“So, I’m Casey,” I say, and my voice comes out steady, the voice I use when I’m sitting on a hospital floor next to a scared kid who needs someone to be honest with them. “And I’m not great at speeches. I’m better at magic tricks, but I don’t thinkthat’s appropriate right now.” A small ripple of laughter. Kavita beams. “But I want you to know something about your Arjun. Something you might not know because he doesn’t let people see it.”
Arjun’s hand tightens, and I can sense his growing alarm. A warning. I hold on.
“The first time I saw Arjun work, he was in surgery for eight hours. A little boy, four years old, with something in his brain that shouldn’t have been there. And I watched him through the gallery window, and his hands never shook. Not once. Eight hours, and those hands were steady the entire time, and at the end of it, that little boy was going to grow up and go to school and fight with his siblings and do all the normal, messy, beautiful things that kids do, all because of him.”
The courtyard’s quiet. The lanterns flicker. Arjun isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at a point approximately three feet to the left of my head, and his jaw is locked, and the pink is rapidly climbing up the back of his neck toward his ears.
“But here’s the thing about your Arjun,” I continue, and my voice is gentler now. I’m not performing, I’m not executing a script, I’m just telling the truth, which is the only thing I’ve ever known how to do. “After that surgery, after eight perfect hours, he went to that little boy’s mother and he explained everything in medical terms that were completely accurate and completely incomprehensible, and the mother just started crying because she didn’t understand a word of it and she just wanted to know if her baby was okay.”
Tiny, startled laughter from several points in the crowd. Even Meera’s mouth twitches.
“And Arjun didn’t know what to do. He’s not great at the... the soft part. The messy, human, feelings part. He’s brilliant at the science. He’s the best surgeon I’ve ever met. But the soft part is hard for him, and that’s okay, because that’s what I’m for.”
I turn and look at him. He’s still staring at the point three feet to the left of my head, but his eyes are bright, too bright, and themuscle in his jaw is working, and his hand in mine is gripping so hard that my fingers are going white.
“I’m the guy who translates. I’m the guy who sits on the floor with the scared kids and does the magic tricks while Arjun does the impossible things. And I know...” My throat tightens. I swallow. Push through. “I know that the soft part’s hard for him. But I also know that underneath all that precision, underneath the composure and the perfect posture and the absolute refusal to eat a carbohydrate that doesn’t come wrapped in cellophane...”
More laughter. Louder this time. Casey Welling is killing at the Kapoor engagement party, which is a sentence I never anticipated existing in any timeline.
“...there is the kindest, most dedicated, most quietly extraordinary man I’ve ever met. And I’m really, really lucky that he picked me.”
The courtyard goes still.
I look at Arjun.
He looks back at me, his eyes blazing into mine.
His mask is gone. Not cracked, not slipping, gone. Completely, categorically gone. His green eyes are wide and bright and there’s an expression on his face that I’ve never seen before, an expression that’s not clinical and not controlled and not composed. He wears an expression that’s raw, shaking, and so full of something that it looks like he’s physically hurting to contain it, and he directs it entirely at me.
Three seconds. That’s what he gave himself in the bedroom, when he saw me in my suit. Three seconds of unguarded truth before the walls went back up.
He gives himself four this time.
Then he blinks, and the mask slides back into place, and he turns to the crowd and says, with exquisite composure, “Casey has a gift for understatement.”
The courtyard erupts. Laughter, applause, the clinking of champagne glasses raised in toast. The sitar starts up again. Kavita is openly weeping into a samosa. Sunita’s phone is in both hands,her thumbs a blur of activity that suggests the WhatsApp group is receiving a live, play-by-play transcript of the most emotionally ruining engagement speech in Kapoor family history. Daadi, from her chair, taps her cane once. Just once. I catch her eye. She nods.
From Daadi, one nod is a standing ovation.
We step off the platform, and the crowd swallows us. People are touching my arm, shaking my hand, telling me things in Hindi and English and combinations of both that I catch maybe half of but feel all of. An auntie I haven’t met cups my face in her hands and says something to Arjun that makes his ears go incandescent. His reaction makes me want to know exactly what she said to cause that, so I can catalogue it for future use.
Meera intercepts us near the rose arrangements. She is holding a champagne glass and her expression is the most complex I’ve ever seen on a human face: twelve emotions at once, none of them simple, all of them in negotiation with each other. She looks at me for a long moment.
“That was not rehearsed,” she says.
“No, ma’am.”
“Meera.”
“No, Meera.”
She takes a sip of her champagne. Something flickers behind her eyes, quick and deep, like a fish moving beneath dark water. “My son is not easy to know.”
“No. He’s not.”
“But you seem to know him.”
I hold her gaze. “I’m working on it.”