Chapter 22
The Good Man
Casey
Dev Mehindra brings me tea.
I want to be clear about the significance of this, because it matters, because it would be so much easier if this man was terrible, and he’s not terrible, and the tea is evidence.
It’s the morning after his arrival. I’m sitting in the garden, on the stone bench beneath the neem tree where I FaceTime my mom, and I’m attempting to video-call Oliver via Mrs. Kasparian's phone, except Mrs. Kasparian doesn’t understand how to work the camera and I’ve been staring at her ceiling for four minutes while Oliver barks at what I suspect is his own reflection in the phone screen.
Dev appears. He’s dressed in linen trousers and a white cotton shirt, looking exactly like a model from a catalogue for people who holiday in places with names like “the Amalfi Coast” and “the Maldives.” He’s carrying two cups of chai, and he holds one out to me with a small, genuine smile.
“You looked like you could use one,” he says. “Kavita's recipe. She showed me where she keeps the cardamom.”
I take the chai. It’s perfect. It’s hot and sweet and spiced with the exact blend that Kavita uses, which means Dev paid attention when she showed him, which means Dev is the kind of man who pays attention, which means Dev is making this enormously, terribly difficult for all involved.
“Thanks,” I say. “That's really kind.”
He sits down on the other end of the bench. Not too close. Not invading space. Just present, with the easy, measured comfort of someone who has spent their life navigating social situations and knows precisely how much distance to leave between themself and another person's boundaries.
“Is that your dog?” he asks, nodding toward my phone, where Mrs. Kasparian has finally managed to angle the camera so I can see Oliver.
Oliver’s lying on her sofa with a throw pillow in his mouth and an expression of such operatic contentment that I suspect he has been spoiled beyond all reasonable recovery, and I’m in for a rough ride when I get back home.
“That's Oliver. He thinks he's a person.”
“He looks extremely comfortable.”
“He's been living his best life. I'm fairly sure he's forgotten I exist.” On screen, Oliver drops the pillow, yawns enormously, and rolls onto his back, presenting his belly to the ceiling with the total, unguarded trust of a creature who has never once in his life had reason to doubt that he’s loved and adored.
My chest tightens. I miss that dog so much it's a physical thing.
“I had a dog growing up,” Dev says. “A springer spaniel named Wellington. He was a disaster. He ate an entire sofa cushion once and we had to rush him to the vet.”
“Oliver ate a rose from a wedding bouquet. Five thousand dollars at the emergency vet. He was constipated.”
“Five thousand dollars for constipation?”
“Welcome to Canadian veterinary care.”
Dev laughs. It’s an open, easy laugh, and the problem with Dev Mehindra's laugh is that it’s genuine. It’s the laugh of someone who finds constipated dogs funny because constipated dogs are objectively funny, and he’s laughing with me, not at me, and I can’t help but like him.
I like him, and I wish I didn't, because liking him makes everything harder.
We sit on the bench and drink our chai, and the morning sun is warm through the neem leaves, and the garden is beautiful, and the fountains murmur, and somewhere inside the estate, Arjun is getting dressed with his meticulous, surgical precision, and the man his mother chose is sitting next to me being kind and funny and easy to talk to, and I am experiencing the specific kind of emotional turmoil that I think soldiers have when they discover the enemy is a person.
“Can I ask you something?” Dev says, after a comfortable silence.
“Sure.”
“What's he like? When he's not...” He gestures vaguely at the estate, the palace, the whole elaborate machinery of the Kapoor world. “When he's not this.”
I look at Dev. His dark eyes are careful, curious, and there’s a vulnerability in them that I wasn’t expecting.
This isn’t intelligence gathering. This isn’t Meera's interrogation.
This is a man who had what he thought was a romantic dinner of equals with Arjun three years ago and has been thinking about him ever since, and who genuinely wants to know.
And here is where it gets complicated, because the honest answer, the true answer, the answer that rises in my throat with a force that cannot be contained, is: when Arjun isn’t this, he’s extraordinary.
When Arjun isn’t this, he falls asleep on your shoulder on planes and his face goes soft and his hand finds your sleeve.
When he isn’t this, he argues with you about dinosaur movies and compliments the animatronic jaw structure and you watch his eyes go wide during the T-Rex scene and it's the most beautiful thing you've ever witnessed. When he isn’t this, he counts the number of times another man touches your arm and pretends it's clinical observation and nearly shatters a teacup over an admittedly delicious mango. When he isn’t this, he sneaks into the kitchen at two in the morning because he forgot to eat at his own engagement party and he watches you cook Laal Maas with an expression that makes your entire chest cavity reorganize itself. When he isn’t this, he holds your hand in the dark and his fingers stop shaking and you understand that you’re the only place, outside of the operating room, where this man's hands are still, and the weight of that is staggering and sacred and the best thing you have ever been trusted with.
I can’t say any of this. Not to Dev. Not to the man who wanted what I have and was too decent to fight me for it.
“He's quieter,” I say. “He's funny, actually. Accidentally funny. He doesn't mean to be, which is what makes it so good. He's...” I pause. I take a sip of chai. “He's the most exhausting person I've ever met, and also the most worth it.”
Dev nods. He looks at the garden. He takes a sip of his own chai.
“I knew,” he says quietly. “At that dinner in London. Three years ago. We spent the whole evening arguing about beta-blockers, and I thought...” He pauses.
A rueful, self-aware smile crosses his face.
“I thought it was romantic chemistry. Intellectual sparring.
I thought there was something there. But Arjun left the next morning and I didn't hear from him for three years, and when Meera called and said he'd agreed to an engagement dinner, I told myself it was a second chance.”
He looks at me. His dark eyes are steady and clear.
“It wasn't a second chance,” he says. “It was Meera. It was always Meera. He never agreed to anything.”
“Dev...”
“It's alright.” He says it with a quietness that isn’t defeated.
It’s the quietness of a man who has been sitting with a truth for longer than he wants to admit and has made his peace with it.
“I saw you two at dinner last night. The hand on his back. The way he leans toward you. The way his entire...” He searches for the word, his surgeon's words failing him for once.
“His entire frequency changes when you're in the room.
I've never seen him like that. Not at our dinner.
Not in any version of Arjun I've encountered.”
My throat feels tight. My chai is getting cold.
Oliver is now asleep on Mrs. Kasparian's sofa, his enormous golden body stretched across three cushions, and the video call has been forgotten because I’m sitting on a stone bench in a garden in Rajasthan having the most unexpectedly difficult conversation of my life with the man I am supposed to be competing with, but who I can only feel sympathy for.
“He's lucky,” Dev says. “And I think you probably are too.”
He finishes his chai. He stands and straightens his linen shirt with the neat, exact movements, as if he is quietly closing a chapter, and he extends his hand.
I take it. His handshake is firm and brief.
“For what it's worth,” he says, “you're not what I expected.”
“A six-foot-three Canadian who can't play polo?”
“A good man.” He pauses. “The kind of good man that Arjun has needed for a very long time and that his family, who have been too busy looking for the perfect candidate, didn’t notice was already there.”
He walks back toward the estate, his linen trousers catching the morning light, his posture straight and composed. He does not look back.
I sit on the bench. I hold the empty chai cup. I stare at the fountains and the flowers and the immaculate, beautiful, suffocating grounds of the Kapoor estate, and I let myself feel the thing I've been holding at arm's length since Dev arrived.
I’m afraid.
Not of Dev. It’s clear to me now that Dev isn’t a threat. Dev is a good man who has just quietly, gracefully removed himself from a race he was never actually in, and I respect him for it with a depth that surprises me.
I’m afraid of this. All of this. The estate and the family and the social machinery and the sheer, overwhelming weight of what it means to be chosen by Arjun Kapoor.
Because being chosen by Arjun means being chosen to join a world that doesn’t fit me.
A world of heirloom silver and seating charts and astrologers and aunties with WhatsApp surveillance networks.
A world where a gift shop in Huntsville is a footnote and a paediatric generalist is an asymmetry.
I’ve been so focused on getting through, on winning over the aunties and surviving the interrogations and navigating the polo matches and being cheerful and present and unflappable, that I haven't let myself sit with the bigger question: what happens when we go home?