The meeting
They met on a screen, in the middle of the COVID years, when the whole world was indoors and beginnings had nowhere else to happen. We walked, talked, laughed,
she says, and slowly realised that what had started on a screen was becoming something much more real.
The knowing
He said it first. She answered with the bravest thing a person can say to that sentence: not yet. He did not argue, and he did not leave. He stayed exactly where he was, listening, remembering the small things, making her laugh, until the feeling could arrive on its own time.
Then one midnight, with the rest of the world asleep, she rang him, nervous about a thing she already knew, and said it back.
I think that was the moment I knew. Not because something suddenly changed, but because I realised that somewhere along the way, he had become home.
Shanmathi
The evening
There was no proposal in the private sense. There was the 21st of January, both families in one room after everything it had taken to bring them there, and jasmine in the air. As the two of them knelt to put the rings on each other, their song began to play, at the exact moment, as if the evening itself had been rehearsing. I can still feel exactly how I felt then,
she says. She did not stop grinning until it was over, and by her own account, not then either.
The stone
The ring began where these stories begin: at the table, with the stones out loose. I was always a diamond girl,
she says. Natural and rare. I wanted something that represented our relationship.
A diamond, because theirs had been a natural thing that took its own time under pressure and came out clear.
The shape was the table’s counsel. An oval, it was suggested, would sit well on her long fingers. They looked at one, and the discussion was over.
The secret
Every commission holds something the photographs cannot show. This one holds three. Set into her ring, where no one else will ever think to look, are two small diamonds: one for him, one for her, a private reminder that whatever life brings, they are the ones who see each other best. And inside his band, where it rests against his skin, she had a line engraved.
The best thing to hold on to in life is each other.
engraved inside Abhilash’s ring
The rings left the house in January. The whole story is theirs; this much of it, they let us tell.
