Daadi is in her chair. It is a high-backed wooden chair with embroidered cushions, positioned precisely where the first morning light will fall, and she has been sitting in it with contained, alert stillness for hours as she has been waiting for me specifically.
Her silver-topped cane is between her knees. Her green eyes, my green eyes, the ones that I inherited along with her bone structure and her stubbornness, are sharp and clear and entirely without warmth.
“Sit,” she says.
I sit. There is a low stool near her chair, the kind of stool that positions a person slightly below the seated elder, a design choice that is not accidental. Daadi Nirindra does not do anything by accident.
“You look terrible,” she says.
“So I've been told.”
“Priya told you. Priya uses words like weapons because she learned it from her mother. I use silence, which is more efficient and less exhausting.” She adjusts her cane between her knees, her gnarled fingers moving over the silver top with thehabitual, unconscious precision of a woman who has been holding that cane for twenty years. “You have not slept.”
“No.”
“You have not eaten.”
“I had chai.”
“Chai is not food. Chai is a coping mechanism masquerading as a beverage. Your grandfather used the same trick for forty years and it did not work for him either.” She looks at me. The green eyes are steady and cool. “The boy is in Jaipur.”
“Yes.”
“You have sent him fifteen messages.”
I stare at her. “How do you know it's fifteen?”
“Sunita monitors the family's digital communications with a dedication that would impress a foreign intelligence service. She reported fourteen yesterday. I assume you sent another in the small hours because you are your father's son and your father could never leave a thought unsent.” Her eyes narrow fractionally. “What did the fifteenth say?”
“I'm sorry” I reply.
“Two words.”
“Two words, yes.”
“And the fourteen before it?”
“Longer, except for one that just said please.”
“Clinical?”
The question lands like a scalpel. Precise. Economical. Cutting exactly where it needs to cut.
“The first several were... structured,” I admit.
“Structured.” She repeats the word with the flat, devastating intonation of a woman who has survived eight decades by seeing through every euphemism ever constructed. “You mean impersonal. You mean you sent a man who flew halfway around the world because he loved you a series of carefully composed emotional assessments with the warmth and spontaneity of a medical discharge report.”
I do not respond. There is no response. She is correct with such surgical precision that responding would be redundant.
“I sat in that drawing room,” Daadi says, and her voice has shifted. Lower. Slower. “I sat in that drawing room and I watched Pandit-ji read your charts, and I watched your mother's face while he did it, and I watched your face while you listened, and I listened to her tell you the engagement would be called off, and I did not tap my cane.”
“I noticed.”
“Do you know why I did not tap?”
“Because you were thinking.”
“Two taps would mean I was thinking. No taps means something else entirely.” She leans forward in her chair, and the movement is slow and deliberate and carries weight. “No taps means I was furious. No taps means I was so angry that my hand could not be trusted with the cane, because if I had tapped, I would have tapped three times, and three taps in front of the extended family would have been a declaration of war against my own daughter, and I am old, Arjun, but I am not ready for that war. Not in public.”