Shivam Goyal

Shivam Goyal, the CEO of Ascent Brandz, is both a powerful corporate figure and a man still governed by the loss of Mohini Bhattacharya. His decisive significance lies in the contradiction between those roles: he can read campaigns, direct a company, and imagine long-term commercial strategy, yet the sight of Aparna Mahadevan’s jhumkas can return him without warning to a love story ended by tragedy. His relationship with Aparna therefore becomes not merely a new romance, but a test of whether grief can coexist with a second chance.

Identity and Introduction

Shivam is introduced through Aparna’s perspective as a striking presence at Ascent Brandz. She encounters him when he enters the conference room where she has been working alone on a dummy project. Tall, athletic, broad-shouldered, and dressed in a beige suit, he is immediately recognizable to her as the company’s CEO, but his physical presence is more overwhelming in person than in the online videos through which she already knows him. His deep brown eyes appear piercing, and the scene establishes the unequal charge of their first meeting: Aparna freezes with both apprehension and fascination, while Shivam greets her with professional ease.

The encounter also identifies Aparna as more than an anonymous intern. When she introduces herself as Aparna Mahadevan from SIMS and recalls that she and her friends won the paper-presentation competition on emerging trends in digital marketing, Shivam recognizes the achievement and welcomes her to Ascent. His first exchange with her thus joins institutional authority and personal attention. The workplace is the setting of their connection, but the meeting already carries a force that exceeds ordinary professional introduction.

Grief and the Return of Mohini

Shivam’s response to Aparna is shaped by a bereavement that he has not overcome. After Sherlie D Costa leaves his office, he slumps in his chair, closes his eyes, and allows memories of Mohini to return. He remembers evening walks in misty parks, her laughter in the silence, and the completeness and specialness she once made him feel. The memory is attached to a precise visual object: the jhumkas that used to hang from Mohini’s ears and resemble the earrings worn by Aparna.

The resemblance does not reduce Mohini to a replacement. Shivam insists inwardly that Mohini was unique, and the very fact that Aparna evokes her unsettles him. Tears come as he recalls losing Mohini in a freak accident two years earlier. He wipes them away and tries to steel himself against life, but the wound remains active; the tragic ending of his love story continues to deny him peace. Aparna’s hair falling beside her jhumkas becomes the detail he uses to explain the association, yet the explanation fails to quiet it. He has seen many women wearing similar earrings, including women in the streets of Mumbai, but none had brought Mohini back to him before. The scene presents attraction and mourning as intertwined rather than separate experiences.

Work, Authority, and Purpose

Shivam is not defined only by romantic suffering. Two months later, he appears as a confident business leader examining the numbers of a successful campaign. A triumphant smile crosses his face, and even Girish Goyal’s normally inexpressive face shows that the results have impressed him. When Alex D Costa expresses disbelief that the achievement came from only three interns, Shivam corrects him: the interns have become full-time employees.

His interest extends beyond celebrating a single success. Shivam uses the campaign figures to propose a long-term engagement plan built around the newly established database of influencers. He outlines a tiered reward system, including a weekend workshop at an off-metro location for the top twenty-five influencers who agree to post for future campaigns at a reduced price. Further rewards are intended for roughly the next fifty participants. The proposal reveals a manager who thinks in systems, retention, incentives, and durable relationships rather than in isolated publicity. It also places his emotional life beside a professional vocabulary of commitment: the same man who designs continuing engagement for influencers must confront the obligations and attachments he cannot efficiently arrange in his private life.

Aparna, Sherlie, and the Demand for Choice

Shivam’s romantic conflict is complicated by his bond with Sherlie D Costa. He explains to Aparna that he wants to escape a toxic friendship but cannot consciously push Sherlie toward another suicidal attempt. His affection for Sherlie is therefore bound to fear, responsibility, and guilt. Aparna recognizes that he has developed an attachment to Sherlie despite everything Sherlie has done for him, and asks what role she can play in helping him.

His answer marks a movement from implication to confession. Looking into Aparna’s eyes as though searching for an answer, Shivam says that he wants her to stay with him. He traces the beginning of his transformation to the day he saw her working alone in the conference room: something about her changed him. His appeal is tender but also forceful, almost at once a plea and a demand. He acknowledges that his obligations might burden her or deprive her of her rights, and therefore admits that he has no right to stop her if she chooses to leave.

The airport setting intensifies the uncertainty. Aparna’s flight is announced, and she says that she wishes there had been more time to tell him what she feels, while also promising that she will not be the first person to walk away from their relationship. Shivam points out the contradiction because she is physically walking toward departure, then takes her bag as they move toward the counter. The gesture captures his characteristic mixture of care and possessiveness: he wants to preserve her freedom, but he also cannot passively watch her disappear.

Crisis, Commitment, and Ending

Shivam’s public authority is shaken when he receives a midnight call summoning him to the police station. Staring at the screen and then at the men before him, he asks Alex D Costa, Inspector, and Satyam Goyal what he is hearing. The inspector gives him the devastating explanation that his business partner, Alex D Costa, is guilty of murder. Shivam’s immediate reaction is disbelief, and the interrupted question about whose murder shows how abruptly the professional world he controls has become a criminal crisis. The revelation places his family, partnership, and trust under pressure, even though the supplied scene does not yet state the full details of the crime.

By the later proposal scene, Shivam has reached a different kind of certainty. He tells Aparna that he wants to absorb the redness of the alta from her feet after every future session and performance, making her Bharatanatyam practice part of the imagined life they will share. He then proposes marriage in language that deliberately refuses hesitation: he tells Aparna Mahadevan to marry him and says that he is not asking her. Aparna recognizes the possessive force of the declaration, saying that he has played it well and that she is his.

The exchange nevertheless presents commitment as mutual rather than one-sided. Shivam answers that Aparna has had him from much earlier and that he only realized it late. He repeats that she has him, then invokes the support surrounding their union: the Goyal board room has voted unanimously, Satyam Goyal is her champion, Daadi will not delay, and Papa is happy. His personal decision is therefore joined to family approval and institutional authority. The grieving CEO who once feared that Aparna merely revived Mohini’s memory ends by naming Aparna as the person with whom he intends to build a lasting future.

Narrative Role and Significance

Shivam embodies the book’s romance plot of meeting, emotional resistance, entanglement, crisis, and renewed commitment. His first sight of Aparna opens the connection through resemblance and disorientation; his memories of Mohini make attraction morally and psychologically unstable; his obligations toward Sherlie create a prolonged refusal of uncomplicated choice; and his confession at the airport converts hidden feeling into an explicit request. The later marriage proposal completes that progression by replacing uncertainty with a public, family-supported promise.

His arc also exposes the limits of treating love as a clean succession of relationships. Mohini’s death remains part of Shivam’s present, and Aparna’s significance initially emerges through the painful reminder of another woman. Yet the narrative does not leave him fixed in repetition. His final words distinguish remembrance from substitution: Aparna is not presented as Mohini returned, but as the person Shivam eventually recognizes he has loved in her own right. His authority, grief, protectiveness, and possessiveness remain in tension, giving the character a dramatic shape built less on the disappearance of pain than on the decision to live and commit despite it.