenth week.

I was in the middle of a relatively detailed explanation of the physics of the Jodhpur fort's architecture when I looked up and found her in the doorway. Fully awake. Watching me with an expression that was somewhere between touched and highly amused.

"How long?" I asked.

"Long enough to hear about load-bearing arches," she said.

I sat up properly.

"It helps me think about them concretely," I said. "As a real person who will eventually be old enough to understand load-bearing arches."

"What else do you talk to him about?"

I thought about this.

"The fort. Jodhpur at different times of day. The way the stone smells after rain. Dadu's chess strategy, which I disagree with but which he's never wrong about. Corporate law, occasionally, because I figure early exposure can't hurt." I paused. "And you."

"What about me?"

I looked at her.

"That you stayed awake four nights reconstructing a recipe because you wanted the dal to be right. That you draw the way other people breathe—automatically, without deciding to. That when something frightens you, you look it directly in the face until it gets smaller." I paused. "That the sound of you laughing in the next room is the best sound in the world and he should know that before he even arrives."

She went quiet.

Her eyes did the thing they did when she was feeling something very large.

"Aadyant—"

"I'm not done," I said. "I tell him that his mother is the most extraordinary person I have ever met. And that he is lucky—we are both lucky—that she decided to stay."

She crossed the room in about three steps and kissed me.

Soft at first.

My hands found her face. Hers went to my collar.

And then it was not soft.

The notebook went off the bed. Neither of us noticed.

Her fingers in my hair. My hands at her waist, careful and certain. Her mouth and mine in the specific conversation that had no words and needed none.

At some point I broke to breathe and said, against her lips: "I was in the middle of a sentence—"

"The sentence can wait," she said.

"The baby was listening—"

"The baby can also wait."

She kissed me again before I could respond.

I stopped arguing.

Some conversations were better continued without words.

~

~ The First Ultrasound ~

The room was dim when the image appeared on the screen.

Dr. Mehta moved the wand and the image shifted and then there it was.

A shape.

Small. Real. A flicker of movement that was a heartbeat, visible and steady on the screen.

I don't know how to describe what happened to me.

I had been prepared for this appointment the way I prepared for everything: research, expectations set, emotional management planned. I had a working theory of what I would feel.

The working theory was wrong.

Nothing in me had prepared for the specific reality of seeing a heartbeat. Our child's heartbeat. Beating on a screen in a dim room in California at ten weeks.

I felt my eyes fill.

Not gently. Properly.

I said nothing because I could not speak.

Kashvi's hand found mine and gripped.

"That's it," Dr. Mehta said. "Strong heartbeat. Everything exactly as it should be."

"That's—" I started.

And stopped.

Because there were no words for it.

There was a heartbeat on the screen and it was half me and half her and it was the most real thing I had ever seen in my life.

Kashvi looked at me.

I was not managing to compose myself.

"Aan," she said softly.

"I know," I managed. "I'm fine. I'm—" I looked at the screen again. At the small insistent flutter of it. "I'm just—there's a heartbeat. Our baby has a heartbeat."

"They've had one for weeks," Dr. Mehta said gently.

"I know that academically," I said. "This is different."

Kashvi squeezed my hand.

Her eyes were wet too.

We sat in that dim room and watched our child's heartbeat on a screen and I understood, for the first time, what people meant when they said some things changed everything.

Dr. Mehta printed the image.

I photographed it before we left the table.

Then from a different angle because the light was better.

Then a third.

"Aadyant." Kashvi's voice.

"One more—"

"You've taken five. They're all the same photo."

"The angle matters—"

She covered my phone with her hand.

I took one more when she wasn't looking.

~

The photo landed in the family group chat within the hour with the caption:

"Look what we made."

Devika called before the notification had even fully loaded for her. She was crying before she said hello.

Dadi sent three voice notes: ginger tea benefits, ginger-to-water ratios, and a third that was accidentally sent mid-conversation with Dadu where she could be heard saying "come and look at this phone, Vikram, come NOW—"

Ivaan: "THAT'S MY NIBBLING 😭😭😭 I'M NOT OKAY"

Rishvik: "Remarkable. I am very proud of both of you."

Ziva: "I have opened a document."

Dadu, ten minutes later, called Aadyant directly.

"I saw the photograph," he said.

"Yes," Aadyant said.

A pause.

"Well done," Dadu said.

Two words.

From Vikram Rathore, two words in that voice carried everything.

"Thank you, Dadu," Aadyant said.

Another pause. Then, much more quietly, something that was not quite like anything Dadu had ever said on a phone call before: "Tell Kashvi—" He stopped. Cleared his throat. "Tell her we are very proud. All of us."

He hung up.

Aadyant sat with the phone in his hand for a long moment.

Then he went to tell Kashvi.

She listened. Then she was quiet for a long moment.

"Dadu said that," she said.

"Verbatim."

She pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling.

"Okay," she said, very softly. "Okay. I think I'm going to cry a little."

"Take your time," he said.

She did.

~

The friend group's reaction to the ultrasound was a separate event entirely.

Vihaan's voice note was three minutes and forty seconds long. It started with "I wasn't going to cry and then I saw it and now I'm in a bathroom stall in the university library crying and it's absolutely your fault—" and included at one point him having to pause because he was, as he put it, "feeling things in an inconvenient location."

Ritika sent a calm, organized message confirming the photo had been saved to the shared folder, the date had been logged, and then—at the very end, in tiny letters—"also this is the most beautiful thing I have ever added to a folder."

Aashika sent nothing for four minutes. Then a voice note that was mostly silence, and then her saying, very quietly: "I can hear its heartbeat in my head. I don't know if that's possible. I think I'm imagining it. I don't care. Hi, little one."

Shivansh texted two words:

"Hi, little one."

Kashvi showed it to Aadyant.

He read it and had to look out the window.

"Shivansh," he said.

"I know," she said.

~

~Week Twenty~

It was a Thursday afternoon.

I was on the couch with my sketchbook, Aadya beside me reading, the penthouse in its quiet weekday rhythm.

And then:

A flutter.

Not the uncertain early movements I'd felt for weeks. This was deliberate. Unmistakable. A tiny foot or elbow pressing outward with the specific conviction of someone who had decided it was time.

"Oh," I said.

Aadya looked up.

"Aan," I called.

He appeared from the kitchen doorway.

I pressed his hand to the side of my stomach without explaining.

We waited.

Five seconds.

Then: a kick. Definite.

Hello.

Aadyant went completely still.

Then he looked at me with an expression that undid every composed thing about him.

His eyes filled.

His mouth was slightly open.

He looked at my stomach and then back at me and then at my stomach and then said, in a voice that was absolutely not steady:

"That was—that was them. That was—they kicked. Right now. In my hand."

"Yes," I said.

"They kicked my hand."

"Yes, Aan."

"That's our—that's the baby. That's actually—" He pressed his palm closer. Another kick. His whole face fractured into something so open and unguarded I wanted to capture it and keep it. "Hi," he said, to my stomach, very softly. "Hi. I felt that. I'm—."

Aadya, who had her hand over her mouth, said, muffled: "I need a moment."

"Can I—" She already had her hand on my stomach before she finished the question.

Another kick.

Aadya made a sound that was nothing like words.

"It knows us already," she said. "It is performing for us—"

"He," I said, without thinking.

Aadya and Aadyant both looked at me.

"I don't know why I said that," I said. "We don't know—we haven't found out—"

"He," Aadyant said quietly. Like something falling into place.

Another kick.

"He agrees," Aadya said.

~

I had started talking to the baby.

Not because Aadyant had been doing it and I felt I should. Not as a performance. It happened one afternoon when I was alone in the penthouse, sketching at the table, and he kicked—a small, exploratory flutter—and before I had decided to say anything I heard myself say:

"Hi, shona."

And then I stopped.

And laughed at myself a little.

And then kept going.

"I don't know if you can hear me yet. The internet says maybe. Your Papa has been talking to you for weeks so I figure I should catch up."

I kept sketching while I talked.

"I'm working on a collection right now. It's called Strata. It's about layers—how things carry their history in them. I think you're going to understand that instinctively because you're going to arrive with so much history already. This family, shona. This family has centuries of it."

A kick.

"I know. I feel you. I'm here."

I set the pencil down.

"I want to tell you something important. Before you arrive and everything gets loud and everyone wants to hold you." A pause. "I almost didn't make it here. To this life, to this room, to you. There were years that were very hard and I almost didn't choose to keep going. I want you to know that—not to be sad about it, but so you understand what it means that you exist. You are the proof that I kept going. You are what all of it was for."

Silence.

Then: a long, deliberate kick that pressed against my palm.

"That's what I thought," I said softly. "Me too, baby. Me too."

~

I came home one afternoon to find Kashvi at the kitchen window.

Not sketching. Not on her phone. Just standing, one hand on her stomach, talking quietly.

I stopped in the doorway.

"Your Papa is going to be home soon," she was saying. 

A pause.

"He talks to you about the fort and corporate strategy. I'm going to tell you about other things. About what it means to trust someone. About how the people who love you properly make space for the difficult parts of you, not just the easy parts." Another pause. "He made space for all of mine. Every single part. I want you to know that about him."

I stood in the doorway and did not announce myself.

I wasn't sure I was allowed to hear this.

But I didn't move.

"You're going to have a big family, shona. Very loud. Very loving. And when it gets overwhelming—because it will, sometimes—you can come and find me. We'll sit somewhere quiet. Just us."

She patted her stomach gently.

I went back out the front door.

Opened it again loudly.

"I'm home," I called.

"Kitchen," she called back, as if nothing had happened.

I went to the kitchen.

She was sketching at the table.

I kissed the top of her head.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey," I said.

I made her lemon water.

And I carried what I'd heard like something very carefully folded, in the part of me where I kept the things that mattered most.

~

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