Author's Note: Rishtaa: An Arranged Love came about because I wanted to test a theory I had. Khushi and Arnav's first meeting coloured their interactions for months. They began on the wrong foot and, for a long time, they couldn't push past that. So I wondered how these characters might get along if we removed the disaster that was their first meeting, if we allowed them a gentler beginning, but kept almost everything else the same.
Does their pride still get in the way? Do their prejudices? How do they speak to one another? How do they reconcile the differences in status and money? What about their almost-instant and overpowering attraction and lust?
An arranged marriage scenario makes them as equal as they can possibly be: the differences in wealth and status persist but this is no longer the story of a girl who crashed a fashion show and a man who thought she was a corporate spy. It's the story of two people who meet because their families want it; who, despite his money and her idealism, are in the same situation.
In trying to make Khushi and Arnav as equal as possible, I realised that Khushi couldn't be the 18-year-old, straight-out-of-school girl Arnav met at the mazhar. So she's 22 and in her last year of college here. I needed Khushi to have seen more of the world, to understand more of human nature, than she did when we met her in the serial.
The final major change is the absence of Shyam. Initially, I wanted to see how Arshi dealt with Shyam in this new scenario, but once I started writing it, I realised I didn't have the heart.
Chapter 1: Khushi
Khushi peeked between the jars and canisters, trying to steal a glimpse of him as the water boiled. Luckily, he'd placed his dining chair so she had a clear view of him as he waited with his family.
He brought his entire family to see me, Khushi fretted, nervously toying with the end of her dupatta.
There was an elderly matron, a middle-aged man, a middle-aged lady wearing makeup as if it was going out of fashion (his wife?), a grinning young woman who looked sweet, and a shy, bespectacled man who looked out of his depth.
And of course, him.
Khushi turned away, biting her lip, and fished the last of the samosas from a pan of oil. She strained them before adding them to the pile already arranged on a thaali. Then a quick glance at the pot, but the water wasn't even close to boiling. It took a lot of water to make tea for such a crowd.
She returned to her covert surveillance, cataloguing the differences between the photo she'd been looking at for three days and the living, breathing man sitting with her family. His hair was longer, she noted, in danger of falling into his eyes without the gel he'd applied to beat it into submission.
He wears suit-boot even when he's not at the office.
He was dressed in black – black suit, black shoes, black tie – with a dark blue shirt to break up the starkness. It made him look grim, and Khushi thought that he'd looked better in the white shirt and grey suit he'd worn in the photo.
But the stern and forbidding countenance she'd seen in the photo was present in reality, as were the blankness in his eyes and the scowl in his features.
Khushi shivered.
He looked handsome, and his family seemed nice, but Khushi wanted a husband who was kind and loving, someone who would smile and laugh with her.
She returned to the tea, already planning polite refusals in her mind.