She holds my gaze for one more second. Then she turns to Arjun, reaches up, and adjusts the lapel of his emerald jacket with a quick, precise movement that is so automatic, so deeply maternal, that it cuts through every layer of strategy and performance and lands on something underneath that is just a mother touching her son’s collar.
“Eat something,” she says to him. “Both of you. You’re too thin.”
She walks away. Arjun watches her go, and his expression is something I can’t read, something private and complicated.
“Your mom just told me I’m too thin,” I say. “No one has ever said that to me before.”
“That is a Kapoor term of endearment,” Arjun says quietly. “It means she is feeding you. Feeding is accepting, at least for the moment.”
“So I passed?”
“You went off script, Casey. You stood on a platform in front of seventy-two members of my family and delivered an unrehearsed speech about my bedside manner and my relationship with cellophane-wrapped carbohydrates.”
“Well yeah. But did I pass though?”
He looks at me. The party’s swirling around us, music and laughter and candlelight and the heavy, sweet perfume of jasmine and roses. His eyes are steady, and in them I see the mask, firmly back in place, and underneath it, like light through a crack, the thing he showed me on the platform that I’m already beginning to crave. The unguarded, shaking, four-second truth.
“You were adequate,” he says.
And then, so quietly that I almost miss it under the sitar music, he adds: “Profoundly adequate.”
I grin at him so hard my face hurts.
The party continues around us, emerald and gold and seventy-two Kapoors and the heavy, sweet Rajasthani night, and my hand’s still in his, and he hasn’t let go, and I don’t think he is planning to. I know that somewhere in this crowd, Auntie Sunita is typing the words ‘profoundly adequate’ into the family WhatsApp group and an entire dynasty is losing its collective mind.
Chapter 13
The Kapoor Kitchen
Arjun
It is 1:47 a.m. and I am standing in the corridor outside the guest suite in my pyjamas, barefoot on cold marble, having a silent negotiation with my own stomach.
The stomach is winning.
My mother’s engagement party catering was, by any objective measure, extraordinary. There were seven courses. There were appetizers that had their own appetizers. There was a dessert table that stretched the length of the courtyard wall and included a chocolate fountain that my cousin Karan, who has never met a source of chaos he didn’t immediately befriend, nearly fell into while reaching for a second dipping skewer. The food was abundant, and everywhere, and I ate almost none of it because I was too busy maintaining a flawless performance of romantic composure in front of seventy-two relatives while my fake fiancé delivered an off-script speech that dismantled my emotional architecture in real time.
The result: I am hungry. Not mildly peckish or gently inconvenienced. I am the specific kind of hungry that comes from twelve hours of sustained psychological crisis on an empty stomach.The particular kind of hungry that wakes you from a dead sleep at nearly two in the morning and informs you, with the blunt authority of a biological imperative, that if you do not eat something in the next thirty minutes, your body is going to start making choices you will regret.
The palace kitchen is on the ground floor, at the end of a long corridor that runs past the drawing room, through the service wing, and into a sprawling, high-ceilinged space that is, during the day, the operational heart of the Kapoor estate’s hospitality machine. At night, it should be empty. The staff retire by eleven. The kitchen is locked, but I know where the key is kept. I have been stealing food from this kitchen since I was nine years old, which is the first and possibly only act of rebellion I committed before the age of twenty-two, when I brought my first boyfriend home to meet my mother.
Trevor lasted eleven hours. He was a perfectly pleasant junior barrister from Cambridge with excellent manners and a firm handshake and no capacity to withstand a Meera Kapoor dinner interrogation. She asked him about his five-year plan, his pension contributions, and his views on the astrological implications of a Gemini-Scorpio pairing, and he excused himself to the bathroom and climbed out of a ground-floor window. I found his apology text the next morning. It contained the phrase “your family is a lot.”
After Trevor, there was James, who made it to day two before developing a stress migraine during high tea. And David, who held on for an admirable four days until Auntie Sunita cornered him in the garden and asked whether his parents’ divorce had been amicable and whether he had been screened for hereditary conditions. He drove himself to the airport without saying goodbye.
Three men, all during my first year at Cambridge. Three retreats. After David, I stopped bringing anyone home. It was simpler. It was safer. If no one meets the family, no one fails thefamily’s test, and I do not have to stand in the aftermath cataloguing the precise moment the light went out behind their eyes.
Casey, who has spent the better part of a week enduring everything this family has thrown at him and has not so much as flinched, is not relevant to this pattern. The fact that he has outlasted Trevor, James, and David combined is a statistical observation, not a meaningful comparison. The fact that he held my hand in front of seventy-two relatives and his palm did not sweat is a physiological detail, not an admirable one. The fact that my mother called him “too thin” and he grinned like she had handed him a trophy is not endearing. It is a misreading of the social dynamics at play.
I am noting these things because I notice these things. It is a professional habit. It has no emotional significance whatsoever, and I am going to stop thinking about it now and focus on the fact that I am hungry and this kitchen has leftover lamb.
I am halfway down the corridor when I hear footsteps behind me. Large, unmistakable footsteps. The kind of footsteps that belong to a person who takes up an unreasonable amount of physical space and cannot move through a building without the building being aware of it.
“You’re sneaking,” Casey says.
I do not jump. I do not startle. I turn with the composed dignity of someone who was absolutely not creeping through his own family’s palace at two in the morning in bare feet.
“I am not sneaking. I am walking. In my own home. At a time of my choosing.”