Picture this: you’re visiting your estranged family for the first time in seven years. You’re part of a two-week long Indian wedding, and family drama is already brewing—there’s your overbearing aunt, the type-A bride, and your favourite cousin icing you out. Then, your new boyfriend accidentally crashes the event… what do you do?

For Simran Gopal, the lead of a charming cast of characters in Leave and Come Back, the answer is Operation DDLJ—a scheme inspired by her favourite Bollywood movie. In order to avoid a full-blown family crisis, the couple needs to trick Veena perima, Simran’s aunt and the judgmental family matriarch, into adoring Leo…without revealing their relationship. 

Beyond the wedding hijinks, reuniting with family brings up some difficult memories for Simran, taking her back to the painful years after her parents died. As Operation DDLJ unfolds into a mess of misdirections and chaos, Simran must also find a way to heal her old wounds in order to live out a happy ending with both Leo and her family. 

Leave and Come Back is the debut novel from Toronto-based author Lavanya Lakshmi, available in the US and Canada on June 16. Ahead of the book’s release, and in celebration of Asian Heritage Month, SheDoesTheCity is excited to give you a sneak peek at an excerpt from this heartwarming and hilarious romantic comedy that will make an excellent addition to your summer reading list!

16.

Six days until the wedding

Simran, Kavitha, and Geeta head over to the Chopras’ house like ducklings behind Veena perima, who knocks but doesn’t wait for an answer. She walks right in, coming facetoface with Leo, who had been reaching for the door and whose hand is now pressed against Veena perima’s midsection. Leo snatches his hand back as his eyes go so wide that Simran thinks they might fall right out of his head, which would be a shame. He has lovely eyes.

Veena perima sits down with Manjula aunty at one end of the dining room table, covered by a complicated seating chart while the three cousins follow Leo outside to the Chopras’ backyard, where Rishi is waiting. Simran scrapes her gaze down the back of Leo— they haven’t seen each other since their interrupted rendezvous on the balcony three days ago and her skin thrums with the memory.

A banging on the window jolts her out of the moment. She twists around to see her aunt shouting, “Don’t stand in the sun! You’ll become dark!”

“Amma!” both Kavitha and Geeta yell back at her. Kavitha continues, “We talked about this!”

Veena perima looks confused for a second before she waggles her head from side to side. “Oh, haan, haan, girls these days don’t care what color they are. Okay, carry on.”

“That’s not—” Kavitha stops. “You know what? Close enough.”

Simran gets everyone’s attention. “Kavitha helped me make the mix last night—it’s going to be all the cousins and friends for ‘Kajra Re,’ ‘. . . Baby One More Time,’ and ‘Mehndi Laga Ke Rakhna,’ where we’ll do the little skit.” She spent yesterday coming up with new choreography for the dances after Geeta rushed into her room the night before, wailing about how her friend Amu chose all the wrong songs. She could have asked Simran instead of telling her to do it, but Simran also knows Geeta’s standards are very high and she trusts Simran to meet them. That’s the essence of family: annoying that they take you for granted, but comforting that they know you well enough to do so. She used her phone to record the moves earlier to send to everyone else in the dance, so they can learn it too. “Then Geeta, Kavi, and I stay onstage for ‘Kajra Re.’” She turns to Geeta, a ribbon of fondness in her chest for her youngest cousin’s demand to create a routine called “the sisters’ dance,” just for the three of them. “Great idea, by the way.”

“I know,” Geeta says. “Can we hurry? I’ve got to be on a call about obstetric ethics with the head of the Yale School of Medicine in thirty minutes.”

Simran walks everyone through the moves without the music, counting out loud far slower than the actual tempo—it’s still a mess. Rishi can’t keep his lefts and rights straight and Kavitha keeps stepping on her own foot. Leo is perpetually half a beat off, neck craned to see what the person next to him is doing. But most surprising is Geeta, who is out of breath and cannot seem to remember what step is next. It quickly devolves, Rishi checking his phone and Kavitha laughing hysterically as she and Leo dosido, arms linked.

“We’ve got less than a week till the sangeet, can we please focus?” she asks in her Miss Simran voice. They stop immediately. Kavitha sways in place, dizzy, and Leo puts his hands on her shoulders to steady her.

Simran sighs. She misses her preschoolers.

“How are you doing that?” Geeta asks as she resumes teaching.

“Like this—” Geeta huffs as Simran adjusts her hands. “You’ll get it! Just hang in there!”

Simran tamps down her smile. It is nice to be better than her youngest cousin at something, for the first time ever. Geeta clearly doesn’t feel that way, glaring at her, so she calls for a water break.

“Can you show me that move again?” Leo asks, walking over to her.

“Sure! Which one?” she asks.

“That thing with your hips,” he replies silkily.

She gasps in mock outrage. “Excuse me! I am your teacher.”

“And I am very into this role-play,” he says, leaning towards her.

She stops him with a hand on his chest, glancing back to make sure Veena perima can’t see them. “Leo, you’ve got me. You can stop flirting with me.”

“Pass.”

“If I wasn’t supportive—if—I might say a secret plan is not something we should be doing during this already insane week,” Geeta chimes in from a few feet away.

“Gee,” Rishi says, tilting his head. “We’ve talked about this. It’s a wedding. Lots of things will not go according to plan. Nothing else matters except that you and I end up married.”

She softens visibly as he reaches out and squeezes her hand. Turning to everyone else, she says, “Fine. Let’s just get this over with!”

At Kavitha and Geeta’s request, Simran demonstrates the dance by herself. Without needing to teach anyone, she loses herself in the music, whirling and unburdened, the only noise in her head a metronome she keeps time to, the only feeling in her body utter control as she hits every move perfectly. When she’s done, everyone bursts into applause, even Veena perima and Manjula aunty at the window. Her aunt holds both her hands up, palms out towards Simran, before pulling her fingers in and cracking the backs of her knuckles against her temples, a familiar gesture to remove the evil eye. The two women return to the table as Simran’s gaze wanders over to Leo. His grin is incandescent with pride, bordering on awe, and she glows within to match.

As Simran teaches the last few sets of moves, she looks at Kavitha. “Remember this?”

She does the “Chaiyya Chaiyya” hook step, the one they used to do at their summer performances when they were kids. Kavitha’s face lights up.

“Yes! This dance is seared on my soul!” She steps forward and in sync, she and Simran run through the moves, laughing. Geeta sniffs, more than a few steps behind, and Simran feels slightly bad to leave her out—but she has a mission. If she has to use every last bit of nostalgia and childhood connection to win back Kavitha, she’s going to.

The clouds have been threatening to let loose all morning, and when they finally do, it’s a sudden downpour sending everyone rushing into the house. Geeta goes upstairs to take her call, Rishi trailing her. Simran glances around for Leo, who is suddenly nowhere to be found. Kavitha has sat down with the aunties and so she joins them too, watching Veena perima and Manjula aunty tussle over whose third cousin twice removed gets to sit at table thirty-two and which one will be given the insult of sitting at table thirty-three.

After a few minutes, Leo reappears, holding a tray with five steaming mugs on it. “I made chai,” he announces proudly, walking up to the table.

“Oh, such a nice boy,” Manjula aunty says. “But I can’t have chai in the afternoon or it’ll spoil my diet.”

Veena perima barely suppresses an eye roll. Simran wonders if that’s what she looks like when she does the same thing. Her aunt gestures roughly at Leo to give her a cup. “I’ll have one. Some of us don’t make everything about our looks.”

Leo walks up to the table, the cups rattling with each step, like they too are nervous about what’s to come. Simran exchanges a glance of alarm with Kavitha as she picks furiously at a cuticle. What is he doing? Each night, they’ve reviewed and recalibrated Operation DDLJ, based on what has—or, in most cases, hasn’t—happened. The new tactic for Veena perima is to avoid interaction at all costs. Leo is supposed to focus on Ashok peripa and all their friends, not go rogue, even with something as innocuous as a cup of tea. This is Leo’s competitive, optimistic streak coming out: He has always been liked by everyone.

But Veena Iyer is not everyone.

Simran looks on, helpless, as he places a cup in front of each person and stands back, grinning. It’s like one of those National Geographic wildlife specials where an oblivious bird croons while standing in the open jaws of a crocodile.

Copyright © 2026 by Lavanya Narasimhan