Description

Nine years ago, Aaliya Sheikh left Bombay on a August afternoon — a young architect with a one-way ticket to Lisbon and a heart broken so cleanly by Rohan Desai that she had not, in nearly a decade, been able to write his name down without flinching.

Now she is back. A consultancy project at a Worli hotel. Six months, no more. A senior position at a Lisbon firm waiting for her in February. A polite Portuguese partner who knows there was, once, a boy named Rohan, and who has been generous enough not to ask.

On her fourth day back, in a Bandra cafe she had specifically chosen because she was sure he would never be in it, Rohan walks in for coffee with his eight-year-old daughter.

What follows is the slow, agonising, deeply sensual story of two adults trying — across one Bombay monsoon, one half-finished hotel project, and an entire architecture of polite avoidance — to figure out what to do with a love that neither of them quite finished. He is divorced. She is committed. The little girl, terrifyingly, has her mother’s eyes.

And Bombay, in the monsoon, has never been less helpful at letting two people stay apart.

Tender, atmospheric, and beautifully restrained, *Baarish ke Baad* is a romance for adult readers — about the rain that returns, the loves that wait, and the women who finally stop running from themselves.