“Standard interrogation protocol.”
“Your family uses interrogation protocol for tea.”
“My family uses interrogation protocol for everything.”
He says this as he’s standing in a beam of morning sunlight near the window, and it catches the green of his eyes and turns them luminous. His curls are perfectly styled, and his white linen shirt is pressed to within an inch of its life. He looks so beautiful and so tightly wound that I want to cross the three feet betweenus and put my hands on his shoulders and tell him that I will walk into a garden pavilion full of colour-coded aunties and eat whatever they put in front of me and answer every question with the full, honest, messy truth of who I am, because that is what he asked me for. There is nothing in this world I would not do for this man.
But, I don’t do any of that. I grab my nicest casual shirt from the suitcase, the blue linen one that my mom told me makes my eyes pop, and I head for the garden.
The garden pavilion is a covered, open-air structure with carved stone pillars and a canopy of bougainvillea so thick it filters the sunlight into a pink-tinged glow. There’s a low table at the centre, already laden with enough food to feed my entire residency class: plates of samosas, bowls of chutney, trays of mithai in every colour, a towering stack of something fried and golden that smells like heaven crossed with a spice market. Silver tea sets. Bone-china cups. Linen napkins folded into shapes that suggest someone on staff has a degree in textile origami.
And the aunties.
There are five of them, arranged around the table in a formation that I recognize immediately from the dossier’s “Standard Auntie Deployment Pattern.” They’re in beautiful, vibrant saris and salwar kameez. They’re all holding teacups. They’re all smiling at me with expressions ranging from genuinely warm to analytically predatory. The combined wattage of jewellery in this pavilion could power a small city.
Auntie Sunita is seated at the centre. She’s a compact woman in a gold and crimson sari, with sharp dark eyes that are already cataloguing my shirt, my shoes, my hair, and the approximate retail value of my watch (a thirty-dollar Casio my dad gave me when I was twelve that I’ve never taken off since he died). Her phone’s in her lap. Her thumbs are hovering over the keyboard in a state of loaded readiness.
Auntie Kavita’s to her right, a rounder, warmer-looking woman in deep purple who is already pushing a plate of samosastoward the edge of the table nearest my approaching trajectory, like a Venus flytrap baiting its mechanism.
And at the far end of the table, slightly separate, in a carved wooden chair that looks like it’s been there for a century, sits Daadi Nirindra.
She’s smaller than I expected. Stooped with age, her grey hair pulled back from a face that’s lined and weathered and striking, dominated by a pair of green eyes, Arjun’s green eyes I realize with a jolt, sharp and clear and merciless in their focus. She’s wearing a simple white cotton sari with a metallic grey border. Her hands rest on the silver top of a cane that she holds between her knees with the casual authority that she has been wielding for decades and has not once hesitated to use it on anyone who deserved it.
She doesn’t smile when she sees me. She tilts her head, studies me for three full seconds, and then turns to Sunita and says, in a voice dry as the Rajasthani sand, “He’s enormous. Good. Arjun needs someone who can reach the top shelf. The boy has been climbing on chairs his whole life and it’s undignified.” Sunita nearly chokes on her tea. And in that single, deadpan observation, I understand immediately what Arjun meant. This woman sees through everything, but she does it with the bone-dry wit of someone who has been alive for eighty years and has decided that the only reasonable response to the absurdity of her family is to be the funniest person in the room.
“Casey!” Sunita calls, waving me over with a hand that glitters with rings. “Come, come, sit! We are so excited to meet you properly. Tell us everything. How did you and Arjun meet? What attracted you first? His eyes? His brilliance? His complete inability to hold a normal conversation?”
The aunties titter. I grin, pulling up a cushioned stool that groans slightly under my weight. “All of the above, honestly.”
“Here, have a samosa.” Kavita pushes the plate into my hands with a force that doesn’t invite refusal. “You’re too thin.”
I’m six-foot-three and two hundred and twenty pounds. No one in the history of my existence has ever told me I’m too thin. Itake two samosas. They’re, predictably, the best samosas I’ve ever eaten. The pastry shatters and the filling is spiced lamb and potato and something aromatic that I can’t identify, and I make an involuntary sound of genuine pleasure that causes three aunties to exchange pleased glances.
“These are incredible,” I say, reaching for a third. “Who made them?”
“Kavita’s recipe,” Sunita says, and Kavita’s face performs an extraordinary transformation, cycling from suspicious assessment to barely concealed delight in approximately one-point-five seconds.
“It’s nothing,” Kavita says, pushing the entire plate toward me. “Old family recipe. You eat. You’re a doctor, you must work very long hours. I know Arjun works too many hours. He doesn’t eat properly when he is here. Does he eat properly in Canada?”
“He eats hospital cafeteria food wrapped in cellophane,” I say honestly. “I’ve been trying to fix that.”
“Hospital food!” Kavita throws her hands up. “This is what I told Meera. The boy is going to waste away in that Canadian winter eating plastic food. You must ensure to feed him properly, Casey.”
“I’m working on it.”
“He needs ghee. Good ghee. Not the store-bought nonsense. I will send you home with proper ghee.”
Sunita’s thumbs are moving. I can see them, a blur of motion in her lap, her phone tilted at an angle that suggests she’s live-reporting this conversation to an audience that I suspect includes every Kapoor on three continents.
“So, Casey,” another auntie interjects, a tall, elegant woman in turquoise whose name I recognize from the dossier as Radha. “What does a paediatric generalist do exactly? Is it like a real surgeon?”
The room shifts. Several aunties lean forward. This is the test, the same one Meera ran last night but from a differentangle. Not ‘is he good enough for Arjun’ but ‘does he even belong in the same profession.’
“Nah, I’m not a surgeon,” I say, keeping my voice light, my posture open. I take another samosa because Kavita is watching and I refuse to disappoint this gem of a woman. “Surgeons like Arjun, they fix the really complicated stuff. The things that need microscopes and twelve-hour operations and hands that don’t shake. What I do is everything else. I’m the first person a kid sees when they come through the ER doors. A broken arm at 2 a.m., a fever that won’t break, a six-year-old who swallowed a Lego firetruck.” I pause, because several aunties are smiling now. “My job is to make sure the kid is okay, the parents are okay, and if it’s something that needs a surgeon, to get them to the right one as fast as possible.”
“So you are the gatekeeper,” Daadi says.
The pavilion goes quiet. It’s the first time she’s spoken since her initial assessment, and her voice is low, clear, and accented with the precise, unhurried diction of someone who has never once wasted a word.