Chapter 29 #2
She leaves. I sit in the drawing room with the unread book and the triceratops sticker and the silence that Casey left behind, and I feel the Kapoor machinery closing around me, the gears and levers of a system that has been engineered over generations to produce compliant, compatible, strategically optimal heirs, and I am too tired to fight it, and too broken to run, and too afraid to do the only thing that might save me, which is go to a hotel in Jaipur and knock on a door and say, without clinical language, without walls, without a single strategic assessment, I love you and I am sorry and please come back.
The evening of the third day. I am still in the guest suite.
The room has been cleaned, the sheets changed, the bed made with military precision by the household staff.
Casey's scent is now gone. The dent in his pillow is gone.
The only thing left is the triceratops sticker in my pocket and the fourteen unanswered texts on my phone and the quiet, devastating knowledge that I have wasted three days being afraid when I should have been driving to Jaipur.
There is a knock on my door. Sharp. Precise. Not Karan's tentative tap. Not Yash's diplomatic approach.
Priya.
I open the door. My sister is standing in the corridor. She is dressed for battle, which for Priya means her hair is pulled back, her eyes are gleaming, and she is carrying the notebook she brought to the Pandit-ji disaster, the one she holds like a weapon she is keeping in reserve.
“Get up,” she says.
“I am up.”
“Emotionally. Get up emotionally, Arjun, because I am done watching you decompose in this room like a Victorian poet dying of consumption. You are one wilting flower arrangement away from a Bronte novel. If I come back tomorrow and find you writing poetry by candlelight, I am calling an ambulance and having you committed.” She steps inside, uninvited, and closes the door behind her.
“Three days. Three days you have been sitting here.
Three days of Karan bringing you chai and Yash giving you speeches and Kavita sending parathas you won't eat and Mother circling like a vulture wearing Chanel, and you have done nothing.
Nothing. You haven't even changed your shirt.
You are wearing yesterday's shirt, Arjun.
You, the man who irons his scrubs, are wearing yesterday's shirt with the buttons in the wrong holes, and there is a children's sticker in your breast pocket, and you smell faintly of misery and stale chai.”
“I do not smell of...”
“You smell of defeat, Arjun. The Dread Prince of Paediatrics smells of defeat and unshowered regret, and if Casey could see you right now, he would either cry or laugh, and frankly either option would be an improvement on the current situation.”
“What would you have me do?”
“Go to Jaipur! Shower first. Obviously. But then go to Jaipur.”
“He doesn't want...”
“Don't.” She holds up a hand. The gesture is so precisely, terrifyingly like Mother that we both notice it, and Priya drops her hand immediately, as if the resemblance burned her.
“Don't tell me he doesn't want you there.
Don't tell me the silence is an answer. Don't you dare use your clinical, analytical, risk-averse nonsense to justify sitting in this room like a Victorian ghost haunting his own love life while the best man you have ever known sits in a hotel sixty kilometres away, wondering why you haven't come to sweep him off his feet. Metaphorically, Arjun, metaphorically, I am aware that the man is six-foot-three and has the structural mass of a small horse, I am aware that any literal sweeping attempt would result in a paramedic visit and possibly a chiropractor, this is not what I am asking of you. I am asking you to use your words. Words, Arjun. The little things your mouth makes.”
“You don't know that he's wondering that.”
“I know that Karan has been texting Casey every three hours with updates on your emotional state, complete with a rating system he invented that goes from 'mildly tragic' to 'full Heathcliff,' and that you are currently rated at 'full Heathcliff with a trajectory toward Miss Havisham,' so yes, Arjun, I have some intelligence on the situation.”
I blink. “Full Heathcliff?”
“With a trajectory toward Miss Havisham.
Those are Karan's words, not mine, although I will say the comparison is uncomfortably accurate. You are one wedding dress and a cobweb away from a Dickens adaptation. Although — and I want to flag this — how does Karan know about Miss Havisham. Karan. Our Karan. The Karan who, in Year Ten, asked me with genuine sincerity whether War and Peace was about a divorce. I have never seen him voluntarily encounter a Victorian novel. I am working on three possibilities. One, he had a tutor we did not know about. Two, he watched the BBC adaptation by accident, possibly while looking for cricket. Three, he is cheating off someone, the way he cheated through all of A-levels, and—”
“Priya.”
“What.”
“You have left the original point some distance behind.”
“I have not. The original point is that you are full Heathcliff. The investigation into Karan is a parallel concern. Anyway, Karan loves you. Karan has the emotional intelligence of a Labrador and the literary range of a first-year English student, and he has been running a one-man emotional surveillance operation on you since Casey left. That is not the point. The point is that you, my brilliant, impossible, infuriating brother, are doing the thing you always do. You are retreating into control because you cannot control the outcome. You are choosing certain misery over uncertain joy because at least misery is predictable. You are, and I say this with the full weight of twenty-nine years of loving you, being a complete and total idiot.”
She sits on the edge of the bed. The bed that was mine and Casey's. The bed where, four days ago, I woke up with his body against mine and his hand over my heart and the future felt like something I could hold.
“I am going to tell you something,” Priya says, and her voice has changed.
The fury is still there, but underneath it is something older, something that sounds like a girl who watched her brother pack his bags for Cambridge at twenty-two and understood that she was watching him survive the only way he knew how.
“I have watched you leave every good thing in your life because staying was scarier than going.
You left India. You left this family. You left Cambridge, and then Edinburgh.
You built a life in Toronto that is clean and controlled and completely, utterly empty, and you have been so proud of your independence that you didn't notice it was just a more sophisticated version of hiding.”
“Priya...”
“And then Casey happened. And for the first time in my life, I watched my brother stop hiding.
I watched you hold someone's hand in public.
I watched you dance at a festival. I watched you stand up to Mother at a dinner table and defend a man in front of twenty-two people, and I thought, finally. Finally he's going to stop running.”
Her eyes are bright. Fierce. Wet.
“Don't prove me wrong, Arjun. Don't sit in this room and let Mother win.
Don't let this family grind you back into the shape it wants.
You fought for him at that dinner table.
You fought for him against the Home Secretary.
You fought for him at a festival and a polo match and a kitchen at two in the morning, Karan told me about it.
Don't stop fighting because the fight got hard.”
The room is very quiet. The evening light is warm through the balcony doors. The bed is made. The pillows are fresh. The room is clean and empty and smells like nothing at all.
I put my hand in my pocket. I feel the edge of the triceratops sticker, holographic and small and ridiculous, a piece of evidence from a world where a six-foot-three Canadian puts dinosaurs on crying children and makes the scary things stop being scary.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
“What?”
“Tomorrow I will go to Jaipur.”
Priya stares at me. “Not tonight?”
“I cannot show up at his hotel at ten in the evening looking like this.” I gesture at myself.
I have not properly slept in three days.
My curls are a disaster. My shirt is still buttoned wrong.
“If I am going to do this, if I am going to go to him without a script and without a strategy, I need to at least be clean and dressed and...” I pause.
“And I need to figure out what to say that isn't clinical terminology. Which may take several hours.”
Priya's face does something complicated. The fury softens. The fierceness remains. And underneath both, breaking through like sunlight through cloud cover, is something I have not seen on my sister's face since I told her, years ago, that I was leaving for Cambridge: hope.
“I'll set an alarm,” she says. “Six a.m. I'll have the car ready. Kavita will pack breakfast. And Arjun?”
“Yes?”
“If you use the phrase 'error in judgment' within fifty metres of that man, I will personally end you.”
She leaves. The door closes. The room is quiet.
I sit on the bed. I hold the sticker. The holographic surface shifts in the lamplight, blue to green to a faint, oily purple, and I think about everything Priya said, and she is right, she is right about all of it, and knowing she is right does not make the fear smaller.
It makes the fear more specific. More named.
More precisely the shape of a door in Jaipur that I would have to knock on, and a face I would have to look at, and words I would have to find in a language I have never learned to speak.
She wants me to go. Yash wants me to go. Karan wants to drive me there in a fast car. Everyone in this house can see what I need to do, and I can see it too, and seeing it does not make my legs move.
Why?