CHAPTER 50
Jogra Palace
It was midnight.
The corridor outside the studio was silent.
Bharat stood at the easel while the brush moved slowly across the canvas.
On the canvas, Yamini looked angry.
Her hair was slightly disordered from fury. Her eyes were bright with humiliation. And her jaw lifted in defiance even as grief trembled beneath it.
It was the moment before she had stormed out of his life.
He had memorized that look.
He paused, studying the sharp line of her cheekbone he had just rendered.
The light in the painting caught her eye not with warmth, but with something closer to fire.
He adjusted the shadow beneath them.
Her eyes had always been the same. Right from the day he had first seen her.
He set the canvas against the wall to dry.
Then, he stepped back and looked around the studio.
Rows of canvases lined three walls. Some framed, most not. Arranged not by subject or color, the way a gallery would arrange them, but by date.
His eyes went to the oldest one.
It was smaller than the others, the brushwork rougher, technically uneven in a way none of his later work was. A child's painting.
A girl in a fountain, muddy, laughing.
Rewa Palace.
Twenty-two years ago.
Bharat had just turned nine, and he was supposed to travel to Jogra that summer. But the visit had been delayed by two days for an important event. His grandmother had insisted he stay.
Rewa Palace was loud with festival noise. Temple bells in relentless rhythm. Drums. Laughter ricocheting off marble walls. Guests moving through the courtyards. The air was thick with perfume.
He endured it.
He always endured it.
He had learned to measure time in patterns. Twelve seconds between bell strikes. Twenty-four tiles between the fountain and the veranda. Three hundred and twelve steps around the inner courtyard.
If he counted, the noise became numbers.
If he counted, it made sense.
That afternoon, the courtyard was louder than usual because of a festival rehearsal.
Musicians were testing instruments. Samar was chasing Viraj through the corridors. Ram was arguing with a tutor. Voices overlapped. Footsteps collided.
It became too much.
He stood near a carved pillar and tried to regulate his breathing.
Inhale for four. Exhale for six.
A hand touched his shoulder from behind. Unexpected. He hadn't accounted for it.
Then the world fractured.
The bells stopped being bells. They became metal striking bone. The voices sharpened into something with edges.
He jerked away.
The nanny's face blurred in front of him, concerned, saying something he couldn't process.
He couldn't breathe. He couldn't filter any of it. The light was too bright. The courtyard too crowded. The air too thick.
He ran.
Not blindly. Not screaming.
He ran with purpose, past the eastern gardens, beyond the old temple steps, toward the rolling hills he had already mapped in his mind.
There was a narrow passage between two slabs of rock. An opening most adults never noticed. He had found it before, at nine, and measured its width with his arms, memorized its exact incline.
He slipped inside.
The world narrowed.
The passage was tight, cool, silent. He crawled until it opened into a small cave chamber.
Darkness. Stone. Stillness.
He sat with his back against the wall, his head lowered to his knees, his hands pressed over his ears even though the sound was already gone. His mind kept echoing anyway.
He focused on the drip of water from the ceiling.
One. Two. Three.
Breathe.
He would stay until the numbers calmed him down.
He didn't know how long he stayed.
Then he heard his mother’s voice. Calm. Controlled.
“Bharat.”
He didn’t answer.
She called again.
Silence.
“He shuts down, Rani Ma,” the nanny said, her voice frantic. “When there's too much—”
The guards tried, but the passage was barely wide enough for a child.
Then a small girl’s voice cut in.
“I can go.”
A few moments later, he felt someone settle down beside him in the dark. He flinched when her hand brushed his.
She spoke.
“You're missing mango ice cream.”
Her voice was childish but clear. Not loud. Not pitying. Just a fact.
She didn't know words like overstimulation. She didn't understand thresholds or triggers.
She only knew he was hiding.
No one had ever spoken to him that way before. As though hiding were simply something he was doing, and ice cream was simply something he was missing, and both of those things were just facts, neither more important than the other.
He didn't respond.
She nudged his arm.
He lifted his head slightly. Just enough to look at her. His eyes had adjusted to the dark, and the small crack in the cave filtered the sunlight enough to see her.
Recognition flickered.
He knew her. He had seen her that morning in the palace fountain, covered in mud, laughing, hair tangled, the staff scandalized around her.
She hadn't cared.
He had watched from a distance. He had memorized the curve of her grin.
She had been unstructured. Unpredictable. Alive.
Now she was here. In the dark. Unafraid.
She held out her hand again.
“Follow me.”
No persuasion. No explanation. Just a simple instruction.
Her voice didn't splinter in his mind the way the others had. It was straight. Direct.
He lowered his hands from his ears.
And followed.
The tunnel scraped her elbows on the way out. Dust clung to her palms.
She didn't complain.
The palace seemed to exhale when they emerged. His mother came to him.
But Bharat didn't go to her first.
He looked back.
At the girl, brushing dust off her skirt, grinning like she had just conquered a kingdom.
He was nine years old. He did not have a word yet for what he felt looking at her.
That evening, the psychiatrist arrived. Spoke gently and recommended expression through art.
Paints were placed in front of him.
He stared at the blank canvas.
Then he painted.
Not the cave. Or the palace. Or the temple.
He painted a muddy girl, laughing in a fountain—wild and unapologetic.
The first time he had ever translated noise into color.
He had painted from memory. The act of recreating her had steadied his breathing and given order to sensation.
Over time, painting became a ritual. And Princess Yamini Gaur became his subject.
No one had ever been inside his studio.
His mother had seen the earliest paintings once, when he was still nine and when the paintings were new. She had stood in the doorway, looked at the canvases, and recognized the girl without being told. But she had said nothing.
After that, the studio remained his alone. Staff cleaned around the door but never entered. Not even his brothers had seen what was inside.
The paintings were not made to be seen. They were made because he had no other way to hold what he couldn't name.
He looked at the next canvas.
Summers came and went. Yamini visited Rewa most years.
She ran through the gardens like she owned them. Photographed the staff with a new camera. Laughed too loudly. Climbed walls she had been told not to climb.
He watched.
From balconies. From shaded corridors. From distances that let him study her without being noticed. More than once, he postponed his summer trip to Jogra by a week, just to stay while she was there.
She never noticed how often he was nearby.
He never approached. He was never in her vicinity again after that day in the cave.
He simply kept a record.
But there was one other time when he had once again seen her up close. She was sixteen then, and he was nineteen.
Devara Province
Twelve years ago.
Bharat was attending the bull racing festival for Ram.
Crowds pressed close. Noise roared. Dust lifted in waves.
He endured it.
Then he heard a laugh. It was bright and unrestrained.
He turned.
Sixteen-year-old Yamini stood among the spectators, dressed as a young man in a turban, deliberately blending in because royal women weren't supposed to be there. She was with her brother. But he knew it was her, even with the disguise.
He knew, even then, that she had no idea he was less than twenty feet away.
Her eyes burned with excitement. She leaned forward as the hooves thundered past.
She didn't carry herself with decorum. She carried life.
She was the same as she had been at six, just taller.
He watched her longer than he should have.
Bharat looked at the next canvas.
This one was larger. Formal. The colors were heavier. Deep blue and silver, the kind of palette reserved for ceremony.
It was from five and a half years ago. But he remembered every detail of that day with the same precision he remembered everything—the weight of the sherwani, the exact angle of the afternoon light through the carved windows, the sound of the priests' chanting layered over conversation.
And Yamini.
Yamini was wearing a blue-and-silver lehenga with heavy diamond jewelry. She was sitting close enough that he could hear the small, careful breaths she took between attempts to speak to him.
She had tried thrice.
All three times, he had not answered. Not because the room overwhelmed him. By age fifteen, he had learned to manage that. He had sat through state functions, investor meetings, and royal ceremonies. He knew how to remain present in noise.
It was she who undid him.
After seventeen years of watching her from a distance, his mind was unable to process her presence nearby.
Now she was beside him. Close enough that the faint scent of her reached him between the incense and the marigolds.
He could not look at her directly. Every time he tried, his thinking fractured.
He had not had words for it then. He still didn't, entirely.
She would not have known any of that. To her, it would have looked like indifference. Like she wasn't worth the effort of a single glance.
He had looked. Many times. Never when she was looking back.
That night, alone, he had painted it.
Not the ceremony. Not the priests, the fire, the formal portraits that would be released to the papers the following week.
Just her. The exact angle of her head as she tried to speak to him. The slightly shy smile and her eyes filled with hope before she had given up trying.
He had captured it all.
Three days before the wedding, she was gone.
He had not interfered when she ran five and a half years ago.
He had known where she was. He had known who she was with.
He had allowed her to build the life she thought she wanted.
Until harm entered the equation.
He did not interfere when she chose. He intervened when she was being hurt.
There was a difference. But she did not know it.
She still believed pieces of her life had been rearranged by him out of pride. And revenge.
He let her think that because it was easier than the truth.
Exhaling slowly, he turned back to the canvas drying against the wall.
The newest one. Still wet.
Her anger. The day she left.
He looked at the row of paintings one more time before he reached for the lamp.
Twenty-two years of the same person, in every canvas.
Twenty-two years later, in a locked studio at midnight, he was still painting her.
He turned off the light.