“She is going to have him declare us incompatible.”
The main drawing room is full when we arrive. Not the intimate family dinner arrangement. The full deployment. Every auntie, every uncle, every cousin who is currently on the estate. Meera has assembled an audience, because Meera does nothing without witnesses, and whatever is about to happen is meant to be seen.
Pandit-ji is seated at a low table near the windows. He is a small, thin man in his sixties with wire-rimmed glasses and a humble-looking white kurta, surrounded by charts and papers and what appears to be an astrolabe. He looks like a professor. He looks harmless. He looks like the kind of man who studies the stars because he loves them, not because he has been bribed to weaponize them.
Meera is in her wingback chair, teacup in hand, smile serene. She is wearing pale gold today, and the morning light catches the silk and turns her into something luminous and untouchable, and I can see the strategy in her posture the way you can see storm clouds building on a flat horizon: slowly, inevitably, with an understanding that what is coming cannot be stopped.
Dev is present, seated near the back. He had not left after all.At one point at the festival Rohan had told me that Dev chose to stay through the end of the visit out of respect for the family, not because he was still in the running but because leaving abruptly would have caused its own scandal, and Dev is too decent for that. His expression now is carefully neutral, but there is a tension in his jaw that suggests he was not informed about today's agenda and is not amused. Rohan is beside him, and for once, the charming menace is not charming. His dark eyes are hard and watchful and his jaw is set and he looks like a man who knows what is about to happen and does not approve in the slightest.
Priya is against the wall with her arms crossed and her notebook in her hand, and her expression is the one I have come to recognize as her combat face: lethal, controlled, and ready to deploy.
Daadi is in her chair. Her cane is between her knees. Her shrewd eyes are on Meera, and they do not contain a hint of warmth.
We walk in together. Arjun's hand finds mine as we cross the threshold, and his grip is tight, and I hold it, and I do not let go, and every person in the room sees us enter hand in hand, and the room goes very, very quiet.
“Ah, there you are, I was worried you would be late,” Meera says, her voice bright and sickly sweet. “Come in, come in. Pandit-ji has been doing some very interesting work.”
We sit on the settee. Side by side. Arjun's thigh pressed against mine. His hand still in mine, resting on his knee, visible, deliberate. His composure is immaculate. His mask is on. But underneath my fingers, his pulse is racing.
Pandit-ji adjusts his glasses and shuffles his papers. He clears his throat with the mild, apologetic manner of a man who is about to deliver bad news and wishes someone else were doing it.
“I have completed a comprehensive analysis of the astrological compatibility between Dr. Arjun Kapoor and Dr. Casey Welling,” he begins, his voice thin and reedy. “Using traditional Vedic methods, incorporating the Kundli charts, the Guna Milan scoringsystem, and a thorough assessment of planetary positions at the time of both births.”
He pauses. He looks at his papers. He does not look at Arjun or me.
“I regret to inform the family that the charts indicate a significant degree of... incompatibility.”
The room shifts. It is subtle. A collective intake of breath. A rustling of saris. Sunita's hand moves toward her phone.
“The Guna score is eleven out of thirty-six,” Pandit-ji continues, and his voice has the flat, recitative quality of a man reading from a script he did not write. “The minimum acceptable score for a harmonious union is eighteen. Additionally, there are unfavourable aspects between Mars and Saturn in the respective charts, indicating potential for conflict, instability, and...” He swallows. “Emotional discord.”
Emotional discord. The man who told me he loved me mere hours ago while shaking in my arms after saving a child is being told, by a hired astrologer reading from a script his mother paid for, that the stars say we are emotionally discordant.
I almost laugh. The absurdity of it is so complete, so comprehensive, so perfectly, magnificently ridiculous, that laughter is the only rational response. We are sitting in a drawing room in a palace, holding hands, with the taste of each other still on our lips, and an astrologer with an astrolabe is telling a room full of people that the planets have determined we don't work.
But I do not laugh, because beside me, Arjun is fracturing.
I can feel it happening. Not the visible fracture, not the kind that shows on the surface. The internal kind. The kind I've seen in the ER when a parent hears news they were expecting but not prepared for, when the body absorbs the impact and the face holds steady and everything underneath begins to crack.
His hand in mine has gone cold. His pulse, which was racing, has slowed to something controlled and deliberate, the emergency-override heartbeat that he uses in the operating room when the margins get critical. His jaw is locked. His eyes arefixed on a point in the middle distance, focused on nothing, seeing nothing, because everything he is seeing is internal.
He is watching his mother win.
Not through a dinner confrontation. Not through a politician or a visa threat. Through the one weapon he cannot fight with logic: tradition. Family. The ancient, deep-rooted authority of a system that has been telling Kapoors who to love for centuries, a system that he left India to escape, and that has just followed him into the one relationship where he finally stopped running.
“The charts further indicate,” Pandit-ji continues, and each word sounds like it costs him something, “that the union would be deeply unfavourable for both families, and that the recommended course of action is to... reconsider the arrangement.”
Reconsider the arrangement. Meera's phrase, filtered through an astrologer, given the cosmic authority of planetary positions and thousand-year-old scoring systems. A scientific man is being told that science doesn't matter, that the universe itself has voted, and that the vote is against him.
Meera doesn’t rush. Meera never rushes. She lets Pandit-ji's verdict settle over the room like dust, and only when the silence has thickened to her satisfaction does she speak.
“Thank you, Pandit-ji. Your guidance to this family has been, as always, illuminating.” She folds her hands in her lap. The rings catch the light. “Then I think it falls to me, as the head of this household, to acknowledge what has been said.”
She looks at Arjun. Not at me. At Arjun. The look isn’t unkind. That’s, somehow, what makes it terrible.
“We will, of course, need to re-evaluate. There are letters that have not yet gone out. They will not go out. The announcement to the community and extended family can be quietly withdrawn.” Her voice is perfectly even, the voice of a woman reading the minutes of a meeting that has already adjourned. “We owe the Kapoor name a careful exit. Discreet, dignified, and above all, final. I have already spoken to Anjali Mehra about the Bhatnagarboy in Bombay. He has expressed interest in meeting before the end of the calendar year. The astrological compatibility is, I am told, exceptional.”
Beside me, Arjun stops breathing. I feel it. Not metaphorically. His ribs, against my shoulder, stop moving.