“I know that Karan has been texting Casey every three hours with updates on your emotional state, complete with a rating system he invented that goes from 'mildly tragic' to 'full Heathcliff,' and that you are currently rated at 'full Heathcliff with a trajectory toward Miss Havisham,' so yes, Arjun, I have some intelligence on the situation.”
I blink. “Full Heathcliff?”
“With a trajectory toward Miss Havisham. Those are Karan's words, not mine, although I will say the comparison is uncomfortably accurate. You are one wedding dress and a cobweb away from a Dickens adaptation. Although — and I want to flag this —how does Karan know about Miss Havisham.Karan. Our Karan. The Karan who, in Year Ten, asked me with genuine sincerity whetherWar and Peacewas about a divorce. I have never seen him voluntarily encounter a Victorian novel. I am working on three possibilities. One, he had a tutor we did not know about.Two, he watched the BBC adaptation by accident, possibly while looking for cricket. Three, he is cheating off someone, the way he cheated through all of A-levels, and?—”
“Priya.”
“What.”
“You have left the original point some distance behind.”
“I havenot.The original point is that you are full Heathcliff. The investigation into Karan is a parallel concern. Anyway, Karan loves you. Karan has the emotional intelligence of a Labrador and the literary range of a first-year English student, and he has been running a one-man emotional surveillance operation on you since Casey left. That is not the point. The point is that you, my brilliant, impossible, infuriating brother, are doing the thing you always do. You are retreating into control because you cannot control the outcome. You are choosing certain misery over uncertain joy because at least misery is predictable. You are, and I say this with the full weight of twenty-nine years of loving you, being a complete and total idiot.”
She sits on the edge of the bed. The bed that was mine and Casey's. The bed where, four days ago, I woke up with his body against mine and his hand over my heart and the future felt like something I could hold.
“I am going to tell you something,” Priya says, and her voice has changed. The fury is still there, but underneath it is something older, something that sounds like a girl who watched her brother pack his bags for Cambridge at twenty-two and understood that she was watching him survive the only way he knew how. “I have watched you leave every good thing in your life because staying was scarier than going. You left India. You left this family. You left Cambridge, and then Edinburgh. You built a life in Toronto that is clean and controlled and completely, utterly empty, and you have been so proud of your independence that you didn't notice it was just a more sophisticated version of hiding.”
“Priya...”
“And then Casey happened. And for the first time in my life, I watched my brother stop hiding. I watched you hold someone's hand in public. I watched you dance at a festival. I watched you stand up to Mother at a dinner table and defend a man in front of twenty-two people, and I thought, finally. Finally he's going to stop running.”
Her eyes are bright. Fierce. Wet.
“Don't prove me wrong, Arjun. Don't sit in this room and let Mother win. Don't let this family grind you back into the shape it wants. You fought for him at that dinner table. You fought for him against the Home Secretary. You fought for him at a festival and a polo match and a kitchen at two in the morning, Karan told me about it. Don't stop fighting because the fight got hard.”
The room is very quiet. The evening light is warm through the balcony doors. The bed is made. The pillows are fresh. The room is clean and empty and smells like nothing at all.
I put my hand in my pocket. I feel the edge of the triceratops sticker, holographic and small and ridiculous, a piece of evidence from a world where a six-foot-three Canadian puts dinosaurs on crying children and makes the scary things stop being scary.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
“What?”
“Tomorrow I will go to Jaipur.”
Priya stares at me. “Not tonight?”
“I cannot show up at his hotel at ten in the evening looking like this.” I gesture at myself. I have not properly slept in three days. My curls are a disaster. My shirt is still buttoned wrong. “If I am going to do this, if I am going to go to him without a script and without a strategy, I need to at least be clean and dressed and...” I pause. “And I need to figure out what to say that isn't clinical terminology. Which may take several hours.”
Priya's face does something complicated. The fury softens. The fierceness remains. And underneath both, breakingthrough like sunlight through cloud cover, is something I have not seen on my sister's face since I told her, years ago, that I was leaving for Cambridge: hope.
“I'll set an alarm,” she says. “Six a.m. I'll have the car ready. Kavita will pack breakfast. And Arjun?”
“Yes?”
“If you use the phrase 'error in judgment' within fifty metres of that man, I will personally end you.”
She leaves. The door closes. The room is quiet.
I sit on the bed. I hold the sticker. The holographic surface shifts in the lamplight, blue to green to a faint, oily purple, and I think about everything Priya said, and she is right, she is right about all of it, and knowing she is right does not make the fear smaller. It makes the fear more specific. More named. More precisely the shape of a door in Jaipur that I would have to knock on, and a face I would have to look at, and words I would have to find in a language I have never learned to speak.
She wants me to go. Yash wants me to go. Karan wants to drive me there in a fast car. Everyone in this house can see what I need to do, and I can see it too, and seeing it does not make my legs move.
Why?
The question forms by itself, in my father's voice, the way it used to when I was a boy and I had done something inexplicable and he would sit me down at his desk in the library and ask, not unkindly,why, beta, why did you do that? Not as accusation. As inquiry. As the genuine and curious question of a man who believed that every action had a reason and that locating the reason was the first step toward understanding the action.
Why am I sitting on this bed?