There is a particular kind of love that does not begin with conversation. It begins with watching. While reading Heart Overruled – A Bengali-Tamil Romance by Debanjana Mukherjee, I kept returning to the image of a sixteen-year-old girl at her sister’s wedding, standing amidst marigold garlands and ritual chants, quietly memorising the face of a man who barely registers her presence. That first encounter is brief, almost fragile. For Parineeta, it is seismic. For Aravind, it
Some books don’t begin when you open them. They begin much earlier— in the quiet fears you carry about love, in the endings you never got to choose, in the stories you were forced to leave unfinished. The Things We Leave Unfinished met me exactly there. I picked this book up with assumptions. I’ll admit that upfront. I thought I was walking into a glossy, trope-heavy romance—something indulgent, dramatic, maybe even forgettable. Instead, Rebecca Yarros quietly dismantle
