Chapter 4
Background Research
Casey
He’s sitting on the couch beside me with his chin on my thigh, his enormous brown eyes tracking between my face and the glowing screen with the slow, mournful patience of a creature who understands that his human has lost his mind but loves him too much to intervene.
His tail gives one halfhearted wag every few minutes, as if to say, I'm here for you, buddy, but this is deeply concerning behaviour.
It’s Monday. I fly to India on Wednesday.
I have approximately forty-eight hours to transform myself from the man who once forgot to wear pants under his scrub gown during a code blue into a convincing romantic partner for the most meticulous human being on the North American continent, and I’m handling it with the calm, measured grace of a man setting himself on fire.
Tab one: “Kapoor family Rajasthan estate.” The search results are staggering.
The Kapoor family doesn't have a house in Rajasthan. They have a compound. A sprawling, sandstone-and-marble palace that looks like it was ripped out of a period drama and dropped into a manicured garden the size of a city block. There are turrets. Actual turrets. In contrast, I grew up in a three-bedroom bungalow in Huntsville where the biggest architectural feature was a screened-in porch that my dad rebuilt twice because the raccoons kept breaking through. And even then, they still got in because nothing keeps raccoons out when they’re determined.
Tab two: “Indian engagement customs traditional.” I've been reading for forty-five minutes, and the depth and beauty of the traditions are genuinely hitting me in the chest. Roka ceremonies.
Ring exchanges. The exchange of gifts between families.
The significance of sweets. I open a sub-tab: “What sweets to bring to an Indian engagement?” I open another: “Can I make sweets or should I buy them?” I open a third: “How badly will I offend everyone if I bring store-bought sweets?”
Tab three: “Basic Hindi phrases for beginners.” I’ve been practising namaste in the bathroom mirror for ten minutes. Oliver watched me through the open door with an expression that I can only describe as deeply and truly concerned.
Tab four: “How to drape a sari.” This one is purely precautionary.
The YouTube tutorial is twenty-two minutes long and performed by a woman with extremely patient hands and a soothing voice, and I watch the whole thing twice.
I’ll almost certainly never need to drape a sari.
But if some catastrophic wardrobe emergency occurs and I’m the only person available, Casey Welling will be ready.
Tabs five through sixteen: Assorted Kapoor family Google results.
Society pages. Charity galas. A photograph of Arjun’s mother, Meera Kapoor, at a polo match in Jaipur wearing a very expensive-looking sari, standing next to a woman the caption identifies as “Auntie Sunita” who is furiously typing on her iPhone even in the photograph.
A blurry shot of someone who might be Arjun at a London medical conference, barely visible in the background, standing with his hands clasped behind his back.
I zoom in on that one. I zoom in way too much. I am not proud of myself.
Tab seventeen: “Rajasthan weather in February.” Hot during the day, and cool at night. I own one pair of linen pants that I bought for a friend's beach wedding in 2019. They have a small hole near the left pocket. This is the foundation of my warm-weather wardrobe.
I close the laptop. I open it again. I close it.
I pick up my phone.
Arjun's contact is sitting there, near the top of my recents, where I put it last night because I could not stop myself from opening the message thread approximately nine times before I went to bed.
The thread contains exactly three pieces of information.
A dinosaur emoji, sent by me. A confirmation of receipt, sent by him, that reads Acknowledged.
And a follow-up, sent four minutes later, that reads Goodnight, Dr. Welling, which is the most Arjun Kapoor sequence of texts that has ever been generated by a human being.
I have his number. I have his actual, personal, not-the-hospital-switchboard number, the one his mother, his sister, and approximately four other people on the planet probably have, and now I have it too, sitting in my phone next to my mom and the pizza place on College and the on-call schedule for the paediatric ER.
Two years of pining, and the man has now been digitally adjacent to me for fourteen hours.
I want to text him. I have nothing to text him about. The two facts have been waging a quiet civil war in my chest since approximately 5 a.m.
I scroll past his name instead.
It's 6:47 a.m. I know my mom is already awake.
Brenda Welling has been getting up at 5:30 a.m. for as long as I've been alive, because “the lake is prettiest before the tourists wake up,” and because she’s incapable of sleeping past dawn.
Something about thirty years of opening the shop at seven and never quite shaking the schedule, even on her days off.
I open FaceTime and call her.
She picks up on the second ring. The screen fills with the kitchen of the house I grew up in: knotty pine cabinets, a window overlooking the frozen lake, a fridge covered in magnets and old photos and a bumper sticker that reads “MY SON SAVES LIVES (and has very nice hair).” That bumper sticker was a gag gift from my residency class.
She put it on the fridge the day I gave it to her and has refused to take it down for years.
“Casey James!” Her face appears, flushed and bright-eyed, blonde curls piled on top of her head in a messy bun.
She is already dressed, wearing a flannel shirt and holding a mug that reads “Lake Life” in a font that looks hand-painted, which it is, because she sells them at the shop.
“You said you'd call! I've been dying. Dying, Casey. I texted Aunt Linda. I texted your cousin Mike. I called the shop and told Karen to hold down the fort this morning because my son is having some kind of international crisis and I need to be available.”
“Ma. I called at eleven last night and you didn't pick up.”
“I was watching Outlander, and the phone was in the other room. That's not the point. The point is India. Why are we talking about India? Is this about a boy? Tell me this is about a boy.”
Oliver, who has been patiently waiting for his moment, suddenly recognizes the voice coming from my phone and lunges. His enormous golden head shoves directly into the frame, his nose filling the entire screen, his tail going into full helicopter mode.
“OLIVER! Oh, my sweet baby boy, hello, hello, look at you!” My mother's voice goes up approximately three octaves.
“Casey, angle the phone so I can see his face. His WHOLE face. Oh, he looks so handsome. Have you been brushing him daily like I told you to? His coat looks a little matted on the left side.”
“Ma. Focus. And yes, of course I’ve been brushing him.”
“Right, right. India. Boy. Go.”
I take a breath. Oliver settles back down, having received his due attention, and rests his chin on my knee again.
Through the phone, I can see my mom settle into her kitchen chair, her blue eyes sharp and locked on me with the intensity of a mother who has been waiting for this specific phone call for years.
“So there's this guy at the hospital,” I start.
“I knew it.”
“Ma, I’ve barely even said anything yet.”
“Sorry. Go on. There's a boy, I mean, a guy.”
“His name is Arjun. He's a neurosurgeon.
Paediatric neurosurgeon. He's... he's brilliant, Ma.
Like, scary brilliant. He does these insanely complex surgeries on little kids' brains, and his hands never shake, and he's got these green eyes that just…” I trail off, because my mother's face has gone soft and warm and dangerously emotional, and I haven't even gotten to the complicated part yet.
“Oh, Casey,” she mumbles.
“So here's the thing.” I rub the back of my neck.
“His family is... they're a big deal. Like, a huge deal. Indian aristocracy, old money, the whole thing. And his mom’s trying to arrange a marriage for him to some other guy in London, and Arjun doesn't want that, so he.
.. he told his mom that he's already engaged. To me.”
Silence. On the screen, my mother blinks once. Twice. A raven caws somewhere outside the kitchen window, over the frozen lake.
“So, it's fake,” she says.
My mom isn't dumb. My mom ran a gift shop through two recessions, organized the Huntsville Regatta for fifteen consecutive years, single-handedly navigated the Canadian small business tax system after my dad died, and once talked a black bear out of the backyard using nothing but a pot lid and the sheer force of her personality.
Brenda Welling is not a woman who misses subtext.
“Yeah,” I say. “It's fake.”
“But you want it to be real.”
My throat does something inconvenient. “Ma.”
“Sweetheart.” She leans forward, and her face fills the screen, all warmth and blonde curls and those blue eyes that are exactly my blue eyes, and she looks at me the way she's looked at me my whole life, like I'm the best thing she ever made and she'd fight a moose for me without hesitation.
“You have been talking about a surgeon at your hospital for two years.
You have never once told me his name, but every time you mention him, your whole face changes. I'm your mother. I see things.”
I press my hand over my eyes. Oliver whines softly and licks my elbow.
“So when do I need to buy a sari?” she asks brightly.
I choke out a laugh that's half relief and half something that aches in a good way. “You don't need a sari, Ma.”