Thus, pestered by Gautam, his father was forced, against his better judgment, to call on his cousin. Slighted by the rebuff that followed, Gautam pressured Mallika to defy her parents. But her refusal to go by his diktat left him brokenhearted. Unable to reconcile himself to a life without her, he confronted her parents with the picture of his future in the making. When they were blunt that matches get fixed on the current rating and not on future holding, he grudged his fate, in spite of the promise it held.
Later, hoping that time would have softened their stand, he called on them again to renew his request. But, as they asked him not to make a nuisance of himself by calling on them, he felt humiliated. Smarting from the insult, he shot from the hip that he would soon take a wife to whom their daughter would not hold a candle and that one day he would make it bigger than all of them put together.
His resolve to strive to make that a reality seemed to define his destiny even as the recollection of his childhood boasts of restoring the family aura gave him a sense of purpose. And his grandmother’s words of rejoicing at his success from heaven seemed prognostic to his perturbed mind.