Chapter 7
The Arrival
Arjun
The heat hits me first.
It always does. No matter how many times I come home, the first breath of Rajasthani air lands on my skin like a warm, open palm, and something deep inside my chest cracks along an old fault line.
It is February. In Toronto, I left behind a city encased in grey ice and frozen slush.
Here, the air is dry, golden, and saturated with light, and the temperature is hovering somewhere around twenty-eight degrees Celsius.
My body registers this with stunned, almost offended confusion after having spent the last eight months living in a country that treats winter as a personality trait.
We step off the connecting flight in Jaipur, and the tarmac shimmers.
The sky is vast and blindingly blue, the kind of blue that does not exist in Canada, that makes the flat, overcast Toronto skyline feel like a memory from a different planet.
The air smells of dust and diesel and something floral underneath it all, jasmine or marigold, likely the scent of garlands being strung at a roadside stall just beyond the airport walls.
Beside me, Casey stops walking.
He just stops, right there on the tarmac between the plane and the terminal, his carry-on slung over one shoulder, and he tilts his head back and looks at the sky with his mouth slightly open.
He looks like he just walked through a door into a country he's only read about in a thirty-two-page dossier and is suddenly, viscerally aware that paper cannot hold this.
“Arjun,” he says, and his voice has gone quiet in a way I have never heard before. “It's beautiful.”
He is not performing, nor is he being polite.
He is standing in the Jaipur heat in his wrinkled henley with his chaotic blonde curls going in fourteen different directions and sweat already darkening the collar of his shirt, and he is looking at the sky above my homeland like it is the most extraordinary thing he has ever seen.
Something in my chest threatens to turn over. I clamp down on it immediately.
“It's thirty-two degrees on the tarmac and you're blocking the deplaning corridor,” I say, adjusting my messenger bag on my shoulder. “Move.”
He grins at me, wide and bright and entirely too much, and moves.
Inside the terminal, I feel the shift happen.
It is an old, practiced mechanism, as reliable and involuntary as a reflex arc.
The moment my feet touch Indian soil, something in my posture changes.
My spine straightens by an additional two degrees.
My chin lifts. My expression, which over the course of a fourteen-hour flight had softened into something dangerously close to human, resets itself to factory settings: cool, controlled, aristocratic, and impenetrable.
I am no longer Dr. Arjun Kapoor, paediatric neurosurgeon at Lakeshore Memorial, who fell asleep on a colleague's shoulder and woke up with his face pressed against a henley that smelled like fabric softener and warmth.
I am Arjun Kapoor of the Jaipur Kapoors.
Eldest son. Cambridge and Edinburgh educated.
Expected heir to a social dynasty that spans several centuries and three continents.
The armour slides on like a second skin, and it fits so perfectly that the seams are invisible.
I have been wearing it since I was old enough to stand at my mother's side at a dinner party and shake hands with government ministers.
It consists of perfect posture, clipped diction, and the unwavering certainty that no one in any room may see me sweat.
I hate it. I need it. Both of these things are true.
Casey, walking beside me through the terminal, notices. Of course he notices. The man has an unsettling talent for reading people, a diagnostic instinct that extends well beyond his patients, and he can apparently read the shift in my posture the way I read an MRI scan.
He doesn't say anything. He just moves half a step closer, so that his shoulder is almost touching mine, and the heat of him radiates comfortingly through the narrow gap between us.
The car is waiting outside the arrivals terminal. Not just any car, but a vehicle. A gleaming black Range Rover with tinted windows and polished chrome, idling in a reserved space next to a uniformed driver who snaps to attention the moment I walk through the automatic doors.
“Dr. Kapoor,” the driver says, bowing his head. “Welcome home. The family is expecting you.”
“Thank you, Ranjit.” I hand him my luggage with the easy, unthinking authority that this world expects of me. Casey hands over his bag with a friendly “Thanks, man,” and a grin that makes Ranjit blink twice, clearly recalibrating his expectations of the Kapoor heir's choice of partner.
We slide into the back seat. The leather is cool and immaculate.
The air conditioning is a sharp, blissful relief.
Casey's thigh presses against mine because the man is physically incapable of occupying a normal amount of space, and I do not shift away because I am choosing not to.
This is for strategic reasons related to maintaining the appearance of a comfortable and healthy intimate partnership.
That is the reason. There is no other reason.
The drive from Jaipur to the estate takes forty-five minutes, and every single one of them is a slow, relentless compression of the distance between who I am in Toronto and who I have to be here.
The city falls away and the roads narrow.
The landscape opens into a vast, sun-baked expanse of red earth and scrubby brush, punctuated by the brilliant, shocking green of irrigated fields and the occasional flash of a sari-bright figure walking along the roadside.
Camels plod along the edge of the highway like commuters who have decided that traffic laws are a suggestion.
“Arjun,” Casey says, pressing his face against the window like a child. “There are camels.”
“Yes. They are a common mode of transport in rural Rajasthan.”
“There are camels, and you're giving me a Wikipedia entry.”
“What would you prefer? A dramatic narration?”
“I'd prefer you to look at the camels and be even a tiny bit excited that there are camels!”
I look at the camels. They are dusty, indifferent, and chewing something with the slow, philosophical detachment of creatures who have survived several millennia of desert conditions and are not particularly impressed by Range Rovers.
“They're camels,” I say.
“They're amazing.”
He is smiling so broadly that the corners of his blue eyes are crinkling, and he has pulled out his phone and is taking photographs through the tinted window with enthusiasm as if he has never been more delighted by anything in his entire life.
Seeing this makes me want to put my face in my hands because this enormous, ridiculous, irrepressible human being is about to be fed to my family and he is taking photographs of camels.
The estate announces itself before we see it.
The road surface changes from weathered asphalt to smooth, recently poured concrete.
The scrubby brush gives way to landscaped borders of flowering shrubs.
A high sandstone wall appears on the right, running parallel to the road for nearly half a kilometre, and then the gates appear.
They are wrought iron, twelve feet tall, set into stone pillars carved with the Kapoor family crest. They stand open. Beyond them, a long, straight driveway lined with neem trees stretches toward a structure that Casey, peering through the windshield, goes silent looking at.
The Kapoor estate is not a house; it is a statement.
It is a sprawling, seventeenth-century haveli that has been expanded, renovated, and lavished upon by twelve generations of my family.
It sits on twelve acres of manicured grounds; the primary structure is sandstone and marble, warm amber and gleaming white, with arched windows, carved jharokha balconies, and a central courtyard visible through an ornate stone archway.
Bougainvillea cascades down the walls in violent, gorgeous waterfalls of pink and magenta.
Jasmine climbs the pillars. The gardens are geometric and immaculate, a chessboard of flowerbeds and fountains and stone pathways, and in the distance, half-obscured by a grove of mango trees, I can see the polo grounds.
I grew up here. I learned to walk on those stone pathways.
I had my first riding lesson on the polo field when I was six.
While the fountains ran outside the open window, I sat in my father's study doing my maths homework and dreamed of a life where I could measure myself by something other than my name.
I left at the first opportunity. I went to Cambridge, then Edinburgh, then Toronto.
I chose a career where precision and control could save lives instead of preserving legacies.
I built a life in a freezing, grey, wonderful city where nobody knew or cared that I was a Kapoor.
A life where surgical outcomes judged me, not my ancestry's sandstone walls.
And now I am driving back through those gates with a fake fiancé who is currently pressing his entire face against the car window, his breath fogging the glass, whispering “Holy shit” under his breath.
“Your house,” Casey says, very slowly, “has turrets.”
“They are jharokha balconies. Not turrets.”
“Arjun. Your house has balconies that look like turrets, on a palace, with actual bougainvillea and actual fountains and actual... wait is that a polo field?”
“Yes.”
“You grew up here.”
“Yes.”
“In a palace. With a polo field.”
“It is technically a haveli.”