The morning in Malleshwaram arrives without hurry.
Shutters clatter awake one by one, a chorus of soft steel and groaning hinges. Flower vendors lace marigolds and kanakambaram into thick, fragrant ropes. Somewhere nearby, a temple bell rings once — not to call, but to mark a rhythm. A stillness lives between these sounds.
Panya stands at the edge of a yellow auto, fingers wrapped around the cold iron bar. Her black saree, edged in deep red, catches the light just so — not gleaming, not dull, just present. Behind her, the street pulses: the blur of another woman’s braid heavy with jasmine, the momentary passing of a market-bound cart, the curve of shadows along the wall.
She is not posing. She is pausing.
Not waiting for something — simply being.
A few lanes down, Goopika adjusts the pleats of her pink saree and sits cross-legged against a faded blue shutter. She lifts a compact mirror, its wooden leaf-shaped frame worn at the edges. The lipstick is applied with no ceremony, no fuss. This, too, is ritual. A quiet defiance of hurry. A conversation between the self and her reflection. Between how she is seen, and how she chooses to be.
Their eyes don’t meet yet — but their moments are threaded.
A camera swings loosely from Panya’s wrist now, and Goopika steps lightly into the street, her bangles catching sunlight like small cymbals. Between bursts of movement — autos, cyclists, sari-clad women swaying past — she glances across the marketplace. A gaze, perhaps shared. A rhythm, unmistakably felt.
In the shadow of the flower stalls, Panya squats low, elbows on her knees, framed by garlands and passing chaos. A woman in yellow blurs past the frame. A man’s shirt stripes the edge like static. And yet Panya stays in sharpness — her chin resting on her palm, a smile barely formed, as if caught in a memory not her own.
The market carries on.
So does the city.
But in these gestures — the tightening of a bangle, the swipe of a lipstick, the pause before stepping out of a rickshaw — something sacred lingers. Not in grandeur, but in the repetition. The weight of ritual carried in soft cotton folds, in glances and stillness, in the act of being seen as you are.
Later, they sit together on a stoop. The camera passed between them. A frame reviewed. Not judged. Just looked at.
One smiles. The other nods.
The world outside the shutter continues to blur and spin. But here — here, in the hush between their breath and the roll of the shutter door behind them — they hold it still for a moment longer.
This is not nostalgia.
This is presence.
This is alankara — grace not as ornament, but as memory worn daily.
And then, again—
A shutter clicks.
And something stays.