Chapter 24
The Festival
Casey
The Kapoor estate doesn’t throw a festival. Instead, the Kapoor estate becomes one.
I step out of the main house the following day at dusk and the grounds have been transformed so completely that for a second I genuinely wonder if I've walked through the wrong door and ended up in someone else's life.
Hundreds of clay diyas line the garden paths, their tiny flames flickering in the warm evening air like a field of earthbound stars.
Paper lanterns hang from the neem trees and the mango grove, casting the whole estate in a pleasant, amber glow that turns the sandstone walls to liquid gold.
There are garlands of marigold and jasmine strung between the pillars of every archway, so thick and fragrant that walking beneath them feels like passing through a curtain of flowers.
The polo field has been converted into an open-air gathering space.
A wooden stage has been erected at one end, where a group of musicians are tuning instruments I can only partially identify: a sitar, a pair of tablas, something with strings that looks like a small harp, and a harmonium that an elderly man is coaxing into warm, droning life.
Bright fabric canopies billow overhead. Food stalls line the perimeter, and the smell of frying samosas and roasting corn and something sweet and saffron-laced is so dense in the air that it's practically a physical presence.
There are people everywhere. Not just family.
Staff, neighbours, villagers from the surrounding area.
Children are running between the stalls with sparklers, trailing ribbons of light.
Women in bright saris are arranging offerings at a small shrine near the garden entrance.
Men are clustered around the food stalls, arguing about something with the animated, good-natured intensity that I've learned is the default communication style for any gathering of more than three Indian men in proximity to food.
It is, without exaggeration, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
“Close your mouth, Casey. You look like a tourist.”
Priya appears beside me, resplendent in a deep red sari embroidered with gold that makes her look like she stepped out of a painting. She hooks her arm through mine with the proprietary ease, as if she has adopted me and doesn’t see a reason to pretend otherwise.
“I think you might’ve forgotten, but I am a tourist,” I say.
“No, you're family. There's a distinction. Tourists gawk. Family participates.” She steers me into the crowd.
“Come on. Mother has assigned seating for the first hour, which means you and Arjun are being split up. She's got him with the senior family members and the local politicians. You're with me, Karan, and the cousins. Yash, our younger brother, should be arriving soon as well, and I’m sure you’ll meet him tonight.”
“She's still separating us?”
“She's always separating you. It's her primary tactical doctrine.
Divide and conquer. But it's a festival, Casey.
She can't control a festival. Too many people, too much chaos, too many variables.” Priya's quick eyes sweep the crowd with an expression that is equal parts excitement and strategic assessment.
“Festivals are where Kapoor rules break down.
It's the one night Mother can't choreograph.”
Arjun is already gone, absorbed into a cluster of older relatives near the main canopy as soon as we arrived together and Meera steered him away from me.
I catch a glimpse of him through the crowd: dark curls, white kurta, rigid posture, his hands clasped behind his back.
He’s performing. The Kapoor heir, polished and composed, nodding at whatever the elderly man beside him is saying.
But even from fifty feet away, across a crowd of several hundred people and a sea of lantern light, I can see the tension in his shoulders.
The locked jaw. The way his eyes, when he thinks no one’s watching, scan the crowd with a specific, searching focus that I recognize because it’s the same focus I’m directing at him.
He’s looking for me. In a crowd of hundreds, he’s looking for me.
My chest does the thing. The intense, expanding, too-big-for-the-ribcage thing. I let Priya pull me into the festival.
The first hour is a whirlwind. Karan finds us almost immediately, appearing from behind a food stall with a plate of chaat piled so high it defies several laws of physics, his kurta already stained with something orange, his energy operating at its usual eleven out of ten.
“Bhai!” He shoves the plate at me. “Try this. The pani puri guy is from Jodhpur. He's the best in the state. I'm trying to hire him for the restaurant, but he’s playing hard to get.”
I eat a pani puri. It explodes in my mouth, sweet and sour and spicy all at once, and water runs down my chin, and Karan howls with laughter and slaps my back and tells me that my technique is “terrible but enthusiastic, which is the Casey brand.”
Priya introduces me to a rapid succession of cousins, neighbours, and local dignitaries, and I shake hands and say namaste and deploy the thirty-odd Hindi phrases I've memorized with what I hope is acceptable pronunciation but what Karan tells me sounds like “a moose trying to speak poetry, but in an endearing way.”
Over Priya's shoulder, I catch movement at the far end of the courtyard.
Yash has arrived. I know it's Yash because I've seen his face in three framed photographs and one painted portrait, and also because he is currently being absorbed by a swarm of aunties the way a dropped sugar cube is absorbed by tea.
Sunita has him by one cheek. Kavita has him by the other.
A third aunty I haven't been introduced to yet is holding his face still with both hands so she can examine him at close range, like a jeweller appraising a stone.
Yash, who looks like a slightly softer, more rumpled version of Arjun, bears this with patient resignation as if he has been through this many, many times.
His suit jacket is already askew. Someone has put a plate in his free hand.
Someone else is putting a glass in the hand that was holding the plate, which is now being held by a fourth aunty who has materialized from nowhere.
“Oh good, Yash made it,” Priya says without turning around. “Mother will stop checking her phone now.”
“Is he always—”
“Mauled? Yes. He's the baby. Daadi calls him chhota chand, little moon. He could commit a felony and they would feed him laddoo about it.”
The music starts. The musicians on the stage launch into something rhythmic and complex and joyful, the sitar weaving a bright, quick melody over the driving pulse of the tablas, and the crowd responds immediately.
People begin to dance, not the formal, choreographed dancing I've seen in Bollywood videos but something looser, more instinctive, a gathering of bodies moving together in the warm evening air because the music is asking them to and they see no reason to refuse.
Karan drags me into the dancing. I’m a terrible dancer.
I’ve always been a terrible dancer, because I’m six-foot-three and two hundred and twenty pounds and my body was designed for forward propulsion on ice, not rhythmic movement on grass.
But the music’s infectious and the crowd’s warm and Karan’s shouting instructions that I'm only half-following, and within five minutes I’m doing something that isn’t technically dancing but is in the general neighbourhood of dancing, and the people around me are grinning, and a small child has grabbed my hand and is pulling me in circles, and I’m laughing so hard my face hurts.
It’s during a break from the dancing, while I'm catching my breath near the food stalls and demolishing my second plate of chaat, that someone sits down beside me on the stone wall.
“You must be Casey.”
I turn. The man beside me is younger than Arjun, and I recognize him immediately.
Mid-to-late twenties, maybe. He has the Kapoor cheekbones, sharp and elegant, but his face is warmer, more open, with a wide, easy smile that suggests he has spent his life being the person in the room that everyone likes.
His eyes are dark and intelligent, and he’s dressed in a beautifully tailored navy kurta that he wears confidently.
“I'm Yash,” he says, extending his hand. “Arjun's brother. The younger, more charming, significantly less terrifying one.”
I shake his hand. His grip’s warm and firm and carries the kind of simple confidence that doesn't need to prove anything. “I've heard about you from the dossier. Threat level: green.”
Yash laughs, delighted. “He rated me green? That's the lowest tier; I’m almost offended! I’m certain Sunita got red. Even Karan must have merited a yellow.”
“I think green means he trusts you.”
Something shifts in Yash's expression. The easy charm softens into something quieter, more real. “Yeah,” he says. “I think it might.”
He picks up a samosa from the communal plate between us and takes a bite, chewing thoughtfully.
The festival swirls around us: music, lanterns, laughter, the distant sound of children's sparklers fizzing in the dark. Somewhere in the crowd, Karan’s attempting to teach a group of local teenagers a dance move that involves a spin and a clap that he cannot execute simultaneously.