“I passed that exam.”
“You passed it because you’re a genius, not because you’re a good liar. You are the worst liar in this family, and in a family that includes Karan, who once tried to convince Daadi he hadn’t eaten an entire tray of barfi by hiding the empty tray behind a curtain while he still had powdered sugar on his face, that is saying something.”
I press my back against the corridor wall. The stone is cool through my shirt. Above me, an oil painting of my great-great-grandmother regards me with harsh eyes that look disturbingly like my own.
“The engagement is not real, Priya.”
The words leave my mouth before I can stop them. They just come out, flat and quiet and exhausted, in the way that confessions sometimes escape when a person has been holding them so tightly for so long that their grip simply fails.
Priya does not blink. She does not gasp. She does not look surprised, because Priya has not been surprised by anything I’ve done since approximately 2003.
“I know,” she says.
The corridor goes very still.
“You know?”
“Arjun. You showed up with a man you’ve never once mentioned, announced an engagement that allegedly began eight months ago without a single piece of photographic evidence, and tried to sell it to a family that has been professionally evaluating romantic prospects since before the British left India. Of course I know. I knew within the first four hours.” She pauses. “Daadi knew within the first four minutes, but that’s Daadi.”
I close my eyes. The cool stone presses against the back of my head. “How much does Mother know?”
“Mother suspects. She doesn’t know, because knowing would require her to admit she was outmanoeuvred, and Mother does not get outmanoeuvred. She prefers to operate on the assumptionthat reality will eventually bend to match her plans.” Priya’s voice softens, just slightly. “Arjun. Look at me.”
I open my eyes. My sister is standing in front of me, and her expression has changed. The sharp, prosecutorial intensity has eased into something warmer, something that I recognize from a thousand small moments across our childhood: the sister who sat outside my bedroom door when I cried after Father’s funeral. The sister who flew to Edinburgh for my medical degree graduation without telling anyone. The sister who has never, not once, not even during our worst arguments, stopped being on my side.
“If this engagement is fake,” she says quietly, “then you are doing a spectacular job of making it look real.”
“Priya, I am not sure if you are aware but that is the point of a deception.”
“No, Arjun. You are doing a spectacular job of making it look real because it is real. For you. I’ve watched you with him for days. You don’t look at an arrangement the way you look at Casey. You don’t count arm touches for a cover story. You don’t nearly break antique china because a man offered your colleague a mango.”
“It was an Alphonso mango. The provocation was?—”
“Arjun.” Her voice is gentle. Firm. A scalpel, not a sledgehammer. “Do you have feelings for him?”
The corridor is silent. Great-great-grandmother watches. The morning light is warm through the arched windows. Somewhere in the distance, I can hear the faint sound of Casey’s laugh, carried on the warm air from the breakfast table where Rohan is almost certainly touching his arm for the twelfth time.
“I have a crush,” I say, and the word sounds pathetic and inadequate and humiliatingly accurate. “I have had a crush on him for approximately two years. It is an inappropriate, unproductive, clinically unjustifiable infatuation that I have been managing through strict emotional compartmentalization, and the current situation has... compromised my viral containment protocols.”
Priya stares at me. Then she presses both hands over her face and lets out a sound that is half laugh and half groan, the sound ofa woman who has just had her most extreme suspicion confirmed and does not know whether to hug her brother or hit him with a shoe.
“Two years,” she says through her fingers. “You’ve had a crush on him for two years, and your solution to Mother trying to marry you off to Dev was to panic-name your crush as your fake fiancé and then drag him to Rajasthan.”
“When you phrase it like that, it sounds?—”
“It sounds like a terrible cliché Bollywood film, Arjun. It sounds like the most chaotic, emotionally repressed, magnificently idiotic Bollywood film ever written, and you are the hero, and you don’t even realize you’re the hero because you’re too busy counting arm touches and pretending the mango was the problem.”
She drops her hands. She looks at me with those shrewd eyes that miss nothing, and then she does something that surprises me. She steps forward and wraps her arms around me.
I stand very still. I am not accustomed to being hugged. I am not accustomed to physical contact that I have not pre-approved. But Priya is small and warm and she smells like the perfume she’s worn since she was seventeen, and she is holding me with the fierce, unshakeable grip of a sister who has watched her brother build walls for years and is tired of standing outside them.
“You need to figure out what you want,” she says against my shoulder. “Not what’s safe. Not what’s diplomatic. Not what can be managed, or compartmentalized, or filed in a leather notebook. What you actually want.” She pulls back and looks up at me. “Because that man is not a variable, Arjun. He is a person. A really good, really kind, really stupidly gorgeous person who is currently sitting at a breakfast table letting another man flirt with him, and the fact that he hasn’t flirted back even once should tell you everything you need to know.”
The corridor is quiet. The ancestors watch. My throat is so tight I cannot speak.
“And if you waste this,” Priya says, “if you let him walk awaybecause you’re too afraid to stop performing and start being honest, I will personally call Daadi, and she will come for you with that cane, and I will hold the door open for her. Are we clear?”
“We are clear,” I whisper.