“You were not always this stone,” she said softly. “You were a boy who cried when his first calf died. You were a man who shared his last roti with a beggar. I did not marry a tyrant, Sardool. I married a sikander — a conqueror of hearts, not a jailer of souls.”

She was not what anyone expected. Where Sardool was thunder, Jashnpreet was the hush before dawn. She wore no heavy jewelry, raised no voice, and never interfered in his “business” — the land disputes, the gun licenses, the whispered judgments passed under the ancient banyan tree. People called her “Sardool di parchhaavan” — the lion’s shadow. They meant it as an insult, implying she was invisible.

“The lion is not gentle,” he would say. “But his shadow has teeth.”