Chapter 34
The Proposal (For Real This Time)
Arjun
Ibuy the ring the following week.
Not from the Kapoor vaults. Not from the family jeweller in Jaipur who has been supplying the Kapoors with engagement rings for four generations and who my mother has almost certainly already briefed on Casey's ring size through some intelligence channel I cannot identify or prevent.
Not from any source that carries the weight of family expectation or dynastic obligation or the strategic implications of a Kapoor engagement.
I buy it from a small jeweller on Queen Street West, in a shop between a vintage bookstore and a ramen place that Casey claims has the best tonkotsu in the city and that I have been reluctantly forced to agree is, in fact, excellent.
The shop is tiny. The jeweller is a woman named Maria who has been making rings by hand for thirty years and who looks at me with calm, assessing patience, as though she has seen many nervous men stand in her shop and stare at trays of rings with the glazed, overwhelmed expression that comes with making a decision that will outlast their furniture.
She also looks at me with faint, knowing amusement, as though she has met me before. Not in person. In description.
“You're the doctor,” Maria says.
“I am a doctor.”
“The doctor. The neurosurgeon. The one who clasps his hands behind his back when he is uncomfortable, which is most of the time. The one who, several months ago, a very large, very blond, very flustered customer came in here to buy two rings for, in a great hurry, with a credit card he kept dropping.”
I stare at her.
“He bought them here.”
“He bought them here. He stood exactly where you are standing now. He was sweating. He explained to me, in a great deal of detail that I did not ask for, that you and he were undertaking a project of considerable complexity and would require, in his words, two rings. I sold him two rings. He did not return them. I assume he still has them, because he seemed the sort who would not, in the end, return such things.”
The rings are in the top drawer of his dresser, the one that became mine the day we returned home.
They have been there since the night we landed back in Toronto and removed them by mutual unspoken agreement, both of us, at the front door, like coats.
We have not discussed them since. Neither of us has thrown them away.
Neither of us has worn them. They sit in a small velvet pouch among the other artefacts of a life I no longer recognise as mine, and I have known, since the moment I decided to come to this shop, that the question was never whether to keep them.
It was whether to leave them in the drawer.
They are staying in the drawer.
Not because they are nothing. They are not nothing.
They are evidence that on the morning before our flight to Delhi, in a panic neither of us was quite ready to name, the man I love walked into this shop and described me to a stranger before buying the rings he hoped would carry us through the lie.
They are evidence that even in the middle of a performance, he was telling the truth.
They are precious in the way that prop weapons from a real war are precious, which is to say that the metal is cheap but the history is not.
But they were chosen for a performance. They were chosen in haste, for a story we were telling other people.
And what I am here to buy is not another piece of evidence.
I am here to buy a ring that has no performance in it at all.
A ring that is the first object I have ever selected for him that does not need to convince anyone of anything, including me.
“He still has them,” I say to Maria. “We both do. We are not getting rid of them. But we are also not going back to them.”
“I thought so.” Maria's mouth does something that is not quite a smile.
“He talked about you for twenty minutes. He did not need to talk about you for twenty minutes. He was buying rings. He could have selected them in eight. He simply wanted to talk about you, and I had no other customers, so I let him.”
I do not know what to do with my face. I am, perhaps for the first time in my adult life, fully and completely seen by a stranger, through the eyes of the man I love, on the basis of a twenty-minute conversation that took place in this shop months ago.
“Now, why don’t you tell me about him,” Maria says.
So I tell her.
I tell her about him. I tell her that he is enormous and warm and that he wears dinosaur scrubs and that he puts stickers on children.
I tell her that I have studied the preparation of chai through seventeen distinct methods, that I keep a notebook on the subject, that I am, by any objective measure, the more qualified chai-maker in the household, and that none of this matters because he learned the technique from my grandmother over video call in a single afternoon and produces a cup that is incrementally but unmistakably better than mine.
I tell her that he watches me make it anyway, every morning, with the patient amusement of someone who knows he is being out-competed and is choosing to be gracious about it.
I tell her that he cannot fold a towel to save his life and that his dog chose me over him and he pretends not to be jealous.
I tell her that he held my hand in a palace in India and danced with me at a festival and drove back from a hotel in Jaipur when I thought I had lost him.
I tell her more than she needs to know. She listens to all of it.
She shows me a ring. Simple. A brushed platinum band with a single, thin line of gold running through the centre, like a vein of warmth through cool metal. It is not flashy. It is not ornate. It is not anything my mother would choose, which is precisely the point.
“That one,” I say.
“You're sure? You don't want to look at the others?”
“I'm sure.”
She sizes it. She boxes it. I pay with hands that are steady, because my hands are always steady when they are doing something that matters, and this matters more than any surgery, more than any incision, more than any twelve-hour microscopic navigation of a child's brain.
The ring sits in my jacket pocket for eleven days.
I carry it to the hospital. I carry it home.
I carry it to Huntsville on the monthly weekend visit, where it sits in my jacket while Brenda feeds me pie on the dock and Oliver rolls in something unidentifiable in the backyard and Casey throws the tennis ball into the lake by accident and has to wade in to retrieve it while I watch from the porch with a book and a level of amusement that I do not adequately conceal.
Brenda knows. Of course Brenda knows. Brenda Welling has the same preternatural maternal radar as my grandmother, the same ability to look at a person and read the thing they are carrying before they have decided to put it down.
She does not ask. She does not press. She simply, on the Saturday evening, while Casey is showering and I am helping her wash dishes in the kitchen overlooking the lake, puts her hand over mine on the counter and says, “Whenever you're ready, sweetheart.”
I stare at her. She smiles. She hands me a dish towel.
Brenda Welling, who does not know about the ring in my jacket and somehow knows about the ring in my jacket, goes back to washing dishes, and the loons call across the lake, and the evening light is gold on the water, and I dry the dishes and I think about timing.
Timing is everything in surgery. The right incision at the wrong moment is worse than the wrong incision at the right moment, because surgery is not just precision, it is rhythm, and the rhythm is what separates the competent from the exceptional.
I have spent my career mastering rhythm.
I know when to cut and when to wait. I know when the tissue is ready and when it needs another moment.
I know how to read the silence between heartbeats and find the space where the scalpel belongs.
I do not know how to read the silence between my own heartbeats and find the space where a proposal belongs.
I have been looking for the space for eleven days, and every potential moment has been either too public or too private or too ordinary or too staged, and the ring sits in my pocket growing heavier with each passing hour, and I am beginning to understand that the problem is not timing.
The problem is that I am, once again, attempting to plan an operation that cannot be planned.
Daadi calls on a Tuesday evening. She calls every Tuesday. The calls are brief, efficient, and precisely calibrated to deliver maximum emotional impact in minimum time, because Daadi Nirindra does not waste words the way she does not waste cane taps.
“Have you done it yet?” she asks, without preamble.
“Done what?”
“Arjun.”
“I don't know what you're referring to.”
“You bought a ring eleven days ago from a jeweller on Queen Street.
The jeweller's name is Maria. The ring is platinum with a gold inlay. You have been carrying it in your jacket pocket and you have not asked the question because you are overthinking it, which is what you do with everything, and I am tired of waiting.”
I hold the phone away from my face and stare at it. I put it back.
“How could you possibly know this?”
“Priya tracks your credit card for security purposes. She saw the charge. She called the jeweller. Maria is apparently a very forthcoming woman when presented with a compelling narrative about two doctors in love.” A pause. “Also, Brenda called me.”
“Brenda called you?”
“Brenda and I speak every Thursday. We have been speaking every Thursday since you returned from India. She is a remarkable woman. Her opinions on pie crust are revolutionary. She also told me you were carrying something heavy in your jacket and looking at her son the way a man looks at someone when he has made a decision but has not yet found the courage to say it out loud.”