Chapter 31
The Grand Gesture
Arjun
The drive to Jaipur takes fifty-three minutes. I know this because I count every one of them, the way I count seconds during a surgery, except in surgery the counting keeps me steady and on this drive the counting is the only thing preventing me from telling the driver to turn around.
Priya is in the passenger seat. She appeared at the car before I did, dressed, alert, and holding two travel cups of chai with the grim, focused energy of a woman who has been awake since four and has been waiting for this moment with the strategic patience she inherited from our mother and the ferocity she developed in opposition to her.
“I'm coming,” she says, when I open my mouth to protest. “This is non-negotiable. You need a handler.”
“I do not need a handler.”
“You need someone to prevent you from composing a speech in the car, turning around at the city limits, or sitting in the hotel lobby for three hours doing nothing while your emotional processing speed operates at the pace of continental drift.” She hands me a chai. “Get in the car, idiot.”
I get in.
The Rajasthani landscape scrolls past the window.
Flat, dry, sun-baked, punctuated by clusters of bright bougainvillea and the occasional camel plodding along the roadside with the dignified indifference of a creature that has been navigating this terrain for centuries and does not care about the emotional crises of the passengers in passing vehicles.
I envy the camels. They do not compose speeches in their heads.
They do not send overly impersonal text messages.
They do not fall in love with six-foot-three Canadians and then catastrophically mishandle the aftermath.
I am composing a speech.
I know Daadi told me not to. I know she said to arrive without a script, without a strategy, without a single prepared word.
But I am Arjun Kapoor, and asking me not to prepare a speech is like asking my hands not to tremble after surgery: the instruction is clear, the intention is good, and the body does it anyway.
The first draft starts clinical. “Casey, I need to address the contextual framework of our recent interpersonal disruption.” I delete it from my brain before the sentence finishes forming. Priya would end my life. She is sitting three feet away and would somehow know.
The second draft starts apologetic. “Casey, I am profoundly sorry for the manner in which I articulated my emotional state to a third party using terminology that failed to capture the depth and complexity of...” No. That is a discharge summary with feelings. That is worse.
The third draft starts simple. “Casey, I love you.” Three words.
Clean. Direct. The problem is that I said those three words five days ago, shaking in his arms after saving a child, and then I said them again with my body, in a bed, in the dark, with his skin against mine and his mouth on my throat and his hands learning the architecture of me with a reverence that I will feel in my nerve endings for the rest of my life.
Three words and one night were not enough to prevent the corridor.
They are the beginning. What comes after them is the work, and I do not know how to do the work without a plan.
“You're composing a speech,” Priya says from the front seat, without turning around.
“I am not.”
“Your jaw is doing the thing. The micro-clench. You're on draft three, maybe four. How clinical is it?”
“The third draft is three words.”
“Which three words?”
“I love you.”
“Good start. What's the problem?”
“It is insufficient to address the scope of the damage.”
“Arjun.” She turns in her seat. Her green eyes are sharp and warm and deeply, profoundly tired of me. “Say the three words. Mean them. Then shut up and let him talk. That's the whole plan.”
Thirty-seven minutes to go. The camels are still indifferent.
My phone buzzes. Karan.
Bhai are you there yet??? Yash says good luck. Kavita packed samosas in the car did you find them. Daadi says nothing because Daadi is Daadi but she tapped once when you left so that’s good right???
Also if this doesn't work you can come stay in my flat in Jaipur. I have a very comfortable sofa and excellent wifi and we can eat our feelings together. But it WILL work. You are the Dread Prince. Dread Princes always win. This is established lore.
I almost laugh. It is a ragged, fragile, barely-there thing, but it exists, and Priya, who is monitoring me in the rearview mirror, nods once with the grim satisfaction of a medical professional observing a positive indicator.
Twenty-two minutes. Then fourteen. The outskirts of Jaipur appear. Traffic thickens. The pink sandstone buildings catch the early morning light. The city wakes up around me and I am sitting in the back of a car with samosas I have not eaten and a dinosaur sticker in my pocket and no speech.
The car pulls up to the hotel. It is a mid-range place in the old city, the kind of hotel that tourists book for its proximity to the Hawa Mahal.
Priya is out of the car before the engine stops. She straightens her kurta, adjusts her hair, and turns to me with the focused, tactical expression of a woman executing a field operation.
“Stay behind me,” she says. “I'll get the room number. You go up. Don't wait, don't hesitate, don't stand in the lobby composing draft six.”
“How are you going to get the room number? They won't give out private guest information.”
Priya smiles. It is the smile she deploys at fundraisers and family functions and, apparently, unsuspecting hotel receptionists. It is a weapon of mass distraction and I have seen it reduce grown men to stammering cooperation.
“Watch,” she says, and adjusts her dupatta with the casual precision of a woman loading a weapon.
We enter the lobby. It is modest, with a front desk staffed by a young man who looks like he was not expecting visitors at half past six in the morning.
He looks to be maybe twenty-two, with neatly combed hair and the slightly bored expression of a man approaching the end of a night shift. He does not remain bored for long.
Priya moves to the front desk with the fluid, magnetic confidence of a woman who has spent her entire life navigating rooms full of powerful people.
She leans on the counter with both elbows, her chin resting on her interlaced fingers, her green eyes wide and warm and aimed at this man with the full, concentrated force of Kapoor charm deployed without restraint.
“Good morning,” she says. “I am so sorry to bother you this early. I have been driving all morning and I am absolutely parched and exhausted and you look like someone who knows everything about this building. Is it true the original structure dates back to the colonial period? The archways are stunning.”
The man's posture straightens so fast I am surprised he does not pull a muscle. His face flushes. His hand moves to smooth his already smooth hair. “Oh, yes, actually, the foundation is pre-independence, we have photographs...”
“Photographs!” Priya exclaims, as if he has just revealed the location of the Holy Grail.
“I would love to see them. I studied architecture at university. I am fascinated by the way colonial structures were adapted to the Rajasthani climate. The ventilation systems alone...” She leans further across the counter, and her dupatta slips fractionally off one shoulder in a manoeuvre that is either accidental or the most precisely executed piece of tactical fabric displacement I have ever witnessed.
“I'm sorry, I'm rambling. You must think I'm terribly odd, showing up at half six in the morning asking about ventilation.”
“No, no, not at all!” The receptionist is now fully animated, his night-shift weariness evaporated. He turns his monitor to show her a photograph of the original facade, and in doing so, angles the screen directly toward where I am casually drifting behind the desk.
The guest register is visible in the open tab behind the photograph. Three seconds. That is all I need.
Welling, C. Room 307.
I move toward the elevator. Behind me, I hear Priya say, “And the courtyard, is that original stonework? It reminds me of a haveli I visited in Udaipur, last year. You have such an eye for these details. What was your name? Vikram? What a lovely name,” and the last thing I see before the elevator doors close is the receptionist offering to personally give my sister a tour of the building, and Priya accepting with a smile so radiant it could power a small city.
My sister is a terrifying woman. I make a mental note to never be on the opposing side of any operation she conducts.
The elevator doors close. Third floor. Room 307.
I stand in front of the door. My hands are at my sides. Not clasped behind my back. Visible.
I knock.
No answer. I knock again. Harder. The sound is loud in the quiet corridor, and I am aware that I am a wild-eyed man in a rumpled shirt banging on a hotel room door at six-thirty in the morning and this is not the behaviour of a composed neurosurgeon and I do not care.
I knock a third time.
“Casey.” My voice is not the Dread Prince voice. It is not the surgical voice. It is just my voice, raw and thin and scared. “Casey, it's me. Open the door.”
Silence. Footsteps. The sound of a deadbolt turning.
The door opens.
Casey is standing in the doorway in a T-shirt and track pants.
His hair is a disaster. His eyes are puffy, the specific puffiness that comes from sleeping badly or crying or both, and there are dark circles underneath them that I have never seen on his face before, because Casey Welling is a man who sleeps like the dead and wakes like the sun, and the evidence of disrupted sleep on his face is evidence of what I have cost him.