Adultery My Fiancee's Happiness

[sakurasan]

Chapter 1 — 90s Love

Doctoral convocations at the university in Pune were usually quiet affairs, held in a smaller auditorium with only guides, examiners, and a thin row of guests. Tonight was different. The hall was packed. Research scholars filled the front rows under the stage lights, but behind them sat crowd after crowd of students who had come for one reason. Their favourite lecturer was receiving his doctorate. Every few minutes another candidate walked up, received a handshake, and returned with a new doctoral hood resting on their shoulders. The students waited through each name with restless patience, whispering, shifting, watching the side entrance.

Near the front, a young woman in a simple cream saree sat with her hands folded in her lap. Her face was quiet, almost composed, but her eyes kept drifting toward the side entrance of the hall. She too was waiting for one name.

The dean stepped back to the microphone.

“And now,” he said, smiling as the hall settled, “we have a special mention. At twenty-seven, he becomes the youngest person ever to receive a PhD from this university. A new institutional record. He was once our top-ranking student, joined us later as a lecturer, completed his research with distinction, and today he makes history. Please welcome Mr. Rohan.”

Applause rose at once.

From the side aisle, a smart-looking young lecturer walked in. His formal shirt sat neat on his shoulders. His steps were steady, almost shy under the sudden attention, yet there was a quiet pride in the way he carried himself. He climbed the stage, bowed his head slightly as the doctoral hood was placed on him, and accepted the certificate with both hands.

Cameras flashed. Professors smiled with real respect.

Rohan turned toward the audience to acknowledge the applause. For a second his eyes searched the front row.

They found her.

Isha was already on her feet, clapping hard, her cream saree catching the light. Their eyes met across the stage, and something soft passed between them. In that look there was pride and affection, quiet and sure. Rohan’s mouth curved into a small smile meant only for her. Then he turned back to thank the dean.

One after another, senior faculty came forward to shake his hand. He thanked each of them quietly, his face calm under the praise. When the last handshake ended, the crowd began to break into smaller groups. Conversations rose. More cameras flashed.

Rohan stepped down from the stage and walked toward the side aisle where Isha was standing.

She was still smiling when he stopped in front of her. Up close, her face looked brighter than usual, eyes fixed only on him.

“Congratulations,” she said, her voice warm and a little unsteady with pride. “You made history today.”

“Thank you,” Rohan said. He held her gaze a moment longer. “And thank you for being here. It meant everything that you came.”

Around them the hall stayed busy with talk and cameras. Rohan glanced once at the crowd, then back at her. His voice lowered.

“Come with me,” he said quietly. “Just for a minute, outside.”

He guided her gently toward the exit, his hand light at her elbow, careful and serious. They left the noise of the auditorium behind and stepped into the quieter corridor near the doors. A few people passed at a distance. For a moment the space between them felt private enough to hold what he had carried for years.

Rohan stood facing her. He rubbed his thumb against his own palm, searching for the right place to begin.

“I have been circling this for a long time,” he said softly. “Looking for the right words. Waiting for a day that felt steady enough to carry them.”

Isha nodded, listening with her whole face.

“I kept telling myself there would be a right time,” he went on. “A time when I could look at you and speak about a life. About a home. About mornings that belong to us. About growing old with the same person who already knows my heart.”

His breath caught. He smiled, shy and earnest.

“I think that time is here,” he said. “I think it’s time. Let’s get married.”

For a second Isha only stared at him. Then joy broke across her face so fully that her eyes filled at once. She had waited for this day the way one waits for rain after a long dry season. In quiet moments she had imagined this question. Now it stood in front of her in his own voice, and happiness rose so high she could barely hold it.

“Yes,” she whispered. Then louder, laughing through the tears, “Yes, Rohan. Yes.”

He let out a breath that sounded like relief and wonder mixed together. She took his hands, holding them tightly, and he held hers back as if the whole future lived in that simple clasp.

“I have dreamed of this,” she said, her voice soft and shining. “I hoped one day you would ask. I hoped I would be ready to say yes without looking away.”

“You were always the answer I wanted,” Rohan said. “Even when courage sat heavy on my tongue and I could barely get the words out.”

She laughed again, quiet and full. “And you were always the boy who made ordinary days feel like forever had already begun.”

He drew her into a mild hug, careful and warm. In the open corridor the hug felt free, and she stayed in his arms with her face turned fully into his shoulder, still and sure. It was the first time they hugged like this openly on campus. She rested her cheek against his shoulder for a breath, then leaned up and pressed a soft kiss to his cheek. When they eased apart, their hands found each other again.

They stood like that for a long, bright stretch of silence, smiling at each other, letting the joy stay. Isha’s heart kept repeating yes, yes, yes. She wanted to keep this corridor, this question, this answer, forever.

Then, slowly, a quieter thought rose beneath the happiness. Her parents. Their rules. Their hard eyes when love arrived without their permission first.

The change showed on her face before she found the words.

Rohan saw it at once. He tightened his hold on her hands.

“Don’t worry about your parents,” he said gently. “I will speak to mine. My father is the panchayat head of our village. He has a way of convincing people, even the stubborn ones. Once he and my mother understand, they will go to your parents. They will speak for us.”

Isha looked up at him. The worry was still there, but trust rose through it like light through thin cloud. She squeezed his fingers and nodded.

“Then we begin,” she said softly.

“We begin,” Rohan answered.

In the corridor outside the celebrating hall, with their hands joined and the future finally spoken aloud, the decision settled between them like a vow already kept.

On the drive home, Rohan steered his hatchback through the evening streets of Pune with his mind still floating. The doctoral hood lay folded on the back seat. The certificate rested on the passenger seat beside him, catching the last soft light through the window. She had said yes. After three years of quiet devotion, she would be his wife. Joy moved through him in waves, bright and almost weightless, and under it sat a steady gratitude. He owed so much of this path to Kunal.

The memories rose on their own.

They had met on the first day of college. Rohan walked into the hostel room assigned to him and found Kunal already there, bags open, talking to someone on the phone as if the whole building belonged to him. Kunal was loud and restless. Rohan was quiet and serious. Somehow that was enough. Within weeks they were inseparable. By choice they stayed roommates through every semester after that, two boys who learned each other’s habits the way brothers do. They shared late nights, exam fear, cheap tea, and the kind of loyalty that needed no performance.

At graduation, Rohan’s name sat at the top of the list. Kunal barely passed his classes because photography and sports had taken all his time. While professors and friends told Rohan he was a fool for turning down corporate offers to become a lecturer, Kunal was the only one who stood beside him and said, ‘Do what you actually want, brother. The rest will manage.’

They kept living together after college. Rohan joined the university as a lecturer and poured himself into research. Life settled into a quiet rhythm of shared rent, shared meals, and Kunal’s restless energy filling the house whenever Rohan came home late from the lab.

Then Isha arrived.

She joined as Lab In-charge in the EEE department, and her desk sat in a clean line of sight from Rohan’s faculty table. The first time he looked up and saw her, the world narrowed. Fair luminous skin. Soft oval face. Large dark eyes, slightly upturned, watchful as a cat’s. She moved through the lab in conservative sarees, pallu neat, posture careful, every inch of her wrapped in respectability. Under those sarees lived the body that would haunt him: full breasts that filled the blouse with a heavy, graceful curve, a narrow waist, and wide hips that turned ordinary walking into something his mind catalogued without permission. The ultimate dream pornstar body, hidden inside campus sarees.

At night he lay awake for hours. When he closed his eyes, she returned: that same hourglass shape, those same soft lines, the conservative saree sliding through his imagination. He was restless and aching, caught between respect and hunger. Hypnagogic images flashed behind his lids of her waist, her breasts, and the fall of cloth over hips he had memorized from across a room. He woke tired and still wanting.

He talked to Kunal about her for hours, nights on end.

“Write her a letter,” Kunal said at last, half laughing, half serious. “You’re dying in slow motion.”

Kunal helped him write it. Line by line. Soft words. Honest ones. When Rohan still hesitated with the finished page in his hand, Kunal pointed at him with a grin that meant business.

“If you don’t give her that letter,” he said, “I will kick you in the balls myself.”

Rohan gave it.

Four days later it was back on his desk. On it, in red ink, she had written Yes. Love began there, shy and certain. Three years followed. Most of their love lived in long night phone calls, talking about anything and everything in their world. On weekends they met in the park, then at the mall, and later in the movie theatres, where in the dark she kissed his cheek. Hands held. Soft looks. Mild hugs. Those cheek kisses felt like vows. For him those three years felt like minutes, because he was with her. And today she had said yes once more.

Rohan turned onto their street and passed the little park at the corner. At their duplex the first-floor lights were already on. He swung left into the parking driveway, stopped at the steel gates, and rolled the car in beside Kunal’s sports bike. At the end of the driveway the stairs climbed past the ground-floor studio to their flat above. He took them with the certificate under his arm, the evening still warm on his face.

Inside, the hall opened at the center of the first-floor 2BHK, the kitchen quiet beyond it. Kunal sat at his media desk, the big computer and screens glowing soft, one ankle crossed over his knee as he scrolled like any other night. He glanced up when Rohan came through the door, easy and unhurried.

“What’s the update?” he said.

Rohan kept his face as blank as he could manage. He held out the PhD certificate.

Kunal took it, scanned the name, and grinned. “Nice. Congrats on that. Now what about the main thing?”

Rohan scratched the back of his neck and looked at the wall, then at the floor. “I did meet her…”

He let the silence hang. Kunal waited a beat, then sat forward.

“Idiot. Did you get cold feet again? I’m going to kill you now.”

Rohan laughed, the blank face gone. “You are now looking at Mr. Isha.”

Kunal stared, then barked a laugh and shoved his shoulder. “You bugger. You finally did it. We’re going out now and you’re paying the bill.”

Rohan went to change. Kunal stayed in the hall a moment longer, the screens still glowing behind him, and looked at the empty space where his friend had stood.

The words Mr. Isha sat warm in his chest. After three years of letters, night calls, park walks, and that soft, stubborn patience, the man had finally asked. Kunal grinned at the wall, then the grin settled into something quieter.

He had known boys like Rohan were rare long before anyone else bothered to look.

College had shown it first. First year, same hostel room, two opposite lives pressed into one set of walls. Kunal was restless, average in class, always somewhere else in his head. Rohan was serious, steady, and somehow never tired of standing up for people. Kunal started calling him Karna for the joke of it, then for the truth of it. The nickname stuck. Friends used it. Juniors used it. By the end, half the block answered to Karna when someone shouted for Rohan, and a few newcomers honestly thought that was his name. Kunal never corrected them with much energy. The name fit.

After college, the fit mattered more.

Kunal had no job and no direction, only a borrowed camera and a stubborn love for pictures. Ordinary openings came and went. He hated every one of them. Rent pressed. Pride pressed harder. Most people saw a restless boy who had scbangd through exams and should grow up. Rohan saw something else.

He bought Kunal his first proper DSLR.

“Make it your work,” he said, as if the choice were already clean.

Kunal had called that camera a seed. Rohan had called it a gift. Both were true. The seed grew slowly. Early studio years were thin and loud with worry. Clients were few. The ground-floor space waited through long empty afternoons. Shared rent still had to be paid. Rohan never made the struggle feel like a lecture. He stood there, paid what needed paying, ate whatever late meal they managed, and kept believing when belief was the only useful currency left.

When the work finally began to hold, Kunal opened a joint account for the studio and put Rohan’s name beside his own as co-owner. Seed money deserved a share. Rohan smiled, nodded, and left every paise untouched. The account sat there like quiet proof of a debt Kunal felt every day and Rohan refused to collect.

That was Karna. That had always been Karna.

Kunal shut the screens, grabbed his keys, and followed the sound of Rohan’s footsteps toward the stairs. Tonight his brother had finally asked, and the girl had said yes. Tonight they would eat well, laugh loud, and Rohan would pay because Kunal had said so.

And under the jokes, Kunal carried the older truth with him: whatever good had grown from that first DSLR, from those hard years, from the studio downstairs, it had grown because one man believed in him when almost nobody else did.

---

A week later, Isha was folding a saree on her bed when her phone rang. The screen showed Mother. She wiped her hands on her pallu and answered with the soft, ready voice she always kept for home.

“Hello, Ma.”

“Isha,” Saroja said, brisk and certain, as if the matter had already been settled before the call began. “Listen carefully. We have planned an alliance for you.”

For a second the room tilted. Isha’s fingers froze on the folded cloth.

“Ma… what are you saying?” Her voice rose too fast. “Alliance? What alliance? I don’t—”

“Yes,” Saroja said. “Your father has agreed. We will have the engagement next week. Book your tickets and come next weekend.”

Panic climbed Isha’s throat. An engagement next week, another man, another life — the words stacked too fast to hold. She stood up without meaning to, the saree forgotten on the bed.

“Ma, I can’t,” she said. “I am… I mean, there is… Ma, please, I already—” The words stuck. She could not say his name. “There is something. No. I mean… I have been… for a long time I… Ma, I can’t just suddenly—”

“Don’t worry so much,” Saroja cut in, gentler now, the way she spoke when she thought she understood. “The groom is from your college only. They are fine with you continuing work even after marriage. That is already discussed. You can keep your job. So stop fretting.”

Isha closed her mouth. Hope arrived so suddenly she almost laughed from the shock of it. Of course her mother thought it was about the job. In her house, girls did not fall in love. They listened. They came home when they were told.

“From my college?” Isha asked carefully. Life pressed back into her chest, thin but bright. “Who is he, Ma?”

“Some lecturer,” Saroja said. “His father is the panchayat president. Very reputed family. Looks like his parents saw you on your campus. They liked you and approached us through contacts.”

The last of the fear left her body in one long breath.

It was Rohan’s father, the panchayat head, the man who could convince stubborn people. He had done exactly what Rohan promised. He had made their love look like an arranged marriage, neat and respectable, arriving through the front door of family pride.

Isha sank back onto the bed and lay there smiling into the quiet room, the phone still warm against her ear.

“Can you at least send the photo of the groom?” she asked, trying to sound only curious.

A moment later the message arrived. She opened it.

Rohan looked back at her from the screen, formal shirt, quiet eyes, the same face that had asked her to marry him in a university corridor one week ago.

“Okay, Ma,” Isha said, her voice steady now, warm with a joy she kept carefully small. “I will come.”

She ended the call and kept the phone on her chest, his photo still open above her heart. The road ahead was clear now. A wedding that could walk through her parents’ front door without shame. With the fear gone, memory rose on its own, soft and complete, from the first day she had ever heard his name.

When she joined as Lab In-charge, a final-year girl had paused at her new desk, looked across the faculty floor, and smiled.

“Look,” the girl said. “Your desk is straight from Rohan sir’s desk.”

Isha had followed the line of sight, curious. “How do you know a lecturer from another department by name?”

The girl laughed as if the question itself was funny. “There is no one on this campus who doesn’t know him. Attend one class of his and he will impress you with his knowledge. And if any student has a problem, we go to him. He stands by us, takes it to the higher-ups, and gets it resolved. He is such a kind person.”

Isha had only nodded then. He sounded kind, knowledgeable, and popular for the right reasons. The name settled somewhere quiet in her.

A few months later, that same kind man walked up to her desk.

He fumbled first, talking about the weather, the corridor fan, and something about the lab schedule that did not need saying. His ears had gone faintly pink. At last he held out a folded letter, eyes unable to stay on hers.

“Please read it,” he said, and then he ran.

She had a class to reach urgently. She slipped the letter into her drawer and left. When she returned, work swallowed the afternoon, and the letter slipped from her mind. Only while leaving in the evening did she remember. She searched the drawer, the files, the edge of the desk, and found only her usual papers. Fear touched her then, small and sharp. A letter from a man had vanished from her keeping.

On the third day, which happened to be her birthday, she went to the temple and prayed for the wellbeing of her future. Back at her desk afterward, she opened the drawer and took out a note she needed for the day. The letter had stuck to it; as she lifted the note, it fell to the floor.

She picked it up with careful hands and read.

Rohan had written a beautiful poem, soft enough to make her breath catch. At the end he asked only if he could love her, and left the rest untouched.

Her upbringing rose at once like a wall. Love was a crime, parents knew what was best, and the city and love both corrupted — she had heard those lines all her life, spoken like scripture.

But the letter melted through them. And she had just come from prayer, asking the universe to look after her future, and the letter had fallen at her feet as if answering. It felt like a sign, and she believed it with her whole heart.

She took the whole night.

All she had ever heard about him was good. He wanted to love her. He was not even asking her to do anything in return. Lying awake in the dark, she turned the thought over and over until a simple answer settled in her: why not?

In the morning, when no one was there, she wrote YES in red ink and left the letter on his desk. The rest became their quiet history.

She was the one who asked that their love stay secret, sealed so tightly it could never travel home by rumor or accident. Rohan had no complaint. He only agreed, gentle and sure, as if her fear deserved protection more than his pride deserved display.

In the years that followed she saw other male lecturers try their luck with her: sweet talk in corridors, lingering smiles, careful compliments dressed as professional courtesy. Rohan saw it all from the far end of the floor. On their night calls he left those men alone and stayed easy beside her voice. After a lifetime of being watched and corrected, that ease felt like freedom. She loved him for it.

She loved to gossip. Rohan became her only true friend for that soft late-hour talk. She would scold modern dresses, complain about girls and boys behaving shamelessly, insist that premarital sex was a sin that would send people to hell. She knew he did not fully agree with half the things she said. Still he only hummed and let her talk. That small mercy made the nights feel safe.

For three full years he loved her quietly and patiently, staying within the soft limits she could bear even when desire sat clear in his eyes. And after carrying that feeling for so long, he had found the courage to ask her to marry him. Then he had taken the full weight of speaking to the families, instead of leaving that burden on her shoulders.

Isha pressed her cheek into the pillow and smiled until her eyes stung. All of it had cleared. All of it had come home.

Warmth gathered low in her belly without warning. Her breath shortened. Then she felt it — her panties were wet.

She froze where she lay.

For a moment she thought she had wet herself. Shame rushed up her neck. She lay completely still in the dark, confused and embarrassed, with no name for what her body had just done.