Chapter 11
Emerald and Gold
Arjun
Tarun arrives like a weather system.
He sweeps through the front doors of the estate at half past nine in the morning, three days before the engagement party.
Two assistants trail behind him carrying garment bags, a leather case of measuring instruments, and a rolling rack of fabric swatches so vast and colourful it looks like someone has captured a sunset and cut it into squares.
He is tall, whippet-thin, and dressed entirely in black, with a silk scarf knotted at his throat and oversized sunglasses pushed up into a sweep of dramatically silver-streaked hair.
He moves through the entrance hall with the possessed, kinetic energy of someone who has been placed on this earth for one singular purpose and that purpose is spectacle.
“Arjun!” He spots me in the corridor and descends with his arms outstretched.
He kisses both my cheeks with theatrical precision, grips me by the shoulders, and holds me at arm’s length, surveying me with narrowed eyes.
“Thinner. Paler. The Canadian winter is eating you alive, darling. We will fix this. Emerald is your colour, it always has been, it makes your eyes look positively felonious. Where is the fiancé? I need to see the fiancé immediately. Your mother has told me he is large. How large? Give me dimensions. I need to prepare myself emotionally.”
“He is in the garden,” I say, delicately extracting myself from Tarun’s grip. “I’ll send for him.”
“Don’t send for him. I want a reveal. I want to see him come around a corner.
I want scale.” Tarun snaps his fingers at his assistants, who immediately begin hanging garment bags along the corridor with the practised urgency of a backstage crew preparing for a curtain call.
“The engagement announcement is in three days. Three days, Arjun. Your mother gave me two weeks’ notice for a same-sex Roka ceremony with bespoke formalwear for two.
Two weeks. I have not slept. I have survived on espresso and sheer creative fury.
What I have made for you will change your life, and I will accept nothing less than tears. ”
“I don’t cry.”
“You will. I’m a genius. Now go get the lumberjack.”
I go to get the lumberjack.
Casey is in the garden, sitting on a stone bench beneath a neem tree, video-calling someone on his phone.
As I approach, I catch fragments: a woman’s voice, warm and animated, asking about the food, the weather, the fountains.
Brenda. He is FaceTiming his mother and showing her the gardens, angling the phone so she can see the bougainvillea and the distant polo field, and I hear her gasp and say “Casey, it’s like a movie!
” and Casey laughs and says “I know, Ma, I know.”
He sees me and his face changes. Not dramatically.
Not a shift anyone else would notice. But I notice, because I have apparently developed an involuntary, highly specific monitoring system for this man’s facial expressions, and the change is this: his smile, which was tender and easy and directed at his mother, becomes something slightly different when it turns to me.
Brighter. More focused. Like a beam that was diffused and has suddenly narrowed to a point.
“Sorry Ma, I gotta run. Talk to you later, okay?” Casey says as he ends the FaceTime call, before addressing me. “Hey, Doc. What’s up?”
“Tarun is here. He needs to see you.”
“The designer guy?”
“The designer. Yes. He is... intense. He will touch you. He will measure you. He will have opinions about your shoulders. Do not be alarmed.”
Casey grins. “My shoulders have been alarming people my whole life. Tell him I’m ready.”
I lead Casey back through the garden and into the entrance hall, and I position myself slightly to the side, because Tarun specifically requested a reveal and I have learned over a lifetime that denying Tarun his dramatic moments results in consequences.
Casey rounds the corner.
Tarun sees him.
There is a silence. It lasts approximately four seconds, which in Tarun’s world is an eternity.
His mouth opens, then closes. His sunglasses slide down his nose.
His eyes travel from Casey’s feet to his shoulders to the top of his blonde, chaotic curls, and his expression undergoes a transformation that I can only describe as religious.
“Oh,” Tarun breathes. He presses one hand to his chest. “Oh, look at him.”
Casey, to his credit, does not flinch. He stands there in his worn jeans and a t-shirt, filling the corridor with the simple, unselfconscious physicality that he brings to everything, and he smiles at Tarun with the same open friendliness he gives to every person he meets.
“Hey,” Casey says. “I’m Casey. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet me. Nice to meet me!” Tarun is circling him now, one hand extended, tracing the air around Casey’s frame without touching, mapping the dimensions like a sculptor evaluating a block of marble.
“Arjun, look at him. Look at this. Fifty-four chest? No, fifty-two, but the deltoids, the deltoids are going to need architectural consideration. And the shoulders. These shoulders are a structural event. I am going to need more fabric. Ramesh!” He snaps at one of his assistants.
“Call the warehouse. Tell them I need an additional three metres of the gold dupioni. Three metres, Ramesh! We are building for a god, not a filing clerk!”
“Tarun,” I say carefully. “Perhaps we could proceed with the measurements in a more controlled environment.”
“Controlled. He wants controlled.” Tarun rolls his eyes skyward, appealing to whatever deity governs fashion and drama.
“I am creating art, Arjun. Art does not happen in controlled environments. Art happens in chaos.” He points at Casey.
“You. Come with me. I need you in the fitting room in direct light. I need to understand you.”
Casey glances at me. His blue eyes are sparkling with barely contained amusement. He mouths the words “I need to understand you” at me over Tarun’s head and I have to look at the ceiling to avoid an expression that would compromise my entire carefully maintained exterior.
They disappear into the guest wing, where Tarun has commandeered one of the larger suites as a temporary atelier. I hear his voice echoing down the corridor: “Arms up. Turn. No, turn the other way. My God, the back. Ramesh, are you seeing this back? This is not a back, this is a landscape.”
I retreat to the main drawing room and sit down with a cup of tea and the uncomfortable awareness that Tarun is currently treating my fake fiancé like the Sistine Chapel, and I have no way of controlling any of it.
The next three days are a blur of preparation.
The estate transforms. Staff move through the grounds with the focused, military efficiency of an invading force, hanging lanterns from the garden trees, constructing a raised platform in the central courtyard, draping silk in emerald and gold from every archway and pillar.
My mother’s event planning is not planning.
It is engineering. She has a master timeline, a staff deployment schedule, a seating chart that accounts for family feuds going back three generations, and a catering team that arrives in a convoy of white vans and immediately takes over the kitchen wing with the calm, practiced dominance of a well-funded occupation.
I avoid all of it. I see patients’ families on video calls, reviewing post-operative progress from seven thousand kilometres away, because the hospital doesn’t stop because Arjun Kapoor’s personal life has become a theatrical production.
I review scans and annotate charts. I sit in the guest suite with my laptop and my medical journals and I try, with decreasing success, to pretend that the enormous, golden-haired man sleeping on the other side of a nightly rebuilt pillow wall is not slowly, regularly dismantling every wall I have ever built inside myself.
Because the pillow wall keeps falling. Every night, without fail.
I rebuild it with increasing structural ambition, incorporating cushions from the window seat, folded blankets, once a bolster wedged vertically between the mattress and headboard that I was particularly proud of.
And every morning, I wake up with Casey’s arm around me and his chest against my back and his breathing slow and deep against my hair, and the ruins of my engineering scattered across the silk bedding like evidence at a crime scene.
I have stopped pretending that this is a structural problem.
The structure is fine. The structure would withstand a minor earthquake.
The problem is that my body, in the undefended landscape of sleep, has decided where it wants to be, and it wants to be pressed against Casey Welling’s chest, and no amount of bolsters and engineering and clinical detachment is going to override that particular biological imperative.