Alex D Costa

Alex D Costa occupies a pivotal and deeply ironic position in the narrative: he is presented as a genial elder, a business partner of Girish Goyal, and a protective father to Sherlie D Costa, yet he is ultimately revealed to have arranged Mohini Bhattacharya’s murder. His importance lies in the fracture between the affectionate “Uncle” and “Pops” known to Shivam Goyal and the criminal whose intervention helped destroy Shivam’s first love. Alex’s storyline turns domestic familiarity into a source of danger and makes private loyalty inseparable from public betrayal.

Identity and Public Persona

Alex is embedded in the Goyal family’s professional and emotional world. He works alongside Girish Goyal and participates in discussions involving the Goyal Group and Ascent Brandz, while his daughter Sherlie D Costa is present in the same circle and attempts to contribute to the company’s presentation. His relationship with Girish is sufficiently close for him to speak with the ease of a family friend and business partner, but that intimacy also gives his words unusual force within the family’s tense hierarchy.

His manner is repeatedly marked by warmth and familiarity. At Shivam’s birthday celebration, Alex removes the lid from a freshly baked cake made by Sherlie and tells Shivam that the Goyal residence cannot hold a party that year and that the D Costa home is also Shivam’s house. The gesture is generous, but it carries an undertow of displacement: Shivam is celebrating away from his family, and Alex’s household temporarily offers itself as a substitute. Shivam accepts the affection while feeling that something is not right, a small disturbance beneath the hospitality that later acquires darker significance.

Alex is also called “Alex Uncle,” while Sherlie calls him “Pops.” These forms of address establish him as a quasi-parental presence rather than a distant associate. When Shivam receives a late call from Alex, however, the familiar voice is broken by an urgent plea to save his daughter. The crisis draws Shivam more deeply into the D Costa family’s troubles and demonstrates how Alex’s paternal role can command immediate loyalty from him.

Business and Family Entanglements

Alex operates within a corporate environment where family feeling and commercial judgment continually overlap. During a Goyal Group meeting, he intervenes when Girish compares the older real-estate business with Ascent Brandz, arguing that a thirty-year-old enterprise should not be measured against a branding company established less than ten years earlier. His defense of Shivam’s company briefly positions him as a moderating voice, even though Girish’s demand that Shivam halve project turnaround times keeps the conflict alive.

That same meeting reveals how easily Alex’s social ease can become tactless. He jokes that business bonds couples and points toward Shivam and Sherlie, invoking Girish and Menka Goyal as an example of marital and commercial partnership. He immediately realizes that he has touched a wound. Menka is in a comatose condition after a short circuit at one of the family’s new projects in Gurgaon, and Mohini’s earlier death has already damaged the relationship between Girish and Shivam. Alex’s remark produces an oppressive silence: Sherlie looks at her feet, Girish avoids everyone’s eyes, and the business meeting can continue only after Girish forces attention back onto investment matters. Alex therefore belongs to the family’s intimate inner circle, but he does not fully control the grief and resentment that circulate within it.

He also stands near the commercial world that Shivam is trying to reshape. Shivam defends Ascent Brandz’s pandemic performance and its expanding celebrity clientele, while Aparna Mahadevan later argues for a different model built around non-celebrity influencers and measurable sales. Her Kyrah maternity-wear proposal emphasizes loyalty, affordability, reach, word of mouth, and the long-term value of cultivating many smaller creators rather than relying only on celebrity names. After the campaign succeeds, Shivam proposes a tiered reward system, including a workshop for the top twenty-five influencers at the Goyal family’s two farmhouses in Mahabaleshwar. Alex’s presence in this business milieu places him within a narrative concerned with how relationships, reputation, and value are organized through both family networks and branding networks. Yet his own most consequential network is secretive and destructive: he uses closeness not to build trust but to control the emotional lives around him.

Protection, Possession, and Crime

Alex’s relationship with Sherlie is defined by intense protective involvement. When he senses a presence approaching Shivam and Sherlie at the cafe, he abruptly grabs his daughter and pulls her away from Shivam. The physical interruption suggests that Alex regards Shivam’s proximity as a threat, even though Shivam has been treated as a beloved member of the D Costa household. His protection is not neutral care; it is an attempt to regulate whom Sherlie may approach and how her attachment may develop.

The later revelation gives this behavior a more troubling psychological shape. At the police station, Sherlie sobs that Alex had previously sent Mohini away from Shivam’s life. Her statement identifies Alex as an active agent in the destruction of Shivam and Mohini’s relationship, not merely a father reacting to his daughter’s distress. The phrase also exposes the possessive logic beneath his conduct: Shivam’s emotional life has been treated as something that can be cleared for Sherlie, as though removing a rival were an acceptable form of parental assistance.

The police then state that Alex is guilty of murder, naming Mohini Bhattacharya as the victim. Shivam, stunned by the accusation, asks whether Alex killed her. Held down by two constables and crying with his head lowered, Alex confesses that he had Mohini killed. The confession is devastating precisely because Shivam has known Alex since childhood and regarded him as one of his best friends’ family. The crime does not come from an unknown outsider; it emerges from a trusted domestic and commercial relationship.

Alex’s actions fit a dramatic pattern in which protection becomes possession and possession becomes violence. He appears to defend Sherlie, but the consequence is the destruction of Mohini and the prolongation of Shivam’s bereavement. His intervention also helps create the emotional vacuum in which Sherlie’s obsession intensifies. The attempt to secure one relationship by eliminating another therefore fails both ethically and practically: it produces death, trauma, suspicion, and a distorted bond between Shivam and Sherlie.

Revelation and Consequences

Alex’s arrest transforms earlier scenes without erasing their surface tenderness. The birthday cake, the claim that Shivam’s home is also his, the parental titles, and the urgent appeal to save Sherlie all become part of a pattern in which affection and control coexist. The narrative does not present his criminality as a separate identity detached from his family role. Instead, his paternal attachment is the channel through which the crime becomes imaginable and consequential.

The revelation also changes the meaning of the conflict between Girish and Shivam. Menka’s coma and Mohini’s death had already soured the father-son relationship, leaving grief to operate as an invisible barrier in the Goyal family. Alex’s confession confirms that Mohini’s death was not simply an isolated loss but part of a concealed intervention that shaped Shivam’s life and contributed to the family’s prolonged suffering. A private crime has therefore produced a public and intergenerational crisis.

For Shivam, Alex’s confession is a collapse of moral categories. The man he has trusted since childhood is simultaneously the familiar elder who offered him shelter and the murderer who removed Mohini from his life. Shivam’s gasp and direct confrontation register not only shock at the crime but the destruction of his understanding of the past. Alex’s tears and lowered head show remorse or defeat, but they cannot restore Mohini, repair Shivam’s bereavement, or undo the years of false interpretation.

Narrative Role and Significance

Alex functions as the story’s embodiment of concealed causality. He is visible early as a participant in business, family gatherings, and moments of apparent care, while the truth of his conduct is withheld until the police confrontation. This delayed disclosure turns ordinary gestures into retrospective clues and gives the plot its strongest reversal: the trusted “Uncle” is the person who arranged the death at the center of Shivam’s unresolved grief.

His characterization also exposes the instability of familial language. “Uncle” and “Pops” imply safety, continuity, and belonging, but Alex’s behavior reveals that family-like authority can be used to justify exclusion and coercion. His attempt to protect Sherlie does not respect her autonomy or Shivam’s love; it substitutes his own design for both of their choices. The result is a stark contrast between care as support and care as control.

Alex’s significance extends beyond the murder itself. His actions link the novel’s romantic plot to its broader structures of business partnership, family obligation, grief, and social reputation. He helps demonstrate that the most damaging threat to Shivam is not always separated from him by distance or hostility. It can arrive through a familiar voice, a birthday cake, a paternal embrace, or a business alliance—and reveal itself only after the life built around that trust has already been altered beyond repair.