Chapter 32
Leaving Rajasthan
Arjun
We drive back to the estate in the late morning, and Casey holds my hand the entire way.
This is not a planned gesture. This is not a performance for the driver or a statement of intent for the family we are about to face.
This is simply Casey Welling's hand wrapped around mine on the back seat of a car, his thumb tracing slow, absent circles on my knuckles.
The contact is steady. Uncomplicated. Fundamentally Casey.
I spend the first twenty minutes of the drive wondering how I survived four days without it.
Priya is not in the car. She texted an hour ago from the hotel lobby:
Vikram is giving me a tour of the old quarter.
It turns out he is a third year engineering student, and knows everything about Mughal-era irrigation systems. This may take a while.
Tell Casey I said welcome back. Also tell him that if he breaks my brother's heart again I will find him and I will use Daadi's cane liberally.
At the time, Casey read the text over my shoulder and laughed so hard the bed shook, which was notable because we were still in the bed at the time, and the shaking dislodged a pillow that fell on my face, and I informed him with great dignity that physical comedy was not appropriate during serious emotional reconciliation.
He kissed the indignation off my mouth and told me I was adorable when I was pompous, and I told him I was never pompous, and he raised one eyebrow so high it disappeared into his messy curls, and I conceded the point.
I sit up. I lean over the edge of the bed and locate my trousers, which are on the floor in a configuration I do not entirely recognize, and I retrieve from the pocket a small holographic object that has been with me since he left.
“Casey.”
“Mm.”
“Hold out your hand.”
He does, without opening his eyes, with the trusting gesture of someone who has decided that whatever I am about to put in his palm is going to be fine. I place the stegosaurus sticker on his palm. He opens his eyes. He looks at it.
The expression that moves across his face is one I will remember for the rest of my life.
Recognition. Then disbelief. Then a kind of devastating tenderness that I am not sure I have earned but am going to accept anyway, because Casey hands these things out without strict adherence to the question of whether they have been earned.
“You kept it.”
“Yes, I kept it.”
“The whole time.”
“The whole time. I carried it during the worst three days of my life, and I would like to give it back now, because I do not need to carry it anymore. You are here. The thing I was carrying was a holographic substitute for the thing I had pushed away, and the thing itself is in this bed, and I am giving the substitute back to its rightful owner.”
Casey is quiet. He closes his hand around the sticker. He brings my hand to his mouth and presses it against his lips, briefly, and the gesture is so unguarded and so Casey that something in my chest does the bending thing it has been doing on and off since I arrived in this hotel room.
“Thank you,” he says.
“For what.”
“For not throwing it away. When you were angry. Or scared. Or whatever you were.”
“Casey.” I take his hand, the one holding the sticker, and I bring it to my own mouth, and I press my lips against his knuckles, the way I have wanted to do approximately forty times since we collapsed into this bed and started reassembling.
“I would not have thrown it away if I had been buried with it.”
We are okay. We are more than okay. We are two people who broke something and put it back together with apologies and honesty and a truly inadvisable amount of physical exertion in a hotel room with thin walls, and the seams where the break happened are visible and tender and will need care, but the thing itself is holding. It is holding.
An hour later, we are in the car.
The estate appears over the ridge, sandstone and gardens and the sprawling, ancient, beautiful cage that I grew up in and left and returned to and am now leaving again, except this time I am not running from it.
I am walking away from it with my hand in someone else's, and the difference between running and walking is the difference between fear and choice.
Casey squeezes my hand as the car passes through the gates. “Ready?”
“No.”
“Good. Neither am I.”
Karan is waiting at the front entrance. He is literally bouncing on his heels, vibrating with an energy so intense that he appears to be in danger of achieving liftoff. The moment the car stops, he wrenches open the door and pulls Casey into a hug so forceful that I hear Casey's spine pop.
“Bhai! You came back! I knew you would come back! I told Yash, I said, the lumberjack will come back, lumberjacks always come back, it is scientifically proven!” He releases Casey, examines him at arm's length, assesses the state of his curls and the general condition of his face, and nods with satisfaction.
“You look terrible. In fact, both of you look terrible. But you also look happy. These two things should not coexist, and yet they clearly do, and this is as it should be.” He grins.
“Kavita is making lunch. She has been cooking since Priya texted that the mission was successful. There is enough food for approximately forty people. She is expressing love through biryani. Do not question the volume.”
We walk into the estate. Together. Side by side. Casey's hand finds the small of my back, warm and steady, and I do not pull away, and I do not look around to see who is watching, and I do not calculate the social implications.
The house knows. Of course the house knows. Sunita's WhatsApp network operates at speeds that would humble a telecommunications corporation, and by the time we reach the main hall, the news of our return has preceded us with the efficiency of a shockwave.
Yash finds us next, in the corridor outside the drawing room. He does not bounce or shout or hug. He walks up to Casey, extends his hand, and when Casey takes it, Yash holds the handshake for a long moment, his dark eyes steady and warm.
“Glad you're back,” he says. Simple. Sincere.
“Glad to be back,” Casey says.
Yash looks at me. Something passes between us, the silent, complicated, deeply specific communication of brothers who have spent their lives navigating the same family with different strategies and who have both, in their own ways, survived.
He nods. I nod. The nod contains years of unsaid things, and for now, the nod is enough.
Kavita ambushes us in the kitchen corridor.
She does not speak. She takes one look at Casey, grabs his face with both hands, inspects him with the critical, thorough assessment of a woman evaluating produce at the market, determines that he is acceptably intact, and points forcefully toward the dining room.
The point says: sit, eat, do not argue. We sit. We eat.
The biryani is extraordinary. It is the best biryani Kavita has ever made, which is a statement of such magnitude that it borders on the geopolitical, and Casey eats three helpings and tells Kavita it is the best thing he has ever tasted.
Kavita pats his cheek and produces a fourth helping from somewhere, and the room fills with the warm, fragrant, uncomplicated comfort of food made with love by a woman who has been feeding this family through every crisis for years and knows that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do for a broken person is hand them a plate and refuse to let them leave the table until it is empty.
Daadi does not come to us. We go to her.
I knock on the door of her private rooms. Casey is beside me, and I can feel the nervous energy radiating off him, which is absurd because Casey Welling is not nervous about anything, except apparently he is nervous about facing the eighty-year-old woman who he made a napkin flower for, who told him not to waste his love, and who is, in a way he does not fully understand yet, the reason I am standing beside him instead of sitting in an empty guest suite with a Stegosaurus sticker and no future.
“Come,” Daadi says from inside.
We enter. She is in her chair. The afternoon light. The cane. The green eyes that miss nothing.
She looks at Casey. She looks at him for a long time, the kind of looking that most people cannot withstand, the kind that strips away performance and bravado and finds the real person underneath.
Casey, to his credit, does not flinch. He stands in her doorway, six-foot-three and blonde and rumpled and looking like someone who has been crying and fighting and making love and driving across Rajasthan all in the same twelve hours, and he lets her look.
“You came back,” she says.
“Yes, Daadi.”
“You could have left. Gone to the airport. Flown home to your mother and your dog and your safe, small life.”
“I could have.”
“Why didn't you?”
Casey glances at me. Then back at Daadi. “Because your grandson drove to my hotel at six in the morning with no speech, with my stegosaurus sticker in his pocket, and he told me he was choosing me, and I believed him.”
Daadi's eyes move to me. The corner of her mouth twitches.
“You brought the sticker,” she says.
“I brought the sticker.”
“Sentimental fool.” She taps her cane once. Approval. Then she looks at Casey again, and the warmth in her eyes is real and present and entirely earned. “You. Come here.”
Casey crosses the room. He kneels beside her chair, instinctively, the way he kneels beside children in the ER, bringing his face level with hers. Daadi reaches out and cups his face with one papery, strong hand.
“Take care of him,” she says. “He is difficult and repressed and he will try to process your entire relationship through medical terminology at least twice more before the year is out. When he does this, do not leave. Hit him with a newspaper. It worked on his grandfather.”