My eyes are doing something inconvenient. I blink. I press my hand against my face. I’m not going to cry at a festival in front of Arjun's younger brother, because I’m a grown man and a medical professional and I have a reputation for unflappable emotional stability that I’ve maintained across two continents.
“Also,” Yash adds, grinning, “I've seen all of the WhatsApp group coverage. Sunita's account of Rohan offering you a mango at breakfast while Arjun nearly shattered a teacup has been analyzed from fourteen different angles. She wrote an essay. It had subheadings.”
I laugh. The laugh breaks something open, something that was tight and heavy in my chest, and the night air rushes in, lively and jasmine-scented and full of music, and the world feels bigger and simpler than it did five minutes ago.
Yash stands. He brushes samosa crumbs from his kurta. “Go find my brother,” he says. “He's been looking for you since the festival started. He's terrible at festivals. He stands at the edge and calculates the fire hazard potential of the diyas. He needs someone to make him dance.”
“I'm a terrible dancer.”
“Perfect. So is he. You can be terrible together; it will be amusing for all around you.”
He claps my shoulder once more, gives me a grin that’s so happy and uncomplicated it makes me miss my own family (even Cousin Mike) with a fierceness that takes my breath away, and disappears into the crowd.
I find Arjun at the edge of the festival, exactly where Yash said he would be.
He’s standing near the garden wall, slightly apart from the crowd, a glass of nimbu pani in his hand, his white kurta luminous in the lantern light. He’s watching the festival the way he watches everything: with clinical precision, cataloguing thedetails, assessing the variables, standing on the outside of joy and studying it like a specimen.
He sees me coming. His green eyes find me across the crowd, and the thing I've been watching for, the thing Yash described, happens. His shoulders drop. Not dramatically. Just a fraction. A release. The tension that he carries like scaffolding, that holds him rigid and upright and at arm's length from the world, eases by a measurable degree the moment I am in his field of vision.
I’m the thing that makes his shoulders drop.
I walk up to him. The music’s slower now, something gentle and winding. People are swaying together in the dim light, couples and families and friends, and the whole festival has softened into something intimate and golden.
“Hey, Doc.”
“Casey.” He takes a sip of his nimbu pani. His composure is immaculate. His hands are steady. His ears, I note with satisfaction, are already going slightly red, because my presence alone is now enough to trigger the response, and I find this deeply, profoundly gratifying. “You're covered in chaat.”
I look down. There is, indeed, a significant chutney stain on my kurta. And some crumbs. And what might be a smear of mango. I look like I’ve been to a festival, which is exactly correct.
“Dance with me,” I say. “Please.”
“Absolutely not.”
I step closer. Close enough that the hem of my kurta brushes against his. Close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off him in the evening air, that familiar, citrus-and-clean heat that I have memorized from a thousand small proximities. I reach out and take the glass from his hand, gently, and set it on the garden wall behind him. Then I take both of his hands. His surgeon's hands, narrow and henna-traced, resting in my big, blunt ones.
“Dance with me, Arjun. Please.”
“I do not dance. I have never danced at a family festival. I have attended these events since childhood and I have never once set foot on that dancefloor.”
“Then this is long overdue.”
“Casey, I am a neurosurgeon. I have a reputation. There are local politicians present. There are members of my extended family with smartphones and a direct line to the WhatsApp group. If I dance, Sunita will have video evidence within seconds. She has been documenting this trip with the dedication of a wartime correspondent. I will not give her more ammunition.”
“Good. Let her.”
He looks at me. I look at him. I’m holding both his hands and standing so close that our chests are nearly touching and the lanterns are flickering light across his face, and the jasmine is sweet and the night is warm and there are hundreds of people around us and none of them matter because right now, in this moment, there are only his green eyes and my hands around his and a question that I’m asking with my whole body: let me hold you, please.
I’m always waiting for this man. And he is always, eventually, reaching back.
He takes a breath, sharp and definite, the kind of breath he takes before a first incision. His fingers tighten around mine.
“One dance,” he says.
“One dance,” I agree, and I know, and he knows, that there won’t be just one.
I pull him into the crowd. The music is something I don't recognize, a melody that winds and climbs and falls like water over stone, and I don't know the steps, and he doesn't know the steps, and neither of us cares. I slide my hand from his fingers to his waist, pulling him close, and his hand comes up to my shoulder, and then we are chest to chest, my arm wrapped around him, his body pressed against mine in a way that is not pre-meditated and is not performed and is simply, completely, the two of us holding each other dancing in the middle of a festival because we want to.
He’s stiff at first. Rigid. His spine is a military-grade structural column and his hand on my shoulder is gripping hard enough to leave marks. But the music is patient, and I’m patient, and slowly, slowly, I feel him give. His spine softens.His grip eases. His body remembers what his brain has spent thirty-three years trying to override, which is that it feels good to move, and it feels better to move with someone, and it feels best of all to move with someone whose arm is wrapped around your waist and whose heartbeat you can feel through the thin cotton.