I am staring at her. My vision is blurred. My hands are in my lap and they are shaking, the full, post-operative tremor, and I do not clasp them behind my back. I do not hide them. I let my grandmother see my hands shake, because she has just told me the most important secret of her life, and the least I can offer in return is the truth of my body.
“I don't know what to say to him,” I whisper.
“Good.” She taps the cane once more. “If you knew what to say, it would be a speech. Speeches are performances. What that boy needs is not a performance. It is a person.” She reaches out and puts her hand over mine. Her skin is papery and warm and her grip is stronger than it looks. “You are your father's son, Arjun. Your father was a quiet man who loved my daughter deeply, in spite of her many faults and expectations, and expressed it badly and who died before he learned to do it differently. You have the chance he didn't. Don't waste it.”
Don't waste it. The same words she said to Casey, privately, at the end of the aunties' tea, a lifetime ago. You love my grandson. Don't waste it.
She has been saying the same thing to both of us. From the very beginning. From both sides of the equation.
I stand. My knees are unsteady. My eyes are wet.
“Daadi,” I say, and my voice is rough and thick and completely devoid of clinical language.
“Go,” she says. “The car is already waiting. I called the driver an hour ago.”
“You called the driver before you summoned me?”
“I have been waiting for you to be ready for three days, Arjun. When Priya failed last night, I knew it would have to be me. I also know you. If I give you time to sit and compose yourself, you will spend forty-five minutes constructing a speech in front of the mirror, and by the time you arrive, you will have rebuilt every wall I just demolished.” She looks at me with those eyes, sharp and oldand full of a love so fierce it has survived sixty years of silence. “Go now. Be scared. Be human. Be the man he fell in love with, not the one who writes discharge reports.”
I go.
I walk out of Daadi's rooms and down the corridor and through the main hall, and I do not stop to change, and I do not stop to check my phone, and I do not stop to compose a single clinical term. Karan is in the kitchen. He sees me. His face transforms from exhausted concern to pure, incandescent, whole-body excitement.
“Are you going?” he whispers, as if saying it too loud might break the spell.
“I'm going.”
“Yes!” He pumps his fist. He actually pumps his fist, in the pre-dawn kitchen of the Kapoor estate, wearing a stained kurta and holding a piece of burnt toast, and the gesture is so purely, ridiculously, beautifully Karan that something in my chest cracks in a way that does not feel like breaking. It feels like opening.
The car is waiting in the courtyard. The driver is ready. The sky is pink and gold and the air is cool and the birds are singing and the estate is waking up around me and I am walking toward a car that will take me to Jaipur, to a hotel, to a door, to a man, and I have no script and no strategy and no plan and my hands are shaking and my heart is hammering and I am terrified.
I get in the car. The engine starts.
Jaipur is sixty kilometres away. I have sixty kilometres to not compose a speech.
This is going to be the hardest sixty kilometres of my life.
Chapter 31
The Grand Gesture
Arjun
The drive to Jaipur takes fifty-three minutes. I know this because I count every one of them, the way I count seconds during a surgery, except in surgery the counting keeps me steady and on this drive the counting is the only thing preventing me from telling the driver to turn around.
Priya is in the passenger seat. She appeared at the car before I did, dressed, alert, and holding two travel cups of chai with the grim, focused energy of a woman who has been awake since four and has been waiting for this moment with the strategic patience she inherited from our mother and the ferocity she developed in opposition to her.
“I'm coming,” she says, when I open my mouth to protest. “This is non-negotiable. You need a handler.”
“I do not need a handler.”
“You need someone to prevent you from composing a speech in the car, turning around at the city limits, or sitting in the hotel lobby for three hours doing nothing while your emotional processing speed operates at the pace of continental drift.” She hands me a chai. “Get in the car, idiot.”
I get in.
The Rajasthani landscape scrolls past the window. Flat, dry, sun-baked, punctuated by clusters of bright bougainvillea and the occasional camel plodding along the roadside with the dignified indifference of a creature that has been navigating this terrain for centuries and does not care about the emotional crises of the passengers in passing vehicles. I envy the camels. They do not compose speeches in their heads. They do not send overly impersonal text messages. They do not fall in love with six-foot-three Canadians and then catastrophically mishandle the aftermath.
I am composing a speech.