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
