Bitter|Sweet

Eira, a married woman navigating adulthood, unexpectedly reconnects with her ex-boyfriend and must confront the emotional aftermath of their breakup in order to understand who she is now-and what she's truly left behind.

Bitter Sweet is a contemporary literary fiction novel that unfolds over the course of a single day and explores memory, identity, and the lingering ache of unresolved love. Eira, a woman in her early 30s living in Gurgaon, is en route to Noida to stay with her cousin while her husband, Ameh, is away. At a metro station in Delhi, she unexpectedly runs into Aryan-her ex-boyfriend from over a decade ago.

What begins as a brief, awkward exchange turns into a quietly emotional day filled with shared silences, honest conversations, and the tension of everything they never said when they broke up. As they walk through familiar parts of the city-cafés, streets, and metro stations-they revisit the past with a new lens. Eira, caught between who she was and who she's become, finds herself questioning how much of the past she still carries. Aryan, more reserved but equally affected, reveals how he processed their sudden breakup years ago.

As the day winds down, a street artist paints two portraits of them-one close and warm, the other distant and blurred. The paintings echo the shift in their bond: intimate but inevitably changed. On the metro platform, they face their quiet goodbye. Eira doesn't betray her marriage but confronts a deeper emotional truth: closure doesn't always come in neat forms. Sometimes, it's in a shared cigarette, a half-smile, or a simple "maybe."