Description

Aaditi Iyer, twenty-seven, is the perfect Tam-Brahm daughter. IIM-Bangalore graduate. Senior consultant at McKinsey. Engaged, with parental blessings, to a sweet software architect in Whitefield whom her mother has been calling *damaad ji* on phone calls to relatives since the engagement was fixed.

Then her company assigns her to a six-month project in Bombay, and her project lead — handsome, sharp-tongued, completely unsuitable — turns out to be Junaid Rizvi. A divorced thirty-four-year-old Bohra Muslim with a teenage daughter, a complicated past, and absolutely no interest in being convenient to anyone, least of all to Aaditi.

What begins as professional friction over PowerPoint decks becomes coffee meetings that run too long, then dinners at Bademiya, then a stormy August night in his Bandra apartment that neither of them planned and neither of them regrets. Aaditi has always believed in *sahi waqt, sahi insaan*. She has never believed in *galat waqt, galat insaan, sahi mohabbat.*

Set against a Bombay of monsoon traffic and family WhatsApp groups, of mothers who weep strategically and aunties who escalate efficiently, of an engagement that has been announced in three cities and a love story that cannot survive being announced in one, *Ishq Mubarak Nahi* is a tender, fierce, unapologetic novel about the love we are told to refuse — and the courage it takes to say *yeh ishq mera hai, aur main isse nahi chodungi.*

For every reader who has ever loved the wrong person in the right way.