So Meera would come home after a long and gruelling day, pull up the only chair she owned to stand on it and reach for her dinner by untying the food she’d prepared in the morning, hanging from the roof in bags like a chandelier. She would eat in silence, interrupted only by the groaning horns of the ships far out at sea. She’d have a fitful sleep, waking up several times in the night to see if her alarm was working. There was no way she could sleep in peace; not when her mornings began with standing in a queue, waiting for the water tanker to arrive. She would fill two buckets and take the load to a makeshift bathroom outside her hut for a rigorous scrub to get rid of the dead fish stink that engulfed everything and everyone in the colony. She would then walk seven minutes to meet the man primarily responsible for her dreadful plight of being a single woman living in a shanty in the fisherman colony despite her cozy home being only a few kilometers away – the one and only Sahil Malik.

The composer had shelved the film project when he realized Meera would not relent. But once he found out she was back in Bombay, he was at her door the very next day, adamant to work with her. The Apte family did their best not to mention Abhimanyu, allowing Meera to recuperate from her doomed love affair in her own time. Kamal had stopped playing at the Orient Club – in fact, cricket had taken a backseat as he finally began to settle into a steady job at the Municipal Electricity Board, where he worked long hours and earned a pittance. Veena, the eldest sibling, remained the main provider for the family. Meera never rejoined college, and the little interest she had in her academic education was further squashed by the dire financial situation the family found itself in. Living on the edge of collapse from paycheck to paycheck, a mere feather could’ve tipped the scales. The precarious equilibrium was shattered further when their mother’s health took a turn for the worse and her monthly medical expenses strained the family to a breaking point.