“I knocked,” Priya tells the ceiling.
“You did not knock?—”
“I knocked spiritually. In my heart. I knocked with my soul, and my soul was, apparently, not loud enough to penetrate whatever the two of you were doing at nine-fifteen in the morning, which, I will note, is a perfectly reasonable hour at which to expect a person to be vertical and dressed?—”
“Priya.”
“I am leaving now. I am leaving without lowering my gaze, because lowering my gaze is no longer an option available to me in this lifetime. Mother has called a family gathering in the main drawing room at ten. Pandit-ji is here. Get dressed. Both of you.Fully.I want layers. I want sleeves. I want the kind of coverage one wears to meet a head of state.”
She begins backing toward the door, eyes still locked on the ceiling, one hand groping behind her for the handle. She finds the wall. She slides along the wall. She finds the doorframe. She slides along thedoorframe.
“Ten o'clock,” she says. “Drawing room. Clothes.So many clothes.”
She finds the handle. She pulls. She backs through the doorway with the careful, blind precision of a woman defusing a bomb, and the door clicks shut behind her, and somewhere on the other side of it she makes a small, strangled sound that might be a laugh and might be a sob and is almost certainly both.
The silence she leaves behind is comprehensive.
I look down at my pillows. The pillows haven’t improved in her absence. I drop them.
“Well,” I say.
Arjun is staring at the closed door. The sheet has, at some point in the last thirty seconds, migrated again. He doesn't seem to notice.
“Your leg,” I tell him.
“What about my leg.”
“Both of them, actually.”
He looks down. He sighs. He performs a final, weary sheet-adjustment even as he surrenders to the fundamental untrustworthiness of textiles.
“She is going to tell Yash,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Yash is going to tell Karan.”
“Yes.”
“By lunch, the aunties?—”
“Will know everything. Yes.”
Then Arjun goes rigid beside me. Not the gradual stiffening of a man waking into anxiety. An instantaneous, full-body lock, the kind I've felt from him a dozen times before, the reflexive armour-up that happens when the Kapoor machine activates.
“Pandit-ji,” he says.
“Remind me again, who’s Pandit-ji?”
“The family astrologer.”
I sit up. “The one your mom used to check your star charts with Dev?”
“The same one. He has been on retainer with my family for decades. He declared Dev and me 'magnificently compatible' based on a birth chart analysis that my mother almost certainly paid him to produce.” Arjun is already out of bed, pulling on clothes with the rapid, efficient movements of a man preparing for surgery. “If my mother has brought him here now, with our relationship publicly established, it is because she intends to use him.”
“Use him how?”
Arjun stops. He is standing in the middle of the guest suite, half-dressed, his curls still a mess from sleep and other activities, and his eyes when they find mine are flat and hard and afraid.