Chapter 22 #2
When the performance ends and the estate disappears and we’re back in Toronto, in my cluttered apartment in Kensington Market with Oliver and the Uncrustables and I go back to the ER with the purple pom-pom pen.
When Arjun goes back to his hundred-hour weeks and his supposedly pristine condo and his surgical schedule, and I go back to the ER floor, and the distance that collapsed in Rajasthan has to hold in a Canadian winter.
When Meera's expectations follow us across an ocean, and the Kapoor name carries its weight, and I’m just a guy from Huntsville who eats terrible food and does magic tricks for children.
Is that enough?
Am I enough?
The question sits in my chest like a stone. It’s the first time I’ve let it fully form, and it’s heavier than I expected.
I look at my phone. Oliver is still asleep.
Mrs. Kasparian appears to be knitting something in the background, as I hear her humming to herself.
The screen is a window into my normal life, my real life, the life that exists seven thousand kilometres from sandstone palaces and silk saris, and it looks small.
It looks impossibly, heartbreakingly small.
I put the phone down on my lap, and press my hands over my face. I breathe.
My mom's voice, in my head, steady and sure: You call me. Every day you're there. If things get rough, you call me.
Things are rough, Ma. Things are rough in a way I didn't see coming, because the rough part isn't the family or the culture or the astrologer.
The rough part is that I love someone who comes from a world I will never fully belong to, and the question isn't whether he loves me back.
I know he loves me back. I've known it since the terrace, since the polo field, since a pair of green eyes held mine at a breakfast table while his hand found mine under the cloth.
The question is whether love is enough to bridge the gap between a gift shop and a palace.
I don't call my mom. Not because I don't want to, but because I know what she'd say. She'd say, Casey James Welling, since when do you let a big house scare you? And she'd be right. And I'd feel better. And the question would still be there, heavy and real, waiting.
A hand touches my shoulder.
I look up. Arjun is standing behind the bench, dressed in a white linen shirt and dark trousers, his curls slightly damp, his eyes soft in the morning light.
He’s holding something. A plate. On the plate is a paratha, cleanly folded into a neat triangle, and a small steel cup of chai, and a cluster of green grapes.
“You missed breakfast,” he says.
“I was in the garden.”
“I noticed. I also noticed you were sitting with Dev.” He pauses. His jaw does the thing. The micro-tighten that means he’s processing something complicated. “Was it... was it a difficult conversation?”
“No.” I take the plate. The paratha’s warm. He brought me breakfast. Arjun Kapoor, who has never in his life performed a domestic act that was not strategically pre-approved, went to the kitchen and assembled a plate and brought it to me in the garden. “He's a good man, Arjun.”
“I know.”
“He brought me chai.”
“I know. Kavita told me.” His ears go red. The faintest shade. “I came to bring you chai and was informed that I had been, and I quote, 'beaten to the punch by the London boy.' Kavita seemed disappointed in my response time.”
I laugh. It comes out of me like something that has been held too tight, a release, a loosening, and the heavy stone in my chest shifts, just slightly, and the weight eases by a fraction.
Arjun sits on the bench beside me. Not on the far end, the way Dev sat.
Right beside me. Close enough that his shoulder presses against my arm, and I feel his warmth against mine.
He picks up a grape from the plate and eats it, which is the Arjun equivalent of a revolutionary act given that this is unapproved, non-cellophane-wrapped produce being consumed outside of a controlled dining environment.
“Casey,” he says, and his voice is quiet, and his green eyes are looking at the fountain. “I know what you're thinking.”
“You can't hear my thoughts.”
“You haven't made a single joke since I arrived.
You always make jokes. When you stop making jokes, it means something is eating you alive and you're trying to hold still so it doesn't show, except you're a six-foot-three golden retriever, Casey, and golden retrievers cannot hold still. Your leg has been bouncing since I sat down.” He glances at my leg, which is, in fact, bouncing.
I stop it. “You're wondering if you're enough.”
My chest constricts. “Arjun...”
“You're wondering if a lake cottage and a goldendoodle can compete with a flat in London and astrological compatibility charts.
You're wondering what happens when we go back to Toronto and the magic of Rajasthan wears off and you're just a paediatrician in dinosaur scrubs and I'm just a neurosurgeon who can't make small talk.”
I stare at him. He stares at the fountain. His hand, resting on his knee, is trembling. The outside-the-OR tremor.
“I know you're wondering this,” he says, “because I've been wondering the same thing, except from the other direction.
I've been wondering if I'm enough. If a man who has the emotional range of a surgical instrument and who processes affection through clinical terminology and who couldn't tell a crying mother that her son was going to be okay deserves a man who can walk into any room on any continent and make every person in it feel like they matter.”
The stone in my chest dissolves.
Just like that. Just dissolves. Because this ridiculous, beautiful, impossible man just sat down beside me on a bench and told me that while I was wondering if I was enough for his world, he was wondering if he was enough for mine, and the symmetry of it, the perfect, absurd, heartbreaking symmetry, is the funniest and the saddest and the most reassuring thing I have ever heard.
“We're a mess,” I say.
“We are a comprehensive disaster.”
“A comprehensive disaster with good chai.”
“Kavita's chai,” he corrects. “I cannot take credit for the chai.”
“You carried it to the garden. That counts.”
He looks at me. I look at him. The morning sun is warm through the neem leaves, dappling his face with light and shadow, and his eyes are bright and scared and completely, entirely, unmistakably mine.
“You are enough,” he says. “You have always been enough. You were enough in a supply closet in Toronto and you are enough on a bench in Rajasthan and you will be enough in a freezing Canadian winter in a cluttered apartment with a goldendoodle who eats furniture.”
“Oliver doesn't eat furniture. He eats roses. And the occasional throw pillow.”
“The point stands.”
I take his hand. I thread my fingers through his, the way we have been doing for days now, the way that has become as natural as breathing, and I hold on for dear life.
“You're enough too, Doc,” I say. “Surgical instruments and clinical terminology and all.”
“Anushik im, this is better than my stories.”
Arjun freezes. I freeze. We both turn, very slowly, to look at my phone, which is still propped against my thigh, screen still bright, Mrs. Kasparian leaning so close to her camera I can count the bobby pins in her hair.
“The tall one is crying,” she stage-whispers to someone off-screen. “Garo! Garo, put down the paper, the tall one is crying.”
“I am not crying,” I say.
“You are misting. It is the same. Continue, please. I am at the heel of the sock.”
“Mrs. Kasparian.” I pick up the phone. Arjun's ears are now the colour of the bougainvillea over the wall. “Mrs. Kasparian, I have to go.”
“Of course, of course. You go. You kiss the handsome one. I will tell Oliver his fathers are doing well.”
“We are not his—”
“Goodbye, Casey. Goodbye, handsome one.”
“Goodbye, Mrs. Kasparian,” Arjun says.
I end the call. The screen goes dark. I set the phone face-down on the bench, with great deliberation, as if facing it downward will somehow retroactively unhear the last twenty minutes.
Arjun exhales. “How long has she been—”
“Since I sat down.”
“Casey.”
“I know.”
“She heard all of it.”
“I know.”
“Including the part about the surgical instrument.”
“Especially that part. She's going to tell everyone in our building. Mrs. Singh is going to know by lunch. The man at the bagel place is going to know by Tuesday.”
Arjun sighs and leans his head against my shoulder. It’s the smallest gesture. The lightest contact. The Dread Prince of Paediatrics, voluntarily resting his head on my shoulder in a garden in daylight where anyone could walk by and see.
We sit there. Eating parathas and sharing the chai, passing the cup back and forth between us, our lips touching the same rim, which is an intimacy so small and so domestic that it makes my heart ache in the best possible way.
Arjun tears the paratha in half and hands me the bigger piece without comment, which is the most romantic thing a man who calculates portion sizes to the gram has ever done.
I pick a grape off the cluster and hold it up. He looks at it. He looks at me. His eyebrows draw together in the very specific expression of a man who is evaluating whether accepting a hand-fed grape on a garden bench constitutes an unacceptable breach of personal dignity.
“Open,” I say.
“Casey, I am perfectly capable of feeding myself.”
“I know, Arjun. Now open.”
He opens his mouth. I gently place the grape on his tongue.
His lips close around my fingertip for a fraction of a second, warm and soft, and a flush crawls up his neck and his eyes go wide with a startled, slightly outraged expression as he was not expecting a grape to be an erotic experience and is furiously conflicted at the betrayal.
“Another?” I ask innocently.
“That is not how grapes are meant to be consumed.”
“It's exactly how grapes are consumed. Kavita hand-fed me barfi for two hours during the henna. This is established Kapoor protocol.”
“Kavita is a seventy-year-old woman performing a maternal feeding ritual. You are a six-foot-three Canadian performing something entirely different.”
“Well, is it working?”
He scowls and takes the next grape from my fingers himself, deliberately, his eyes locked on mine, and bites it in half, and the look he gives me while he chews is so loaded with challenge and want and exasperated affection that I have to shove an entire paratha in my mouth to keep from kissing him in broad daylight on a bench where any auntie with an iPhone could walk by.
We finish the grapes and the chai. We sit there, not talking, not needing to. Two men on a bench in a garden, both afraid, both enough, both choosing to stay anyway.
Somewhere inside the estate, Meera is recalibrating. Dev is likely packing. The WhatsApp group is updating. And the world is doing what the world does, which is being complicated and beautiful and terrifying.
But out here, under the neem tree, with his head on my shoulder and Oliver asleep on Mrs. Kasparian's couch seven thousand kilometres away, the world’s very simple.
It’s just us.
It has always been just us.