HOMEWARD

Ananya Rao left Bangalore with a plan: a degree abroad, a job offer waiting, a life that made sense on paper. Four years later she comes home with none of it, a visa that ran out before the job ever materialized, and the particular ache of returning to a city that moved on without her.

She does not expect Arjun Iyer to be part of the answer. He was just a boy two rows ahead in school once, a name her mother mentions over breakfast, a familiar face at a cousins engagement. But an easy Saturday coffee becomes a habit, and the habit becomes something neither of them planned for, something built slowly, honestly, out of ordinary evenings rather than any single dramatic moment.

What follows is not a rescue and not a rebound. It is two people relearning how to want things for their own sake, how to choose each other on purpose, again and again, through job rejections and family pressure, a hospital corridor and a city that keeps quietly rearranging itself around them. Homeward is a story about the particular kind of love that does not announce itself with fireworks, the kind that simply shows up, steadily, until one day you realize it has become the surest thing in your life.

A quiet, tender novel about coming home to a city and to yourself, and finding, almost by accident, that both were waiting for the same person all along.