Rituals of Blood Moon

Sitara had always believed herself destined for something extraordinary.

Born to the wealthiest family in the small town of Kisangarh, she was their only daughter—precious jewel, adorned and pampered, raised on promises that the world would bow to her beauty and her father’s fortune. In a place where girls were married off at twenty, twenty-two at the latest, Sitara had been different. Special.

She had rejected them all.

The engineer from Kolkata—too ordinary. The businessman from Delhi—too old. The doctor her mother praised endlessly—his hands were too soft, his laugh too eager to please. Each proposal had been a transaction she’d found lacking, each suitor measured against an impossible ideal she’d constructed in her mind.

The perfect man would come. She was sure of it. With her looks and her father’s money, how could he not?

But perfection, it seemed, had other appointments to keep.

Now, at thirty-five, Sitara worked behind the polished counter of the local bank, processing loans and deposits for the same people who had once envied her privilege. The whispers followed her like shadows.

“Still unmarried.” “What a waste.” “Too proud for her own good.”

The aunties who came in with their savings accounts looked at her with something worse than pity—satisfaction. The men who’d once sought her hand now stared with a different kind of interest, one that made her skin crawl. She was no longer a bride to be won. She was a curiosity. A cautionary tale. An item piece fit for mockery.

Her parents’ desperation had become suffocating. Her mother wept over morning tea. Her father made calls to distant relatives, his voice strained with humiliation. “Please, anyone decent. Anyone at all.”

Sitara felt the weight of it crushing her, night after night in her childhood bedroom, surrounded by dusty trophies from beauty competitions she’d won two decades ago.