Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Beginning of the White Rose
Nitya loved white roses. It wasn’t a preference she had chosen, the way one chooses a favourite colour or a seat by the window. It was something closer to a need — bone-deep, wordless, as necessary to her mornings as breath.
Every day at five o’clock, while the world still lay wrapped in the last warmth of sleep, Nitya would stand barefoot in her small courtyard. A prayer platter in her hands. Eyes half-closed. In the amber glow of the diya, her face held the particular stillness of someone at complete peace with the universe.
“A white rose again?” her mother would ask from the doorway, smiling.
“Even God prefers white things, Mom,” Nitya would reply, her laugh soft as the first light.
Her world was, in those days, blissfully complete: prayers, household rhythms, and small, luminous joys she tucked away like letters she never needed to reread, because she already knew every word by heart.
And then, one day, she got married to Ajeet.
Ajeet was the kind of person who laughed without requiring a reason — and who somehow, without effort or artifice, pulled laughter out of everyone around him like light from a window.
The morning after their wedding, Nitya walked into the courtyard for her prayers and stopped. There, resting right beside her platter, was a single white rose, so fresh the dewdrop on its petal hadn’t fallen yet.
“This...?” she asked, bewildered, turning it over in her fingers.
“Subscription service,” a voice called out from behind her.
She turned. Ajeet stood there with his arms crossed and an expression of supreme self-satisfaction.
“Delivered daily. Lifetime plan,” he said, and winked.
For the first time in her life, Nitya felt a blush rise all the way from her chest to her cheeks. She turned away quickly so he wouldn’t see her smile — but he already had.
The days that followed blurred into something she would later think of only as beautiful. Every single morning without exception, a white rose appeared. Sometimes perfectly straight, sometimes a little crooked, occasionally half-wilted at the edges — but always, always there.
“This one isn’t fresh,” she would tease, holding it up critically.
“Madam, the feelings are completely fresh. The flower is just a little experienced,” Ajeet would say, and then laugh first at his own joke, which somehow made it funnier.
Two months into the marriage, Nitya felt something she hadn’t expected to feel so soon, so completely: that life had handed her more joy than she had ever thought to ask for.
She should have known, in the way one always knows without knowing, that the most perfect moments are also the most fragile.
