Amma patted her head. “You always knew, beta. You just needed the thirst to remember.”

Amma smiled, her wrinkles deepening like riverbeds. “Beta, love doesn’t need a ritual. But rituals remind us to pause. To sit with love when life forgets to.”

“I know,” Kavya replied. “I’m doing it for us.”

Kavya hesitated. Arjun was her husband—loving, modern, and perfectly happy to order her coffee from a delivery app. But the fast… it felt ancient. Symbolic of a woman praying for her husband’s long life, going without water from sunrise to moonrise. In Bengaluru, her colleagues would raise eyebrows.