Chapter 26 #2
Arjun lunges for the sheet. I lunge for the sheet.
We lunge for the same corner of the same sheet, because the rest of the sheet is somewhere on the floor, having been demoted from bedding to obstacle at some point during the night.
The corner we both grab is approximately the size of a dinner napkin.
Arjun pulls it toward his lap. I pull it toward my lap.
The sheet, being a sheet and not a magician, can only be in one place at a time.
It chooses Arjun. I am left holding a fistful of nothing and a sudden, urgent appreciation for the value of a well-placed pillow.
I grab said pillow.
The pillow I grab is the small decorative one, the kind that exists for visual purposes and has never been asked to perform this type of work in its life.
It covers, generously, about a third of what needs covering.
I add a second pillow. The second pillow is somehow smaller than the first. I’m now holding two pillows and have achieved roughly the coverage of one mediocre pillow.
Arjun, who has secured the sheet, has secured it across the wrong half of himself.
His left leg, from hip to ankle, is fully on display.
He notices. He attempts a correction. The correction involves a hip-swivel that exposes a different region entirely, briefly, before the sheet remembers its purpose and flops back into approximate position.
Priya hasn’t moved.
Priya is, in fact, staring at the ceiling. The ceiling is suddenly the most interesting object in the room. Priya is studying it the way an art historian studies a fresco. With deep, sustained, professionally invested attention.
“I am,” she announces to the medallion, “going to take a moment.”
“Priya,” Arjun says.
“I am taking the moment.”
“Priya, if you could—”
“I am still in the moment, Arjun. The moment is ongoing. The moment has, in fact, just begun.”
I shuffle the pillows. The pillows don’t improve. I briefly consider the bedside lamp.
“I knocked,” Priya tells the ceiling.
“You did not knock—”
“I knocked spiritually. In my heart. I knocked with my soul, and my soul was, apparently, not loud enough to penetrate whatever the two of you were doing at nine-fifteen in the morning, which, I will note, is a perfectly reasonable hour at which to expect a person to be vertical and dressed—”
“Priya.”
“I am leaving now. I am leaving without lowering my gaze, because lowering my gaze is no longer an option available to me in this lifetime. Mother has called a family gathering in the main drawing room at ten. Pandit-ji is here. Get dressed. Both of you. Fully. I want layers. I want sleeves. I want the kind of coverage one wears to meet a head of state.”
She begins backing toward the door, eyes still locked on the ceiling, one hand groping behind her for the handle. She finds the wall. She slides along the wall. She finds the doorframe. She slides along the doorframe.
“Ten o'clock,” she says. “Drawing room. Clothes. So many clothes.”
She finds the handle. She pulls. She backs through the doorway with the careful, blind precision of a woman defusing a bomb, and the door clicks shut behind her, and somewhere on the other side of it she makes a small, strangled sound that might be a laugh and might be a sob and is almost certainly both.
The silence she leaves behind is comprehensive.
I look down at my pillows. The pillows haven’t improved in her absence. I drop them.
“Well,” I say.
Arjun is staring at the closed door. The sheet has, at some point in the last thirty seconds, migrated again. He doesn't seem to notice.
“Your leg,” I tell him.
“What about my leg.”
“Both of them, actually.”
He looks down. He sighs. He performs a final, weary sheet-adjustment even as he surrenders to the fundamental untrustworthiness of textiles.
“She is going to tell Yash,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Yash is going to tell Karan.”
“Yes.”
“By lunch, the aunties—”
“Will know everything. Yes.”
Then Arjun goes rigid beside me. Not the gradual stiffening of a man waking into anxiety. An instantaneous, full-body lock, the kind I've felt from him a dozen times before, the reflexive armour-up that happens when the Kapoor machine activates.
“Pandit-ji,” he says.
“Remind me again, who’s Pandit-ji?”
“The family astrologer.”
I sit up. “The one your mom used to check your star charts with Dev?”
“The same one. He has been on retainer with my family for decades.
He declared Dev and me 'magnificently compatible' based on a birth chart analysis that my mother almost certainly paid him to produce.” Arjun is already out of bed, pulling on clothes with the rapid, efficient movements of a man preparing for surgery.
“If my mother has brought him here now, with our relationship publicly established, it is because she intends to use him.”
“Use him how?”
Arjun stops. He is standing in the middle of the guest suite, half-dressed, his curls still a mess from sleep and other activities, and his eyes when they find mine are flat and hard and afraid.
“She is going to have him declare us incompatible.”
The main drawing room is full when we arrive.
Not the intimate family dinner arrangement.
The full deployment. Every auntie, every uncle, every cousin who is currently on the estate.
Meera has assembled an audience, because Meera does nothing without witnesses, and whatever is about to happen is meant to be seen.
Pandit-ji is seated at a low table near the windows.
He is a small, thin man in his sixties with wire-rimmed glasses and a humble-looking white kurta, surrounded by charts and papers and what appears to be an astrolabe.
He looks like a professor. He looks harmless.
He looks like the kind of man who studies the stars because he loves them, not because he has been bribed to weaponize them.
Meera is in her wingback chair, teacup in hand, smile serene.
She is wearing pale gold today, and the morning light catches the silk and turns her into something luminous and untouchable, and I can see the strategy in her posture the way you can see storm clouds building on a flat horizon: slowly, inevitably, with an understanding that what is coming cannot be stopped.
Dev is present, seated near the back. He had not left after all.
At one point at the festival Rohan had told me that Dev chose to stay through the end of the visit out of respect for the family, not because he was still in the running but because leaving abruptly would have caused its own scandal, and Dev is too decent for that.
His expression now is carefully neutral, but there is a tension in his jaw that suggests he was not informed about today's agenda and is not amused.
Rohan is beside him, and for once, the charming menace is not charming.
His dark eyes are hard and watchful and his jaw is set and he looks like a man who knows what is about to happen and does not approve in the slightest.
Priya is against the wall with her arms crossed and her notebook in her hand, and her expression is the one I have come to recognize as her combat face: lethal, controlled, and ready to deploy.
Daadi is in her chair. Her cane is between her knees. Her shrewd eyes are on Meera, and they do not contain a hint of warmth.
We walk in together. Arjun's hand finds mine as we cross the threshold, and his grip is tight, and I hold it, and I do not let go, and every person in the room sees us enter hand in hand, and the room goes very, very quiet.
“Ah, there you are, I was worried you would be late,” Meera says, her voice bright and sickly sweet. “Come in, come in. Pandit-ji has been doing some very interesting work.”
We sit on the settee. Side by side. Arjun's thigh pressed against mine. His hand still in mine, resting on his knee, visible, deliberate. His composure is immaculate. His mask is on. But underneath my fingers, his pulse is racing.
Pandit-ji adjusts his glasses and shuffles his papers. He clears his throat with the mild, apologetic manner of a man who is about to deliver bad news and wishes someone else were doing it.
“I have completed a comprehensive analysis of the astrological compatibility between Dr. Arjun Kapoor and Dr. Casey Welling,” he begins, his voice thin and reedy.
“Using traditional Vedic methods, incorporating the Kundli charts, the Guna Milan scoring system, and a thorough assessment of planetary positions at the time of both births.”
He pauses. He looks at his papers. He does not look at Arjun or me.
“I regret to inform the family that the charts indicate a significant degree of... incompatibility.”
The room shifts. It is subtle. A collective intake of breath. A rustling of saris. Sunita's hand moves toward her phone.
“The Guna score is eleven out of thirty-six,” Pandit-ji continues, and his voice has the flat, recitative quality of a man reading from a script he did not write.
“The minimum acceptable score for a harmonious union is eighteen. Additionally, there are unfavourable aspects between Mars and Saturn in the respective charts, indicating potential for conflict, instability, and...” He swallows. “Emotional discord.”
Emotional discord. The man who told me he loved me mere hours ago while shaking in my arms after saving a child is being told, by a hired astrologer reading from a script his mother paid for, that the stars say we are emotionally discordant.
I almost laugh. The absurdity of it is so complete, so comprehensive, so perfectly, magnificently ridiculous, that laughter is the only rational response.
We are sitting in a drawing room in a palace, holding hands, with the taste of each other still on our lips, and an astrologer with an astrolabe is telling a room full of people that the planets have determined we don't work.
But I do not laugh, because beside me, Arjun is fracturing.