Marrying Mr. Devraj

Ananya Kulkarni has never asked anyone for a favor in her life. She teaches third grade at a government school in Pune, keeps her head down, and takes care of the one thing that matters most — her brother, three years post-transplant, whose hospital bills never really stop coming. Arjun Devraj has everything except time. His grandmother's will leaves the family's hotel empire to him on one condition: he marries within sixty days and stays married for a year — or it all goes to a cousin who'll sell off everything she spent forty years building. He doesn't need love. He needs a name, a signature, and someone who won't ask for more than the contract promises. He finds her at a school gate — a stranger with no idea that his mother once quietly paid a debt for her family, years ago, and never told a soul. Ananya says yes for her brother. She doesn't expect to start noticing the silences Arjun carries, or the way he watches her like she's the only unscripted thing in his carefully managed life. He doesn't expect a woman in a mustard-yellow saree to make his empty house feel, for the first time in years, like somewhere he wants to come home to. They had one year, no promises, and a very clear exit clause. Neither of them planned on falling in love before the ink dried.