Chapter 30
Daadi's Cane
Arjun
The summons arrives at dawn.
Not a knock. Not a text. Not Priya's sharp voice through the door or Karan's tentative tap or Yash's diplomatic interception.
A member of the household staff, one of Daadi's personal attendants, appears at the guest suite at five-thirty in the morning, before the sun has cleared the garden wall, and says, with measured formality: “Daadi-ji requests your presence in her private rooms. Immediately.”
I have not slept. My eyes feel like they have been rubbed with gauze. The sticker is still in my pocket. The fourteen unanswered texts are still on my phone, joined now by a fifteenth that I sent at three in the morning, which simply says: I'm sorry.
No response.
I shower. Quickly, mechanically, because Priya's commentary about my compromised hygiene has apparently lodged itself in my subconscious and because whatever is about to happen, I will face it clean.
I put on a clean shirt. I button it correctly this time.
I walk through the pre-dawn corridors of the estate, past the closed doors and the sleeping household, to Daadi's private rooms which occupy the oldest section of the haveli, the rooms that have been hers since she married into the Kapoor family at twenty-one, the rooms she has occupied for six decades, since the estate was a fraction of what it is now and the Kapoor name was local rather than national.
Daadi's rooms smell of sandalwood and old paper.
The walls are lined with photographs, some framed, some pinned directly to the plaster with the casual disregard for aesthetics that is the privilege of someone who has lived in this house for years and has stopped caring what anyone thinks of her interior design.
There is a carved wooden bed, low and wide, piled with cushions.
There is a reading table with a lamp and a magnifying glass and a stack of newspapers in three languages.
There is a window that overlooks the garden where Casey and I danced mere nights ago.
Daadi is in her chair. It is a high-backed wooden chair with embroidered cushions, positioned precisely where the first morning light will fall, and she has been sitting in it with contained, alert stillness for hours as she has been waiting for me specifically.
Her silver-topped cane is between her knees. Her green eyes, my green eyes, the ones that I inherited along with her bone structure and her stubbornness, are sharp and clear and entirely without warmth.
“Sit,” she says.
I sit. There is a low stool near her chair, the kind of stool that positions a person slightly below the seated elder, a design choice that is not accidental. Daadi Nirindra does not do anything by accident.
“You look terrible,” she says.
“So I've been told.”
“Priya told you. Priya uses words like weapons because she learned it from her mother. I use silence, which is more efficient and less exhausting.” She adjusts her cane between her knees, her gnarled fingers moving over the silver top with the habitual, unconscious precision of a woman who has been holding that cane for twenty years. “You have not slept.”
“No.”
“You have not eaten.”
“I had chai.”
“Chai is not food. Chai is a coping mechanism masquerading as a beverage. Your grandfather used the same trick for forty years and it did not work for him either.” She looks at me. The green eyes are steady and cool. “The boy is in Jaipur.”
“Yes.”
“You have sent him fifteen messages.”
I stare at her. “How do you know it's fifteen?”
“Sunita monitors the family's digital communications with a dedication that would impress a foreign intelligence service.
She reported fourteen yesterday. I assume you sent another in the small hours because you are your father's son and your father could never leave a thought unsent.” Her eyes narrow fractionally. “What did the fifteenth say?”
“I'm sorry” I reply.
“Two words.”
“Two words, yes.”
“And the fourteen before it?”
“Longer, except for one that just said please.”
“Clinical?”
The question lands like a scalpel. Precise. Economical. Cutting exactly where it needs to cut.
“The first several were... structured,” I admit.
“Structured.” She repeats the word with the flat, devastating intonation of a woman who has survived eight decades by seeing through every euphemism ever constructed.
“You mean impersonal. You mean you sent a man who flew halfway around the world because he loved you a series of carefully composed emotional assessments with the warmth and spontaneity of a medical discharge report.”
I do not respond. There is no response. She is correct with such surgical precision that responding would be redundant.
“I sat in that drawing room,” Daadi says, and her voice has shifted.
Lower. Slower. “I sat in that drawing room and I watched Pandit-ji read your charts, and I watched your mother's face while he did it, and I watched your face while you listened, and I listened to her tell you the engagement would be called off, and I did not tap my cane.”
“I noticed.”
“Do you know why I did not tap?”
“Because you were thinking.”
“Two taps would mean I was thinking. No taps means something else entirely.” She leans forward in her chair, and the movement is slow and deliberate and carries weight.
“No taps means I was furious. No taps means I was so angry that my hand could not be trusted with the cane, because if I had tapped, I would have tapped three times, and three taps in front of the extended family would have been a declaration of war against my own daughter, and I am old, Arjun, but I am not ready for that war. Not in public.”
Three taps. Displeasure. I have never heard three taps from Daadi in my life. The possibility of three taps, deployed against my mother, in the drawing room, in front of the aunties, is a scenario so seismic that I cannot fully process it.
“Your mother bribed Pandit-ji,” Daadi says flatly.
“This is not speculation. I have known Pandit-ji for forty-five years. He did my chart when I was thirty-five and he told me I would outlive my husband by decades, and he was right, and his hands shook when he told me because he was a young man then and he had not yet learned to deliver hard truths without trembling. The man who read your charts in that drawing room was not the Pandit-ji I know. He was reading a script. His hands were steady. Steady hands on Pandit-ji means someone has paid him enough to override his conscience.”
“Mother would not...”
“Your mother would. Your mother has. Your mother loves you with a ferocity that has calcified into control, and she has been controlling the narrative of this family for so long that she has forgotten there is a difference between writing the story and living it.” Daadi taps her cane once on the floor.
Not the approval tap. A punctuation mark.
A period at the end of a sentence. “I love my daughter.
But I will not watch her destroy my grandson's happiness because it does not match the blueprint she drew when he was twelve.”
She pauses. Something shifts in her expression. The steel softens, not into vulnerability but into something warmer, a fondness that catches me off guard because Daadi Nirindra does not do fondness casually.
“That boy of yours,” she says, and the way she says it, with a proprietary warmth that suggests Casey has been filed in her personal taxonomy of people who matter, “made me a napkin flower at the tea. Did you know that? A flower, Arjun. Out of a napkin. I have been attending Kapoor teas for decades and no one has ever made me anything. They bring me chai and they bring me gossip and they bring me their petty grievances, and your enormous Canadian made me a flower because I asked him to, and he did it without hesitation, and then he helped me to my feet as if I were made of something precious.” Her eyes are bright.
“He is the first person in this house in thirty years who has treated me like a woman instead of an institution. I am not going to let your emotional constipation cost me the only interesting person to enter this family since your father.”
I almost smile. Almost. “You like him.”
“I like him enormously. He eats like a man who respects food, he laughs like a man who respects joy, and he looks at you like a man who respects love. These are three qualities that are vanishingly rare in this family, and I refuse to let them walk out the door because you are too busy composing analytic text messages to go after them.”
She taps the cane once. Then she looks at me with an expression I have not seen before, something guarded and deliberate, as if she is deciding whether to open a door she has kept locked for a very long time.
“You should know something,” she says. “When you first came out to the family, your mother's initial response was not the acceptance she eventually displayed.
She came to me. She was upset. She had concerns.
She used words like 'phase' and 'confusion' and 'what will people think.
' “Daadi's grip tightens on the cane. “I sat her down in this chair and I told her that her son's heart was not a phase, and that if she ever, ever tried to make your sexuality an issue, if she ever used it as a weapon or a bargaining chip or a reason to diminish you, she would lose not just you, Arjun, but all three of her children, because I would ensure that Priya and Yash knew exactly what their mother had done, and the Kapoor name would not survive the fracture.”
I stare at her. I have never known this.
Mother has never once questioned my sexuality, never once made it an issue, and I had assumed, naively, that this was simply who she was.
The possibility that Daadi reshaped that response, that my grandmother drew a line in the sand before I even knew there was sand to draw in, rearranges my understanding of both women in a way I will need weeks to fully process.