When Arjun isn’t this, he falls asleep on your shoulder on planes and his face goes soft and his hand finds your sleeve. When he isn’t this, he argues with you about dinosaur movies and compliments the animatronic jaw structure and you watch his eyes go wide during the T-Rex scene and it's the most beautiful thing you've ever witnessed. When he isn’t this, he counts the number of times another man touches your arm and pretends it'sclinical observation and nearly shatters a teacup over an admittedly delicious mango. When he isn’t this, he sneaks into the kitchen at two in the morning because he forgot to eat at his own engagement party and he watches you cook Laal Maas with an expression that makes your entire chest cavity reorganize itself. When he isn’t this, he holds your hand in the dark and his fingers stop shaking and you understand that you’re the only place, outside of the operating room, where this man's hands are still, and the weight of that is staggering and sacred and the best thing you have ever been trusted with.
I can’t say any of this. Not to Dev. Not to the man who wanted what I have and was too decent to fight me for it.
“He's quieter,” I say. “He's funny, actually. Accidentally funny. He doesn't mean to be, which is what makes it so good. He's...” I pause. I take a sip of chai. “He's the most exhausting person I've ever met, and also the most worth it.”
Dev nods. He looks at the garden. He takes a sip of his own chai.
“I knew,” he says quietly. “At that dinner in London. Three years ago. We spent the whole evening arguing about beta-blockers, and I thought...” He pauses. A rueful, self-aware smile crosses his face. “I thought it was romantic chemistry. Intellectual sparring. I thought there was something there. But Arjun left the next morning and I didn't hear from him for three years, and when Meera called and said he'd agreed to an engagement dinner, I told myself it was a second chance.”
He looks at me. His dark eyes are steady and clear.
“It wasn't a second chance,” he says. “It was Meera. It was always Meera. He never agreed to anything.”
“Dev...”
“It's alright.” He says it with a quietness that isn’t defeated. It’s the quietness of a man who has been sitting with a truth for longer than he wants to admit and has made his peace with it. “I saw you two at dinner last night. The hand on his back. The way he leans toward you. The way his entire...” He searches for theword, his surgeon's words failing him for once. “His entire frequency changes when you're in the room. I've never seen him like that. Not at our dinner. Not in any version of Arjun I've encountered.”
My throat feels tight. My chai is getting cold. Oliver is now asleep on Mrs. Kasparian's sofa, his enormous golden body stretched across three cushions, and the video call has been forgotten because I’m sitting on a stone bench in a garden in Rajasthan having the most unexpectedly difficult conversation of my life with the man I am supposed to be competing with, but who I can only feel sympathy for.
“He's lucky,” Dev says. “And I think you probably are too.”
He finishes his chai. He stands and straightens his linen shirt with the neat, exact movements, as if he is quietly closing a chapter, and he extends his hand.
I take it. His handshake is firm and brief.
“For what it's worth,” he says, “you're not what I expected.”
“A six-foot-three Canadian who can't play polo?”
“A good man.” He pauses. “The kind of good man that Arjun has needed for a very long time and that his family, who have been too busy looking for the perfect candidate, didn’t notice was already there.”
He walks back toward the estate, his linen trousers catching the morning light, his posture straight and composed. He does not look back.
I sit on the bench. I hold the empty chai cup. I stare at the fountains and the flowers and the immaculate, beautiful, suffocating grounds of the Kapoor estate, and I let myself feel the thing I've been holding at arm's length since Dev arrived.
I’m afraid.
Not of Dev. It’s clear to me now that Dev isn’t a threat. Dev is a good man who has just quietly, gracefully removed himself from a race he was never actually in, and I respect him for it with a depth that surprises me.
I’m afraid of this. All of this. The estate and the family andthe social machinery and the sheer, overwhelming weight of what it means to be chosen by Arjun Kapoor. Because being chosen by Arjun means being chosen to join a world that doesn’t fit me. A world of heirloom silver and seating charts and astrologers and aunties with WhatsApp surveillance networks. A world where a gift shop in Huntsville is a footnote and a paediatric generalist is an asymmetry.
I’ve been so focused on getting through, on winning over the aunties and surviving the interrogations and navigating the polo matches and being cheerful and present and unflappable, that I haven't let myself sit with the bigger question: what happens when we go home?
When the performance ends and the estate disappears and we’re back in Toronto, in my cluttered apartment in Kensington Market with Oliver and the Uncrustables and I go back to the ER with the purple pom-pom pen. When Arjun goes back to his hundred-hour weeks and his supposedly pristine condo and his surgical schedule, and I go back to the ER floor, and the distance that collapsed in Rajasthan has to hold in a Canadian winter. When Meera's expectations follow us across an ocean, and the Kapoor name carries its weight, and I’m just a guy from Huntsville who eats terrible food and does magic tricks for children.
Is that enough?
Am I enough?
The question sits in my chest like a stone. It’s the first time I’ve let it fully form, and it’s heavier than I expected.
I look at my phone. Oliver is still asleep. Mrs. Kasparian appears to be knitting something in the background, as I hear her humming to herself. The screen is a window into my normal life, my real life, the life that exists seven thousand kilometres from sandstone palaces and silk saris, and it looks small. It looks impossibly, heartbreakingly small.
I put the phone down on my lap, and press my hands over my face. I breathe.
My mom's voice, in my head, steady and sure: You call me. Every day you're there. If things get rough, you call me.
Things are rough, Ma. Things are rough in a way I didn't see coming, because the rough part isn't the family or the culture or the astrologer. The rough part is that I love someone who comes from a world I will never fully belong to, and the question isn't whether he loves me back. I know he loves me back. I've known it since the terrace, since the polo field, since a pair of green eyes held mine at a breakfast table while his hand found mine under the cloth.