Little Things, and the Answer Called Not Yet

At the end of the first season of Little Things, Kavya Kulkarni and Dhruv Vats are sitting in the middle of a vineyard, loosened by fresh air and wine, and she tells him something she has not told him before. She does not know what she wants to do with her life. The season ends there. It is not a crisis, and it is not a plan. Nothing has been decided. Something has been said.

Two seasons later, back from Delhi, where his mother has been pressing him to marry, Dhruv shows Kavya a ring. She takes it for a proposal and is upset. He tells her it is not one. They are not getting married, not now. The ring stays with her.

Most love stories treat a moment like that as a blade. A question is put, the answer is yes or no, and it is wanted now. Little Things treats it as something two people can hold. That may be its boldest idea, and it is a quiet one. Between yes and no there is a third answer, not yet, and when it is said honestly and kept where both people can see it, it is not an evasion. It is an answer. It may be the truest thing a long relationship can say about itself while it is still in its middle.

It is also, this essay will argue, the series’ way of taking a woman seriously. The question about marriage is not allowed to overtake the question she asked in the vineyard. Kavya is given something a romance does not always give its heroine, which is time: time to find out what she wants from her work, her city and her parents while the question about him waits. That time costs something, and the cost does not fall evenly.

What becomes of the ring can wait until after the note below.

This essay discusses all four seasons, including how the series ends. The ending has a section of its own, and it is flagged again before it begins. If you would rather watch first, do; the essay will keep.

Little Things was created by Dhruv Sehgal, who also plays Dhruv, with Mithila Palkar as Kavya. Sehgal wrote the first three seasons, the third with the co-writers Garima Pura Patiyaalvi, Abhinandan Sridhar and Nupur Pai. The fourth and last was the first he did not write; it was written by Abhinandan Sridhar. Ajay Bhuyan directed the first season and Ruchir Arun the second, and Arun and Sumit Aroraa shared the third and the fourth. The series was made by Dice Media. Its first season, five short episodes, went out on Dice Media’s YouTube channel in October and November 2016. Netflix took it on from the second season, released in October 2018, and carried the third in November 2019 and the fourth in October 2021: twenty-nine episodes in all, mostly in English, with Hindi in the slang. In Japan it streams under a title that means moments of happiness.

The series was not screened for this essay. Its story is taken from the series’ published episode summaries, from reviews in the Indian and international press, and from episode recaps published online. Lines of dialogue are paraphrased, never quoted as exact.

The story, in outline. Kavya, from Nagpur, and Dhruv, from Delhi, live together in a flat in Mumbai. They are not married, and the series treats that as ordinary. The first season is a handful of evenings and mornings: a lazy Sunday that other people’s posts make Kavya want to liven up; a morning rush that spoils both their moods; a sleepless night of mosquitoes that turns into a long talk about exes, because one of hers is getting married; a dinner plan that falls through; a late night out at a fair; and the vineyard. In the second, her career rises while his stalls, and by the end of it they are arguing about where they stand.

In the third, work takes Dhruv to Bangalore while Kavya is lonely in Mumbai; visits home show them their parents growing older, and his mother presses him to marry. Together again, they find their lives out of step. A ring causes trouble, and sad news from home turns Kavya’s thoughts to Nagpur. The fourth season opens after fourteen months apart, she working from her parents’ house, he in a job in Finland. They meet on a holiday in Kerala. What happens after that is the ending.

The series began with a request small enough to fit in a sentence. “The bosses at the company, Pocket Aces and Dice, asked me to write something on two people in a room, in a house with limited setup,” Sehgal told Film Companion as the last season was about to come out. He started writing on a Thursday, he said, and sent it on the Saturday. What began as a way of making something with very little, one flat and two actors, became the series’ whole way of seeing.

The first season’s episodes ran about a quarter of an hour each, and the outline above is very nearly the whole of their plot. That is the point. A Sunday, a morning, a mosquito: these are the smallest materials a shared life has, and the series builds with nothing larger. Nobody is in danger. The drama is conversation, and what is at stake is the next hour between two people.

Romance has been made out of talk before. Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise found a love story in one night of conversation between two strangers walking through Vienna, and its sequels came back every nine years to hear what the talk had become. Little Things starts where those strangers could not. Its two people already share a flat, and they have to keep talking anyway, about very little, because talking is how they find out where they are. Talk, here, is not how love begins. It is how love is kept going.

This Library’s essay on Alain de Botton’s novel, “The Course of Love Begins Where Most Love Stories End”, opens with a sentence that could stand as this series’ premise: “Most love stories are structurally shy about Tuesday.” Little Things is made of Tuesdays. Its English title promises scale, the small things. Its Japanese title promises moments of happiness, and a viewer in Japan who comes for those will find some, along with a fight at a wedding, a lonely season and a birthday spent alone. Of the two titles, the English is the more accurate.

The flat is never a statement. Shruti Tarigoppula, reviewing the second season for Brown Girl Magazine, set down the facts of the couple’s life in a run of short sentences: “They live together. They are unmarried. She’s much more successful than he is. She makes more money than he does.” These, she went on, are simply facts that make up the fabric of the story, not material to be milked for episodes. This essay keeps to the same register. The flat where Kavya and Dhruv live is where the shopping goes and the arguments happen, and nothing more is asked of it. What the series does make visible around the flat is something older: the families’ expectations, which arrive with the visits home, and a mother’s pressure to marry, which in this series lands on the son.

The question the series keeps asking is not whether they love each other. It is where they are. The vineyard is the first time it is asked aloud, and it is asked about a life rather than a couple. Kavya does not say she is unsure of Dhruv. She says she is unsure of everything else, and the season lets that be its last word.

The second season gives the question weight. Kavya is promoted and gets busier, running a big project. Dhruv makes a difficult decision about his work, quits, and drifts, restless at home and looking for ways to bring some money in. She earns more than he does, and the imbalance starts fights. Tarigoppula credited the series with exploring that imbalance without over-dramatising it, and her word is the right one for what the series avoids. Money is allowed to be the subject of a quarrel without either of them becoming its villain.

One of the gentlest episodes belongs to neither of them. Kavya’s mother comes to visit, and Dhruv takes her out for the afternoon and comes to know the person behind the parent. It is a small episode with a large idea in it, and the idea will come back at the end: that the people who raised you are people too, with lives and a marriage of their own.

Then comes the episode that asks the most of its audience. On a work trip Kavya hits it off with another man, a risk-taking one in Rahul Desai’s description in Film Companion, and begins to ask herself whether her relationship with Dhruv is good enough for the long haul. This essay reads that neither as a betrayal nor as a verdict on the couple. It is the vineyard question again, asked this time with another person’s face attached to it, and it is a real question.

The season ends at a friend’s wedding, where a moment of closeness between them turns into a full-blown argument about where they stand. Its last episode is titled Where Are We? On the way home from the wedding they stop at a place they know and talk it through. The title is the series’ question in three words. The answer the season gives is not a place. It is a conversation.

The third season separates them, and it is exact about how unevenly separation arrives. A research fellowship takes Dhruv to Bangalore. He takes to the city at once and makes friends almost immediately. Kavya, in Mumbai, struggles with loneliness at home and vulnerability at work.

Each goes home. Kavya goes back to Nagpur for her father’s retirement and finds her parents older. Prathyush Parasuraman, reviewing the season for Film Companion, found that part of it deeply moving, and listed what she finds there: an ageing dog, a security guard who was not invited to the retirement party, the friendships of childhood, pyjamas that still fit, shops sold off or renovated into newness. Dhruv goes to Delhi to help his mother pack up his childhood home, and she presses him to marry. The pressure to settle the question lands on him too, and leaves him frustrated and detached.

When they are together again, their lives are out of step. Dhruv compares Mumbai with Bangalore and feels that Kavya’s new friendships have replaced him. Then comes an episode of flashbacks to how each of them first met love and marriage, and in Kavya’s two things are worth keeping. Growing up, she was friends with the young woman next door, who lived on her own with her dog and liked her life that way, and from her Kavya learned that a single life could be a happy one. Later there was a boyfriend who wanted them to marry soon, while she wanted to go to Bombay to study. She did not want to lose him. When it came to a choice, she went.

It is in this episode, in the present, that Dhruv shows her the ring. Set beside her flashbacks, her alarm is not only comic. Marriage has come into the room, in the shape of a ring, while her own life is unsettled, and, if the flashbacks are a guide, she has been here before. The difference this time is that the man tells her himself that he is not proposing. Not now, for either of them.

The season’s last episode brings news for each of them. Dhruv envies an old friend from college his success, and by the end of the episode he has been offered work on the friend’s research. Kavya has sad news from home, and it turns her thoughts to a transfer to Nagpur. They look back at what they have become, and then they are apart again.

So the ring stays with her, unworn and unreturned. On this reading it is the series’ central image: a question with a place to live, kept by her while both of them go and find out who they are going to be.

This Library argued in “Chosen Again, Not Chosen Once” that commitment is not something filed once, at a proposal or a signature, and then left to persist on its own. It is closer to a standing decision, made again in small and unphotographed ways on ordinary days. That essay took from relationship research a distinction between sliding and deciding: drifting through a relationship’s transitions because each step is easier to continue than to reverse, as against passing through them by real, examined decisions. Its worry was the slide, the relationship that keeps going because nobody stopped to ask.

Little Things spends most of its length in a place that distinction has no name for. Kavya and Dhruv are not sliding towards marriage. The question is too visible for that, and it has an object, a ring she keeps, that both of them know about. Nor have they decided. What they have is a question kept open on purpose, with both of them aware that it is open and its token in plain sight. Call it holding: the state of a couple who know exactly what they have not decided, and have chosen not to decide it yet.

The series is fair to the other essay’s worry. In the last season there is a stretch it counts in weeks: three of them go by before the two of them see what a run of bad days has cost them. That is a slide, exactly as the other essay described one. What the series adds is that a held question is not a slide. A slide is what happens while nobody is looking. A held question is looked at. It has a name, and in this case a ring.

What holding makes room for is change. While the question is open, each of them is allowed to become someone the question has not met: a researcher in Bangalore and then in Finland, a woman working from her parents’ house in Nagpur. The essay on de Botton’s novel called romance after romance a practice of revision, in which desire has to keep meeting the updated person rather than stay loyal to an earlier picture of them. A held question is one way of making room for that. If it is answered, it will be answered by the person she has become, to the person he has become, and not by the two people they were on the day the ring appeared.

Another shared flat in this Library makes the contrast plain. “Because This Is My First Life, and the Contract That Had to End Before It Could Be True” read a Korean series in which a landlord and his tenant marry on a written two-year contract, and learn that a contract can govern what passes between two people but cannot keep out the terms everyone else writes into a marriage. Kavya and Dhruv write nothing down. Their families’ terms walk in anyway, as that essay would predict, with a mother packing boxes in Delhi. But the only document in four seasons of their life together is a ring that nobody wears. It holds no terms. It holds time.

A question that is held has to be held by someone, and here, mostly, it was held by her. The first not-yet was spoken by Dhruv, when he told her that the ring was not a proposal. The ring stayed with her. So did the loneliness of the months in which he flourished in Bangalore. The fourteen months apart were fourteen months she spent at her parents’ table in Nagpur, working from their house, while he worked in Finland.

When they meet again, on a holiday in Kerala that takes them to Alappuzha, Kochi and Munnar, the series gives her thirtieth birthday to her alone. Dhruv cannot get out of a work commitment, and she spends the day in her own company, exploring and soul-searching. The episode is called Fort Kavya, a play on Fort Kochi, and the pun may be the season’s kindest joke: a woman on her own on a birthday with a round number, holding a fort that is hers.

It is also the season in which she stops waiting for work to arrange itself around her life. She tells her company she will leave unless she gets her Mumbai role back. Parasuraman, reviewing the last season, singled out that conversation, the one in which she plays hardball, for showing a fierce, competitive side of her that viewers had imagined but never been shown. Dhruv, for his part, decides to come home for good, and a meeting with his friends from Finland raises the question of why he really came back. The series asks who moved for whom. This essay will not guess at the answer.

None of this makes her not-yet a failure of nerve. She has reasons for it, and they are good ones. She learned as a girl, from the woman next door, that a single life could be a happy one. She has already watched a man’s sense of when they would marry run into her sense of what she wanted to do next, and she went to Bombay. And in the vineyard she said that she does not know what she wants to do with her life. A woman with that history who keeps a ring rather than wearing it is not avoiding a decision. On this reading she is refusing to make it before she can make it truthfully.

Dhruv should be given his due as well. The pressure to marry reaches him in Delhi, from his mother, and his own not-yet was honest in its way: he did not let that pressure turn a ring into a proposal he had not made. But the weight of the holding was not evenly shared, and a reading that praises not yet has to say so plainly. She was the one who kept it.

From here, this essay describes how the series ends.

Kavya gets her Mumbai role back and cannot start it. She and Dhruv rent a flat together again, and while they set it up they talk over the pros and cons of marriage. Then comes a setback. A doctor finds a nerve compression in her back, and she is told to rest instead of beginning the job she has just fought for, and has to tell the boss she has just pressed for it that she cannot come. Dhruv is struggling in a new job; at one point, Parasuraman notes, he has to tell his team that their salaries will be late. She is listless at home, he is worn down at work, and three weeks go by before they see what it has done to them.

Every morning Dhruv helps her through her physiotherapy, and the mornings become a routine.

Then both sets of parents come to visit, and the talk turns to marriage. One recap of the finale notices something about the room that is worth keeping: it is not two families of three, a daughter with her parents and a son with his, but three couples. The couple throw a party, and nobody is quite sure what it is for.

At the party Kavya takes Dhruv out onto the balcony and proposes. She gives him back the ring that was not a proposal, and he puts it on her finger.

That night she wears the ring, and they tell no one. Later, unable to sleep, she talks him into going out, and they take the car for a long drive, late at night. In the morning they tell their parents they are engaged, and the two families gather in the living room to mark it. That is where the series ends.

On that drive Kavya asks him whether it would be a dealbreaker if she decided she did not want children. He tells her it would not. On this one question, her say is to count for sixty and his for forty.

And in the last episode, Parasuraman reports, Dhruv tells her that today feels as though they have been together for a very, very long time, and adds that he means it nicely.

Look at what the ending does with the question. The ring comes back as her question. The not-yet that Dhruv first spoke becomes her now, at a moment she chooses. It arrives on nobody’s timetable but her own.

Look, too, at when she proposes. Not when their lives are in order. Her back has stopped her, the job she fought for is waiting, he is struggling at work, and both their families are in the flat. The ring does not wait until she has worked out what she wants to do with her life, the question she asked in the vineyard. What she seems to have worked out is that the vineyard question no longer has to be closed before this one can be answered. She proposes from inside an unfinished life, which is the only kind anyone has.

Look at the order of the rooms. The proposal happens on a balcony, between two people, before anyone else knows. The families come in afterwards, to a living room, to mark an engagement the two of them have already made. Everyone who pressed the question is there for the answer. None of them gave it.

Most of all, look at what stays open. On the same night that one question is answered, another is raised: whether Kavya will ever want children. What the two of them settle on that drive is not the answer. It is the weighting, her say counting for more than his. An engagement that answers one question and honestly holds another is the series’ last argument for not yet. An answer to one question does not have to be an answer to all of them.

In Japanese the question relatives ask can be a short one. Kekkon wa mada? Not married yet? It is the kind of question that can be put at a New Year table or a cousin’s wedding, and a woman who has been asked it may have heard in the mada, the not yet, a small reproach. Little Things does something useful with that word. It takes not yet away from the relatives and gives it to the couple, as an answer of their own, said on purpose.

The last scene may look familiar too. Japanese has a phrase that fits it, ryōke no kaoawase. Ryōke is both households; kaoawase, in the dictionary’s words, is a coming together, above all a first meeting for a shared purpose. The living room at the end of Little Things looks like one, with one difference worth noticing. Nobody in that room is being asked anything. The proposal was made earlier, on a balcony, between two people.

For a woman who has made her life in Japan while her parents grow older in another country, the most familiar part of the series may be neither the flat nor the ring but the visits home: parents older between one trip and the next, a father’s retirement, the old dog next door that she has loved since she was a girl, and sad news from home that becomes a large decision. After the news Kavya goes home, and by the last season she has spent fourteen months working from her parents’ house. This essay reads those months as part of her not-yet rather than a pause in it. She went, and she came back, and neither the going nor the coming back was the answer to the question she was carrying.

Japanese working life has its own vocabulary for the distances jobs put between couples, tanshin funin among them: a posting that takes someone with a household to live alone in another city, leaving the family behind. Little Things is full of distances arranged through work, a fellowship in Bangalore, a job in Finland, a transfer to Nagpur, and it keeps putting to each of them the questions such postings raise. Who moves. Who waits. And who, while the other one works, is holding the question about the future.

None of this makes Little Things a series about Japan, and neither the series nor this essay is a portrait of Indian couples or of Indian women in general. What travels is a mechanism: a question held open by two people, and the matter of which of them is doing the holding.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong.

First, not yet may be a production schedule rather than a philosophy. A romance that hopes to come back for another season needs its central question open, and a series that began as a request for two people in a room, and grew season by season on a streaming service, had every reason to keep its couple undecided. On that account the kept ring is not an idea about love. It is a way of promising a fourth season. This essay cannot rule that out. The narrowest answer is that the series put its deferral on screen, as a ring that was not a proposal and was said not to be one, rather than hiding it inside contrivance. But a device can be honest about itself and still be a device.

Second, the ending may betray the argument. After four seasons in the middle, the series ends with a ring and both families in a living room, which is where romances have long ended. Saraswati Datar, reviewing the last season for The News Minute, allowed that some may find it a rather conventional ending. And the last season was the first its creator did not write: Sehgal told The Quint that he stepped back because the characters had stopped surprising him, and the season was written by another hand. A reader who feels that the series, at the last, went home to the shape it had spent years declining is not wrong. This essay reads the order of the rooms, the balcony before the living room, as the difference. The shape is still the old one.

Third, the holding was unequal, as this essay has said, and praise of not yet may romanticise a woman’s waiting. It would be easy to dress up as patience what was partly an old arrangement, in which a woman’s life waits on a man’s career: a fellowship in one city, a job in another country, and all the while the ring in her keeping. The series answers some of this by giving her reasons of her own and the last move. It does not answer all of it, and neither does this essay.

Fourth, the proposal follows weeks in which he helped her through every morning, and a viewer may see gratitude in the ring, or a debt paid. This essay reads it otherwise, for a plain reason: the ring was his first, and she had kept it since before the fourteen months apart, long before the mornings began. What the mornings show is not what she owes him but what their ordinary days had become while the question waited. Still, the essay cannot disprove the other reading.

Fifth, privilege, and a bias of this Library’s own. Kavya and Dhruv are two educated professionals with jobs that can move and families who, for all their pressure, can wait. Many couples cannot hold a question open for years: money, visas, age, parents who cannot wait, work that will not move. A reading that makes not yet a virtue may be describing a luxury. And this Library has a taste for small things and for questions over answers. It may have found in this series exactly what it went looking for.

Three things, none of them a rule.

Not yet can be an answer. It is one when both people know it has been given, and know where it is kept. It turns into drift when only one of them is holding it, or when neither remembers that it was ever a question. The difference is not how long the question stays open. It is whether anyone is still looking at it.

The person who is asked may take the time to find out what she wants from her own life before she answers: from her work, her city and her parents. She does not need her life to be settled first. She needs the answer to be hers, and it can come in her own words, even in the form of a question of her own.

One answer need not close every question. Some can be left open, together, on purpose, with an understanding of whose say counts for more on each. An engagement can hold a question about children. A marriage can hold others.

So, once, to you. If you are the one who has been keeping a question for both of you, in a bag or a drawer or a silence at dinner, you have not been failing to decide. You have been carrying something that belongs to two people. It is fair for the other one to know where it is kept, and to take some of its weight.

This is a reading of a television series. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and it is not advice about any relationship or about any injury.

It rests on the series’ published record: its credits, dates and episode summaries. It rests on interviews given as the last season was released, to Film Companion, in which Dhruv Sehgal described how the series began, and to The Quint, whose headline carried his reason for not writing the last season; on reviews by Rahul Desai in Film Companion and Shruti Tarigoppula in Brown Girl Magazine in 2018, by Prathyush Parasuraman in Film Companion in 2019 and 2021, and by Saraswati Datar in The News Minute in 2021; and on episode recaps and accounts published online, the fullest of them the episode-by-episode recaps of the last two seasons on the blog Don’t Call It Bollywood; a scene that rests on such an account is described here only where a second account agrees. What a reviewer describes is given as that reviewer’s account.

It makes no claim about how living together outside marriage is regarded in India or anywhere else, and it gives no statistic. It makes no medical claim about Kavya’s back beyond what the series shows: a doctor’s finding, rest, and physiotherapy each morning. It does not say why Dhruv came back from Finland, and it does not guess. The Japanese words discussed above are given as words, not as a description of how Japanese families behave.

No maker, performer, critic or publication named here has any connection with this Library, and none has endorsed it.

Is there a question in your relationship that the two of you are holding open? Do both of you know it is open, and where it is kept?

Which of you has been carrying it, and has the other ever taken a turn?

What would have to be true of your work, your city or your parents before you could answer it honestly?

If the two of you divided the say on one question sixty to forty, which question would it be, and which of you would hold the sixty?