Casey stirs. He opens one blue eye. He takes in the scattered pillows, the demolished fortification, the three-quarters of the bed his body has colonized, and then he looks up at me, standing over him fully dressed and rigidly composed. A slow, sleepy, devastating smile spreads across his face.
“Morning, Doc,” he says, his voice rough and warm with sleep. He glances at the wreckage of the pillow wall. “Looks like there was a structural integrity problem.”
“Get dressed,” I say, and I turn on my heel before he can see my ears, which are, I am certain, a shade of pink that would be visible from space.
His laugh follows me to the balcony, warm and rough-edged and full of something I am not going to examine, and I clasp my hands behind my back and stare at the gardens and wait for my fake fiancé to get ready so we can walk into the lion’s den together.
Chapter 10
The Aunties’ Tribunal
Casey
After breakfast, the invitation to tea arrives via a household staff member who appears at our door at 10:15 a.m. with a silver tray bearing two cups of chai and a folded note on cream stationery that reads, in elegant handwriting:
The aunties would be delighted to welcome Casey for an informal tea in the garden pavilion. 11 o’clock. Casual dress.
“Informal,” Arjun says, staring at the note like it’s a scan showing an inoperable tumour. “Casual.”
“Those seem like good words.”
“Those are camouflage words. There is nothing informal about a coordinated gathering of my aunties in a pavilion. This is a tribunal, Casey. They have assembled a tribunal to pass judgement.”
He’s pacing. He has been pacing since we came back from breakfast, which itself was a masterclass incontrolled tension: Meera presiding, Priya observing, and Arjun eating exactly three bites of paratha while I ate approximately eleven because I was nervous and the parathas were extraordinary and I cope with stress by consuming carbohydrates.
“Okay,” I say, sitting on the edge of the bed, which still has the scattered wreckage of last night’s pillow wall pushed to one side because neither of us has addressed it and I suspect neither of us will address it for the foreseeable future. “Walk me through the lineup one more time. Who’s going to be there?”
Arjun stops pacing. He clasps his hands behind his back and shifts into briefing mode, which is the most natural state of being for Arjun, who only a few days ago wrote a thirty-two-page intelligence dossier about his own relatives.
“Auntie Sunita will be the primary interrogator. She is the fastest texter in Rajasthan and treats family intelligence like tradeable currency. Anything you say to her will be on the family WhatsApp group within ninety seconds. She is coded red in the dossier.”
“The NSA of aunties. Got it.”
“Auntie Kavita is Sunita’s operational partner. She deploys passive-aggressive compliments and aggressive food-pushing as her primary weapons. She will offer you sweets. You will accept them. Refusing food from Kavita is a diplomatic incident on par with a border skirmish.”
“I’m being asked to eat sweets to maintain international peace. This is the best mission briefing I’ve ever received.”
Arjun gives me a look that could freeze, but I catch the twitch at the corner of his mouth. The almost-smile. My personal seismograph, registering the tiny tremor that means I’ve gotten through.
“There will be others,” he continues. “Assorted cousins, peripheral aunties, possibly my cousin Ananya, who is obsessed with social hierarchy and will almost certainly try to determine how much your clothes cost. Do not engage with Ananya. She feeds on information.”
“Noted.”
“And Daadi will be there.”
His voice changes when he says her name. The briefing cadence drops away, and something quieter surfaces, something careful and weighted. He stops pacing and stands very still in front of the carved window.
“Daadi sees everything,” he says. “She will say very little. She will sit in her chair with her cane, and she will watch, and she will understand exactly what is happening with a precision that I find genuinely terrifying. Do not attempt to deceive or charm her. Just be...” He pauses. Swallows. “Be yourself.”
It is, I think, the most trusting thing Arjun Kapoor has ever said to me. Be yourself, directed at a man whose authentic self is a six-foot-three chaos engine in dinosaur scrubs, offered as genuine strategic advice for surviving the scrutiny of the one person in his family whose opinion he respects and fears the most. He’s telling me that the thing he needs from me, in front of the grandmother who sees through everything, isn’t a performance.
He’s telling me that who I actually am is enough.
My chest does something complicated. I stand up. “I’ll be myself. Promise.”
He nods once, crisp and tight, and I can see him armouring up, the mask sliding into place, the walls rebuilding themselves brick by careful brick. “I will not be present for the tea. The aunties specifically requested you alone. This is by design. They want to evaluate you without my interference.”
“They’re separating us.”