Ok. Takeaway for the week going by: All’s well that ends well. In love. In impending marriages. In televised romance-turned-betrayal-dramas which transcend borders. And otherwise.

If you happen to have been watching the idiot-box during the past week, you will know what I am referring to. For the uninitiated, it’s of course the

– more like the pati, patni and woe – that had captured popular imagination.

One man’s ecstasy is often another man’s agony. In this case, both men are the same – Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malik. The former Pakistani skipper vascillated from outright denial to prove-me-I’m-lying to finally admitting that yes he’d married Ayesha Siddiqui, confined to popular imagination only through photographs, in 2005.

While millions of heart-broken men wondered what the Indian version of Anna Kournikova saw in Malik, whose credentials came under question after the match-fixing scandal broke out, our Hyderabadi lass sent the message loud and clear: she stood by her man.

Monday blues dissipated as Mirza articulated at a press conference in Hyderabad how the media needed to treat the story with a little more ‘sensitivity’. And how, instead of pre-wedding jitters, she was having to deal with the paparazzi and their prying eyes! Malik, awed by his soon-to-be-better-half, stood in the sidelines, communicating in his broken English of how the truth will come out and how he would be vindicated.

Well, in X-Files style, the truth emerged. In two days time, precisely. Unable to handle the pressure and the diplomatic proportions that this saga threatened to assume (Malik’s passport was impounded and he was called for questioning by the cops), the wedding itself looked it was headed for anything but a fairytale finish!

Come Wednesday, and all such claims of Malik’s innocent-until-guilty, along with mid-week blues, vanished into thin air as the Siddiquis, chaperoned by Abid Rasool Khan, the General Secretary of Andhra Pradesh Congress, came out in the open and said that Malik had divorced their daughter and a relieved Ayesha could now go back to living a normal life. Providence intervened as mutual family friends of the Mirzas and the Siddiquis negotiated to unite the lovers. Your guess is as good as mine as to what actually transpired between the two sides and which side made the first move.

By now you know that the power of love transcends all. And while the lovebirds get ahead in life, dreaming of a life of togetherness in Dubai (where there’s more love, warmth and sunshine and low rentals, presumably!), one can only say that Malik gets to gain more than any one else.

Cause either way, Shoaib Malik still gets to taste Hyderabadi biryani!

(P.S.: I have forgiven Ekta Kapoor for the decade-long torture that she’d unleashed in the form of ‘saas-bahu’ serials. Hope this saga doesn’t lend her any inspiration!)

This post originally appeared here