Her daughter, Sahasra, now twenty-four and living in Hyderabad for work, often teased her over video calls. “Amma, you never wear that sari. Why do you keep it like a treasure?”

Janaki reached into the folds of her cotton saree and pulled out a small, worn diary. Its pages were yellowed, smelling of old jasmine and a life lived in the quiet corners of a traditional home. This wasn’t a book of recipes or household accounts; it was her secret collection—the "romantic fictions" of a woman who had spent forty years being a mother first.