Samriddhi POV :-
The hostel room was still wrapped in a lazy hush when Samriddhi’s alarm buzzed at 6:45 AM. It was the kind of morning where the sky outside the window looked half-asleep, drenched in soft blues and early sunlight.
Samriddhi groaned, rolled over, and buried her face into the pillow. “Five more minutes,” she mumbled.
“Already gave you ten,” came a sleepy voice from the other bed. Her roommate, Aashi, was brushing her hair into a bun while trying not to spill her tea.
With a half-hearted grumble, Samriddhi finally sat up, her hair a mess of waves falling around her shoulders. She tied it up with a pencil—her usual lazy bun—and dragged herself toward the mirror.
“I have a weird feeling about today,” she said, squinting at her reflection as she dabbed a bit of kajal into her eyes.
“Every day’s weird when you forget breakfast,” Aashi teasteased.l
“I’m not forgetting it today,” Samriddhi declared dramatically, grabbing a banana and a piece of leftover aloo paratha wrapped in foil. “See? Responsible adult.”
They laughed—light and tired and real—and within twenty minutes after getting ready , they were walking toward the main building, joining the morning swarm of students buzzing through the campus.
The air smelled faintly of coffee and wet grass. Samriddhi’s sketchpad peeked out from her tote bag, its edges curled from overuse, its pages smudged with charcoal and hope. Her heart always beat a little faster walking through the fashion wing—like the walls themselves breathed inspiration.
They reached the lecture hall just before the bell. The final year of her fashion designing course had arrived, but for Samriddhi Rajawat, it didn’t just mark the end of college—it marked the beginning of something more personal.
The assignment was simple on paper: create a thesis on Ancient Fashion—Traces of the Past in Modern Threads.
But for her, it was not just a thesis. It was a journey—of research, yes, but also of rediscovery.
While most of her peers began scrolling through online archives or planning museum visits in metropolitan cities, Samriddhi’s heart tugged her elsewhere. She knew exactly where she needed to go.
Prayagraj.
Her hometown. Her origin. Her core.
It wasn’t just the land of ancient temples and forgotten looms. It was also where she had laughed the loudest, grown the most, and observed the subtle, often painful contrasts between freedom and restriction. Unlike many of her childhood friends—girls who were brilliant yet boxed in by conservative households—Samriddhi had grown up in a home where she was allowed to speak, dream, even rebel a little.
Her family was different. Progressive, especially her father. A man of few words but immense warmth, he had always encouraged her to ask “why not?” instead of just “why?”. Her mother showed love in her own way, more practical, more protective.
But it was her father’s silent support, his unshaken belief in her, that had shaped Samriddhi’s confidence.
She loved them both—but if she had to admit it, her heart tilted a little more toward her father.
Maybe that’s where her fascination with fashion came from—not the glamor of the industry, but the expression it allowed. She had seen her friends reduced to whispers, their spirits stitched tightly into rules they never chose.
She wanted to design not just clothes, but a message. Something bold. Something liberating.
Fashion, to her, was rebellion draped in beauty.
As soon as the topic was announced in class, Samriddhi felt something click. While her classmates exchanged confused glances and quickly turned to their phones to google “ancient fashion,” her thoughts had already taken flight—far away from the lecture hall, back to the lanes of Prayagraj, back to the dust, the colours, the stories stitched into every thread.
She barely waited for the class to end. The moment she stepped out of her class. she grabbed her phone from her bag without wasting a single second and called her father. Her fingers trembled slightly—not from nervousness, but from the quiet thrill of knowing exactly what she wanted to do.
“Baba, I need to come home,” she said the moment he answered.
There was a pause on the other end , then a warm chuckle reached out. “Whoa, okay. That’s sudden. What’s going on?”
She smiled, already pacing in the corridor, her voice breathless with excitement. “We just got our final-year thesis topics. Mine’s on Ancient Fashion. And I don’t want to just sit and write about it from Wikipedia or old journals. I want to see it. I want to touch it. The real stuff. Temple carvings, vintage sarees, the weavers in old neighborhoods. Everything.”
A silence followed. Not hesitation—just the kind of pause when someone lets something sink in. Then, in the calmest, most certain voice, he said, “Come home, beta. We’ll figure everything out from here.”
Her heart swelled. She blinked back an unexpected sting of tears.
That night, she curled up in the corner of her bed, laptop open, her journal beside her. The buzz of the hostel dimmed around her as she searched flights, calculating timing, prices, even checking if she’d get a window seat.
It felt like planning more than a trip. It felt like writing the first page of something she’d remember for the rest of her life.
By midnight, she’d done it. One ticket booked. Friday morning. Window seat secured.
The next two days passed in a kind of dreamy urgency. She started packing early—then unpacked and packed again, unsure of what to carry. She added her sketchbooks, some fabric swatches, a few old photographs her mother had once sent her, and that one embroidered kurti she always saved for special days.
She messaged her school friends with a vague, “Hey, I might be around next week…” and only told her roommate the full story.
“I don’t know what it is,” she admitted softly that night, staring at the ceiling fan spinning lazily above them. “It’s just..... I don't why but somewhere I am having a gut feeling like something big is waiting for me there.”
Her roommate had smiled sleepily. “Sounds like a story starting.”
The morning of her flight to Prayagraj, she woke up even before her alarm. She wore her white kurti, pulled her hair into a loose bun, and fastened her silver jhumkas like quiet armor. At the airport, as she rolled her suitcase toward the gate, she felt the kind of nervous excitement that kids feel on the first day of school—like the whole world is about to open up, and you’re not sure whether to run toward it or hold your breath.
As the plane lifted off and the land below slowly vanished into cloud, Samriddhi leaned her head against the cold window and closed her eyes.
She was going back.
Back to the city that raised her.
Back to the stories stitched into the soil.
But what she didn’t know was—this journey wasn’t just about rediscovering the past.
It was about diving straight into her future....
A future that would begin in PRAYAGRAJ....
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