Contents
- Meet Shrimati and Shreekant
- Can a Marriage Stay Equal When Only One Person Keeps Growing
- Love and Ambition Do Not Always Sit Well Together
- The Bakula Flower and What It Means
- What This Book Says About Women and Marriage
- Is Shrimati a Victim
- Sudha Murty's Writing Style
- What Reading This Book Feels Like
- Not Everyone Will Feel the Same Way About This Book
- Who Should Pick Up This Book
- Final Thoughts
At first this book looks like a simple love story. Shreekant and Shrimati meet, they fall in love, and eventually they get married. It reads like something you have seen before. Boy meets girl, boy and girl like each other, boy and girl get married. Simple.
But the more you read, the more you realize the book is not really asking whether these two people love each other. That question gets answered fairly early and fairly clearly. The real question the book keeps circling back to is something much harder to sit with. What happens when two people who start out wanting the same things slowly begin to want different things, or worse, when only one of them keeps growing while the other keeps quietly stepping back to make room?
That is the question that stayed with me long after I finished the last page.
Meet Shrimati and Shreekant
Shrimati is one of those characters you do not fully understand until you finish the book and think back on her. She is intelligent, she is academically gifted, and she has a genuine love for history. She is quiet, she is thoughtful, and she is the kind of person who will make a sacrifice for someone she loves without making a big deal out of it.
It would be easy and lazy to describe her as just another woman who gives up her dreams for her family. But I do not think that is fair to her character. What makes her interesting is not that she sacrifices things. It is why she does it, and whether the people around her, and honestly all of us as readers, should be so comfortable asking women to make these choices in the first place.
Shreekant, on the other hand, is ambitious. He works hard, he is focused on his career, and he wants to succeed. None of this makes him a bad person. His ambition is not written as some kind of flaw or villain trait. The interesting part is not that he wants to do well in life. The interesting part is how his ambition, over time and almost without anyone noticing, starts to shift the balance in his marriage.
Can a Marriage Stay Equal When Only One Person Keeps Growing
This is the question at the heart of the book. Can two people stay equal partners in a marriage when one of them keeps moving forward and the other keeps making space for that movement?
It sounds like a simple question when you say it out loud, but it is not simple at all once you start applying it to real relationships. Most of us know a couple, or maybe we are that couple, where one person’s career, dreams, or plans slowly start to take up more room than the other person’s. It happens gradually. Nobody announces it. It just becomes the shape of the relationship over time.
This book does not shout this question at you. It lets you sit with it slowly, the same way it would happen in real life.
Love and Ambition Do Not Always Sit Well Together
Reading this book made me think about a few things I do not usually stop to ask myself.
Can you truly love someone and still end up hurting them without meaning to? Can sacrifice, even when it comes from a place of love, become too much at some point? Is it always the right thing to support your partner no matter what it costs you? And where exactly is the line between compromising for someone and slowly losing yourself in the process?
I am not going to tell you how the book answers these questions, because honestly, I do not think that is the point. The point is that the book makes you ask them. It is a book that trusts its readers to sit with discomfort instead of handing them a neat resolution.
The Bakula Flower and What It Means
The title of the book comes from the Bakula flower, and once you understand why, it adds a whole new layer to the story.
The Bakula is not a flashy flower. It is small, it is quiet, and you could easily walk past it without noticing it at all. But it has a gentle fragrance that lingers, and it leaves an impression even though it never demanded your attention in the first place.
This feels like a perfect image for Shrimati and for the kind of sacrifices she makes throughout the book. They are not loud. They are not the kind of thing anyone claps for or notices right away. But they shape everything, quietly, in the background, the same way the Bakula’s fragrance stays with you long after the flower itself has fallen.
What This Book Says About Women and Marriage
This is probably the part of the book that stayed with me the most.
There is a quiet expectation placed on women in so many marriages and families, an expectation to support their husbands, to adjust their own ambitions, to put family first, and to feel genuinely happy watching their partner succeed even if it means putting their own goals aside.
This book made me ask a question I do not think I had asked so directly before. Do we praise women for sacrificing themselves without ever stopping to ask why they had to make that sacrifice in the first place? Why is it so often assumed that one partner will step back so the other can step forward? And why is that partner almost always the woman?
The book does not lecture you about this. It simply shows you a marriage and lets you draw your own conclusions.
Is Shrimati a Victim
I want to be careful here, because I do not think the book paints Shrimati as a helpless victim, and I also do not think it paints her as some perfect, saintly wife who sacrifices everything without a second thought.
She is somewhere in between, and that is what makes her feel real. She makes choices. Some of those choices come with real consequences that she has to live with. But they are still her choices, made by a thinking, feeling person, not something that simply happens to her.
This is what makes her a genuinely interesting character rather than a symbol or a stereotype.
Sudha Murty’s Writing Style
If you have read any of Sudha Murty’s other books, you already know what to expect here. Her language is simple. Her storytelling is straightforward. There is nothing complicated or difficult about how the story is told.
What I find impressive is that she manages to raise genuinely uncomfortable questions using very ordinary, everyday situations. You do not need complex sentences or heavy prose to make someone think hard about their own life and choices. This book is proof of that.
What Reading This Book Feels Like
This is a quick read. You could probably finish it in one or two sittings if you have the time. It is emotionally reflective rather than dramatic. There are no big twists or shocking reveals waiting for you.
What it does instead is stay with you. You finish the story, and then you find yourself thinking about the choices the characters made, maybe even comparing them to choices you have seen in your own life or in the lives of people around you.
Not Everyone Will Feel the Same Way About This Book
I think this book is likely to divide readers, and honestly, that is part of what makes it worth talking about.
Some readers will look at Shrimati’s sacrifices and see them as a beautiful expression of love and devotion. Others will read the exact same choices and feel frustrated, maybe even a little angry, that she gives up so much of who she is.
Both reactions make sense to me, and I think the disagreement itself says something important about how differently we all think about love, marriage, and what we owe the people we love.
Who Should Pick Up This Book
This book is a good fit if you enjoy Indian fiction, stories about relationships and marriage, simple and accessible writing, and books that quietly raise questions about the choices women are expected to make.
If you are looking for complex literary prose, a fast moving plot, or high stakes drama, this might not be the book for you. It moves at its own gentle pace and it is not trying to be anything more dramatic than it needs to be.
Final Thoughts
By the end of the book, I stopped asking myself whether Shrimati made the right choices or the wrong ones. That question started to feel too simple for what the story was actually about.
The thought that stayed with me instead was something closer to this. Sometimes the hardest part of loving someone is not the loving itself. It is making sure that while you are loving them, you do not slowly disappear.