Chapter 24 #2
“Every time he visits, I'm somewhere else,” Yash says.
“Arjun, that is. It's been over a year since I've actually been in the same room as him.
Mother always seems to have business for me in Mumbai or Delhi the exact week he flies in.
I used to think it was coincidence. Now I think she doesn't want us comparing notes.” He gives a wry, knowing smile.
“He calls Mother once a week, discusses the weather and his surgical schedule, and hangs up.
He calls me once a month, and it's better, but it's still...” He searches for the word.
“Curated. Everything with Arjun is curated. He gives you exactly what he thinks you can handle and keeps the rest locked in a vault.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know that vault, intimately.”
“But here's the thing.” Yash turns to face me on the wall, his dark eyes steady and earnest. “He's different this time.
And I don't mean a little different. I mean fundamentally, structurally, something-has-changed-at-the-foundation different.
I wasn't at the dinner, but Sunita's WhatsApp dispatch was so detailed it practically came with footnotes and citations.
He defended you to Mother in front of the entire family at dinner, Casey.
My brother, who has spent his entire life avoiding conflict with Mother the way a submarine avoids the surface, stood up at a dinner table and told her she was wrong.
Sunita used the word 'unprecedented.' Sunita does not use that word lightly.”
“That was a few nights ago, actually.”
“And the family is still talking about it! They will be talking about it at Christmas. They will be talking about it at my wedding, if that happens, and probably at my funeral. It is the single most shocking thing that has happened at a Kapoor dinner since Uncle Vikram and the bread roll, and nobody can even agree on when exactly that happened or even if it really did or if it has just evolved into family mythology.”
He pauses. His expression has gone serious, the easy charm replaced by something deeper, something that looks a lot like a younger brother who loves his older brother and has been worried about him for a very long time.
“Do you know why he left?” Yash asks.
“For medicine. For his career.”
“That's what he tells people. And it's true, as far as it goes.
But it doesn't go far enough.” Yash looks at the festival, at the lanterns and the dancers and the flickering diyas.
“He left because he was suffocating. Mother's expectations, the family name, the social obligations, the constant, relentless pressure to be perfect. To be the heir. To be the Kapoor that everyone needed him to be. He was twenty-two when he went to Cambridge, and I was seventeen, and I watched him pack his bags and I knew, I knew with absolute certainty, that if he stayed, the pressure would break him.”
I think about that. About a twenty-two-year-old Arjun, polished and pristine and already cracking somewhere nobody could see.
“Did he know?” I ask. “That he was going to break?”
“I don't think he had a word for it. He had a plan, and the plan was Cambridge, and the plan was medicine, and the plan was out. He told everyone, including himself, that it was about training. The best programmes, the best mentors, the necessary credentials.” Yash's mouth quirks.
“Arjun has always been very good at giving his decisions a professional reason. It saves him from having to admit they had a personal one.”
“But you knew.”
“I was seventeen and I shared a wall with him.
I heard him pacing at three in the morning for the entire year before he left.
You don't pace because you're excited about going to school.” Yash watches a child dart between two dancers, laughing.
“I think he believed he was going somewhere he could breathe. He talked about it once, the summer before Cambridge. He said in England nobody would know whose son he was. He said it like it was the most extraordinary gift anyone could be given. To walk into a room and just be a person.”
“And was it?”
“For about six months.” Yash's smile is wry.
“And then he realized something the rest of us could have told him, if he'd asked.
The walls weren't the family. The walls were inside him.
He carried them to Cambridge, and then to Edinburgh, and then across an ocean to Toronto, and at every stop he built them a little higher, because the only thing more frightening than being suffocated is being free and discovering you don't actually know how to live any other way.”
The music changes. Something slower, more melodic. The dancing shifts from energetic to swaying.
“And he stayed gone.” Yash's voice is matter-of-fact, not bitter.
“Every year the calls got shorter and the visits got rarer, and I stayed here.
Someone had to. Someone had to absorb Mother's expectations, manage the family businesses in India, attend the events, be the Kapoor in residence while she's back in London.
And I don't resent it. I chose it. But I chose it partly so that Arjun could choose to leave, and I need you to understand what that cost him.”
“What did it cost him?”
“Everything comfortable. Everything familiar. Every relationship that was easy, every connection that was automatic. He traded a sandstone palace for a concrete condo. He traded a family name that opens every door for a hospital where nobody knows who his mother or grandmother is. He traded warmth for a Canadian winter.” Yash smiles, a small, sad, fond smile.
“And then he spent years building walls so thick that nobody in Toronto could see how lonely he was. Until, apparently, you arrived.”
“I'm not...” I start, and stop. “I don't know if I'm the right person for what you're describing. I'm just a guy from Huntsville who does magic tricks and eats terrible food. I don't know how to fix all those years of loneliness.”
“You don't have to fix it. You just have to be in the room.” Yash puts his hand on my shoulder. It’s a warm, steady, uncomplicated touch, the touch of a man who has his mother's critical intelligence and his brother's fierce loyalty and none of either's difficulty with physical affection.
“My brother chose you, Casey. I arrived at this festival two hours ago, and in those two hours, I've watched my brother scan the crowd for you approximately forty times.
His shoulders drop when he finds you. I've never seen that.
I've never seen him drop anything.” He squeezes my shoulder. “I don't think he made a mistake.”
My eyes are doing something inconvenient.
I blink. I press my hand against my face.
I’m not going to cry at a festival in front of Arjun's younger brother, because I’m a grown man and a medical professional and I have a reputation for unflappable emotional stability that I’ve maintained across two continents.
“Also,” Yash adds, grinning, “I've seen all of the WhatsApp group coverage. Sunita's account of Rohan offering you a mango at breakfast while Arjun nearly shattered a teacup has been analyzed from fourteen different angles. She wrote an essay. It had subheadings.”
I laugh. The laugh breaks something open, something that was tight and heavy in my chest, and the night air rushes in, lively and jasmine-scented and full of music, and the world feels bigger and simpler than it did five minutes ago.
Yash stands. He brushes samosa crumbs from his kurta. “Go find my brother,” he says. “He's been looking for you since the festival started. He's terrible at festivals. He stands at the edge and calculates the fire hazard potential of the diyas. He needs someone to make him dance.”
“I'm a terrible dancer.”
“Perfect. So is he. You can be terrible together; it will be amusing for all around you.”
He claps my shoulder once more, gives me a grin that’s so happy and uncomplicated it makes me miss my own family (even Cousin Mike) with a fierceness that takes my breath away, and disappears into the crowd.
I find Arjun at the edge of the festival, exactly where Yash said he would be.
He’s standing near the garden wall, slightly apart from the crowd, a glass of nimbu pani in his hand, his white kurta luminous in the lantern light.
He’s watching the festival the way he watches everything: with clinical precision, cataloguing the details, assessing the variables, standing on the outside of joy and studying it like a specimen.
He sees me coming. His green eyes find me across the crowd, and the thing I've been watching for, the thing Yash described, happens.
His shoulders drop. Not dramatically. Just a fraction.
A release. The tension that he carries like scaffolding, that holds him rigid and upright and at arm's length from the world, eases by a measurable degree the moment I am in his field of vision.
I’m the thing that makes his shoulders drop.
I walk up to him. The music’s slower now, something gentle and winding. People are swaying together in the dim light, couples and families and friends, and the whole festival has softened into something intimate and golden.
“Hey, Doc.”
“Casey.” He takes a sip of his nimbu pani.
His composure is immaculate. His hands are steady.
His ears, I note with satisfaction, are already going slightly red, because my presence alone is now enough to trigger the response, and I find this deeply, profoundly gratifying. “You're covered in chaat.”
I look down. There is, indeed, a significant chutney stain on my kurta. And some crumbs. And what might be a smear of mango. I look like I’ve been to a festival, which is exactly correct.
“Dance with me,” I say. “Please.”
“Absolutely not.”