'What happens after you elope? The mundanity of living this grand love requires recalibration

Three couples elope, each of them running from families because of their caste, religion and sexuality respectively. But what happens after they ride off into the sunset? Author Mansi Choksi’s debut book ‘The Newlyweds’ traces the ups and downs in the lives of these couples over several years. Choksi talks to Ketaki Desai about the realities of fighting for love while still aching for familial approval:

- Mansi Choksi

For over half a decade, you’ve tracked the journey of three couples who risk everything for love. Do they find their happily ever after?

When I went into this project, I was interested in lingering in the afterlife of the kind of stories we constantly consume in Hindi movies and soap operas. That aspect of pop culture formed a narrative in their mind for what love should look like. As I spent time with them, I watched this grand love get reassigned to day-to-day life. What happens after you elope, put everything at stake? When love becomes part of the daily hum of life. What I learnt is that love can take various forms. Love can someday show up as regret, some days as hope, joy or longing for acceptance in a world you left behind. It’s not what these young people went in thinking it would be.

Each of these couples had different struggles, one was an inter-caste relationship, another an inter-faith one, and the third was a lesbian love story. How did that impact their journeys?