LOVE, IN FULL STEAM

Andaleeb Wajid scripted Jun many happy endings in her books, even while she grappled with loss

- MANDIRA NAYAR

Andaleeb Wajid is back at her mother’s house, this time for a month. It is Ramzan—the month of fasting. She logs in from her refuge—the desk in her peppermint green room. A romance writer, love is her business. In 2021, she spent six months in her room writing happy endings, even as she dealt with the other side of the four-letter word she has based her career on—loss.

“Everything kind of changed,” says Wajid, who is currently promoting her trilogy, Jasmine Villa. “My mother-in-law and I got admitted together [with Covid-19], and my husband the next day. I recovered. My mother-in-law and husband did not. They both passed away.”

Robbed of her ever-after—a promise in her books— Wajid continued to script it for others. Five days after her husband passed, she went back to her novel Loving You Twice. “The only stable thing was that moment when I would sit down to write,’’ she says. “I just felt that whatever happens in the world, the one thing that would be with me is my writing. That is still a place where I have a certain amount of control over things.”

When she was not plotting perfect scenarios, she tweeted her way through her pain. Her story became symbolic of the grief that engulfed everyone. Wajid wrote poignantly about her pain, offering a window to her devastation. “I sometimes think about how my husband would react,’’ she says. “He was this joking sort of person. He would be like, ‘Look at me. I made you famous’. He could flip it like that.”