Tapovan

Iron, when heated, becomes gold (લોઢું તપી ને સોનું થાય).

He could leave her at the village gates and no one would ever know.

Hiranmay Singh is nineteen, five seasons into a drought, raising his four-year-old twin siblings alone since his parents were found murdered in the forest. When he finds a wounded young woman at the foot of a cliff, he carries her home instead, because it does not occur to him to do otherwise.

She gives a name that is not hers. The household takes her in and asks nothing. But her kingdom has fallen to the Delhi Sultanate in a single night of betrayal, her family is under house arrest in their own palace, and the soldiers searching every lane in the province are not looking for a village girl.

What stands between them and discovery is a festival season, a lane of neighbours who notice everything, and an ironsmith who is beginning to understand that his father's death and this woman's survival are the same story.TAPOVAN: THE IRON opens a trilogy spanning two decades of war, statecraft, and a love never spoken aloud. It is the story of what one craftsman will preserve when an empire comes to take it.

Tapovan literal meaning: Forest of Austerities

puja thali: Plate filled with sacred offerings