ArHi FanFic - The Court of Nawab Malik - Ch06 Posted 16/07 - Page 3

Originally posted by: coderlady

Oh the first meeting. He certainly had fun disparaging himself in front of her. He had no clue who she was and why she wanted to know what he is like. In a matter of hours, things will take a turn.

Thank you for always sharing your thoughts. You are the only reason I continue posting the story here.

MF

It was like a group of vultures zeroed in. They could possibly guess what was going on and were jealous. They tried to put the family down and Khushi fought through.

She held up well against a room full of people who just wanted to run her to the ground.

Aman is a wise man. Those guys were totally out of line, but he is right that they should not show a reaction. Doing that will be unwise. In time they will be taught their lessons.

Why were they presented in the court and not privately for the first meeting? Did dadi begum want to see how Khushi will hold up?

Originally posted by: coderlady

Why were they presented in the court and not privately for the first meeting? Did dadi begum want to see how Khushi will hold up?

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. This is a good question, actually, something I hope to answer soon.

CHAPTER 06 - UNFURLING OF ROSES

Nargis had been moving through the chamber like a woman pursued by invisible consequences, straightening folds of clothes that did not need straightening, opening boxes only to close them again, speaking under her breath in little bursts that were both prayers and laments. Anxiety seemed to hang around her like a cloud.

“Perhaps the blue silk would have been better,” she murmured to herself.

Khushi looked up from her place by the window, where she had been watching the birds. “For the meeting yesterday?”

“I think, in general, blue suits you better.”

“Bhabhi, the meeting has already happened.”

“Which is why I am saying perhaps it should have been different.”

Khushi stared at her. Nargis sighed, twisting the edge of her dupatta between restless fingers. “You do not understand.”

“I understand that the meeting cannot be changed now.”

“That is not what I mean.”

Of course it was not. She meant the overwhelming collection of fears beneath it. The possibility that a single expression, a single answer, a single moment of hesitation could have shifted the direction of an entire future.

“What possessed you?” Nargis asked at last. “You argued with the Nawab in front of everyone.”

“And he argued back.”

Which, somehow, had only made matters worse.

Abbas had been no calmer.

He had alternated between praising her intelligence, lamenting it, and suppressing the urge to tear out his own hair.. “You answered too well, though you should have answered less. Now they will all remember you.”

Abbas had tried, for longer than his temper naturally permitted, to answer her in a reasonable tone. He had failed and was now lying across the chaise with one arm flung over his face.

Poor Abbas. She thought and refrained herself from answering. He had probably spent the last hour imagining impeccably polite letters arriving in Faizabad.

After careful consideration…

Circumstances have changed…

The proposal cannot proceed…

By the time Khushi rose from the low seat by the window, asked to be excused the moment her room began to feel oppressive.

“I am going to walk for a little while,” she announced.

Nargis looked up at once. “Now?”

“Only in the garden.”

Abbas spoke without uncovering his face. “Which flowers have offended you now? Or have you decided the Nawab’s gardener needs enlightenment as well? By the time you’re through, I expect the poor fellow will be asking for leave, a higher wage, and lecturing us all about his rights.”

Nargis shot him a look sharpened by frayed nerves. “This is not the time.”

Before either of them could continue, Sana entered with a bundle of fresh linens over her arm. Her expression open and expectant for any new instructions. Khushi crossed to her. “If it is allowed,” Khushi said gently, ignoring her cousin. “I would like a little air. Alone, if possible.”

Sana hesitated only long enough for household training to protest. Then she dipped her head. “The garden is nearest, Khushi Bibi. Through the second passage, then the smaller courtyard with the stone bench. It is quiet there at this time.” She kept the folded linens in the armoire and clasped her hands together. “I will remain nearby if you need me.”

“Thank you, Sana.”

She slipped out before Nargis could object or Abbas find another remark. Khushi knew Abbas, he carried responsibility until it became indistinguishable from his personality. He had spent years managing accounts, negotiations, relatives, and every crisis that arrived at their door. He could charm a merchant into patience and convince an elder that an inconvenient truth had somehow been their own idea.

But he could not negotiate with uncertainty of the future.

No one could.

The rose garden was smaller than the great inner courts and more intimate for it, enclosed by pale walls softened by climbing vines, hidden from the busiest parts of the household. The roses grew without theatrical arrangement. Some climbed the trellises freely, others leaned over pathways as though they had forgotten they were meant to remain within their boundaries. Some roses had opened heavily in the heat, petals loosening at the edges; others were still tight-fisted, holding themselves in reserve. The air was thick with the layered perfume of tea rose, musk, something citrus-bright beneath it until breathing it felt almost like drinking.

It felt less like a garden created for admiration and more like one preserved for something. Khushi wandered slowly between the rows of pink blooms.

Is this how it ends?

Without obvious insult, outrage or grand scandal. Simply with a cooling of interest, a measured civility, a letter composed in excellent handwriting, full of regret and respect and reasons that would injure no one publicly while wounding everyone privately.

The proposal will not proceed. Citing circumstances, considerations and unsuitability discovered after reflection.

She could already hear the voices of the women in Faizabad.

There were always one or two, who would click their tongues and say fate had its own wisdom, but the others, the ones who lived on the thin sweet meat of other people’s disappointment and misery. They would lower their voices while ensuring everyone heard.

Shafiq Farooqui educated his daughter too much. Books are excellent until they make women forget their place. A girl’s tongue is a dangerous thing if no one teaches her where to stop. Such a fine match, and she ruined it.

She closed her eyes, pressing her fingertips against her temples as an ache began to build.

The cruelty of it was not that they would say she had failed, it was that they would say her parents had. As though their love had been a mistake. That teaching his daughter to think had been an indulgence her father ought to have resisted.

She thought of her father reading by lamplight, spectacles low on his nose, making space for her beside him without once behaving as though her presence was unwelcoming. She thought of her mother, who had never been a loud woman and therefore understood better than most how much discipline it took to say exactly what one meant. She thought of the journey, the careful packing, the instructions beside the sunset, the hesitant hope no one had dared name too plainly.

None of them had treated this like a market bargain, but all the same it had weight. A family did not come this far for nothing.

Her throat tightened.

If she failed here, it would not remain hers alone. It would travel home before she did.

And beneath that immediate fear, lay another more dangerous, one she had scarcely permitted herself to examine too closely.

If she did not fail, if all of this proceeded like intended, if the letters became arrangements, if arrangements became permanance – could she really do it?

Could she really marry a Nawab and survive the handling?

She lowered herself onto the stone border and looked at a rose whose petals had deepened at the center to a bruised crimson. Marriage was spoken of so often as arrival, but for women like her, it was also translation. A movement from one language of self into another, and not all translations protected the original intact. She had seen it happen frequently. Cousins who laughed loudly before marriage and afterwards smiled with care. Women who once argued politics over dinner and later spoke only in socially approved portions. The change was never sudden, it was custom, repetition, the thousand invisible pressures of a household deciding what sort of woman it could comfortably contain.

Could she be made into his wife until everything unruly in her was softened, corrected, worn down?

Her mind returned unwillingly to the many drawing rooms and petition halls where she had stood at thresholds or sat behind screens and watched men diminish by instinct what they could not dismiss by argument. A woman’s observation repeated by a man and suddenly accepted. A woman’s intelligence treated as a novelty until it threatened someone, at which point it became impertinence. She knew those rooms and how quickly a single act could cease to belong to the individual and begin reflecting upon an entire household.

If she became his wife, nothing she did would remain merely hers. Every act of silence, every answer, every misstep, every glance, all of it would be read in light of him. The Nawab’s wife spoke thus. The Nawab’s wife failed thus. The Nawab allows this. The Nawab cannot govern that.

Can I live like that?

Can anyone live honestly like that and not break somewhere inside?

And what did she even know of him? Two meetings, and both useless in opposite directions. The man in the garden had been amusing, unexpectedly kind, capable of absurdity with a straight face so convincing that she had believed him entirely. The memory of his invented description of ruined teeth and charitable portraits made reluctant amusement despite herself.

He had beautiful eyes, she thought with immediate annoyance at herself, Poets had probably squandered oceans of ink describing his face and that infuriating mouth which seemed incapable of smiling fully and it seemed to have an habit of speaking as though every sentence had a second one folded beneath it. Ill-timed jokes, certainly. Too much composure and ease. But there had been warmth in him.

The Nawab in the formal room had been someone else again. Controlled. Intelligent. Sharp. He had worn authority like armor. He looked at her as though he preferred to arrive at conclusions slowly, and then, from time to time, said something so unexpected she could never decide whether he was testing her, amusing himself, or both.

Was there one man in there or two? Or, had she only been foolish enough to show versions of herself and imagine the same liberty in him?

A soft rustle came from the path behind her.

Khushi turned.

An older woman stood a little way off, a wicker basket balanced against her hip. Her dupatta was pinned with neatness, and her wrists were bare except for one thin bronze bangle worn so long it seemed part of her. She had the face that had seen everything from crises, births, feuds, and recoveries.

“I beg your pardon, Bibi,” she said. “I did not mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t.” Khushi straightened and rose from her position. “I should apologize. I came here without asking whose garden this was.”

The woman smiled a little. “In this house, if one waited to discover who each corner belonged to, one would never sit anywhere. I am Rehana.”

Khushi introduced herself as well. “You look after the roses?”

“I help them survive us.” Rehana set down her basket and began, with almost ceremonial care, to pinch away a spent bloom. “People like to admire flowers. Fewer people like the work of keeping them alive once admiration passes.”

Khushi watched her fingers move nimbly. “They are beautiful.”

“They are also stubborn.” Rehana glanced up.

“Then perhaps I should admire them even more.”

“You should.” Rehana nodded toward the winding path. “Come, dear child. Let us walk a little. Roses make people melancholy if they sit among them for too long.”

Khushi fell into step beside her. For a while there was only the sound of skirts against gravel and the occasional distant sounds from another courtyard.

At last Rehana said, “You are the Farooqui girl.”

“I am.”

“And you think too much.”

That startled Khushi before she could prevent it. “Is it so visible?”

“To anyone old enough.” Rehana bent to tie a wayward stem back against its support. “Young people believe their thoughts live inside them hidden. They do not. They walk around wearing them.”

Khushi lowered her gaze. “Then I am wearing very impolite ones.”

“No. Only frightened ones.” Rehana’s voice remained gentle. “Fright is no disgrace. It is merely unproductive. You are wondering what was decided about you before anyone has told you anything,” Rehana continued. “You are imagining journeys home, conversations in drawing rooms and every possible humiliation in the order most likely to hurt you.”

Khushi felt heat climb into her face. “I did not know I was so transparent.”

“Not transparent exactly. Human.” Rehana looked at her. “Old houses test patience but they also test persistence.”

They came to a cluster of pale apricot roses, their petals almost translucent in the lowering light.

“These nearly died three summers ago,” Rehana said. “Blight first, then too much rain. Everyone said pull them up, the roots are gone, begin again. But the roots were not gone. Only injured. There is a difference, if one cares to learn it.”

Khushi touched one petal with the back of her finger. “And if one doesn’t care?”

“Then one loses good things too early.”

Rehana busied herself with the basket, then said, as though the it had only just occurred to her, “The Nawab Sahib comes here himself sometimes, early or late when no one sensible is about. He tends the roses badly at first and well by the end of it. His mother planted the roses and she preferred pink. He says those are more difficult and therefore worth the trouble.”

Khushi’s surprise must have shown.

Rehana’s mouth curved. “You cannot imagine him with soil on his hands?”

“No,” Khushi admitted. “I don’t think I can.”

“Most people imagine titles first and people second. It causes mistakes.” Rehana looked past her for a moment, toward somewhere that Khushi could not know. “There are matters here no one speaks of openly. There are names that remain where they are placed and are spoken about. Sometimes the past survives best by being allowed to rest.”

His parents?

Rehana did not confirm it. “Past is past,” she said simply and began moving again. “The present must remain untouched.”

Khushi understood the boundary and did not press it.

When Rehana spoke again, it was with deliberate lightness. “If you are determined to distress yourself, do it after Lunch. Everything seems more reasonable on a full stomach and if you must wander, avoid the southern verandah after dusk. It convinces people they are being haunted.”

Khushi smiled despite herself. “I will take the warning seriously.”

“You should. This house has enough ghosts without borrowing new ones.”

Rehana moved away down the path, pausing only once to adjust a stem here and there. Khushi remained where she was, breathing in the roses, feeling her mind settle into order.

Persistence, she thought to herself. It had many shades.

She would not wait helplessly to be chosen or dismissed. She could not agonize over the her fate from a glance. The only thing she could do was to hold herself steady until the truth of the matter declared itself.

There was no comfort in it, that in her opinion, always belonged between pages of books. Drawing a slow breath, she turned back with the intention of finding Sana and accepting the invitation to the library, wherever it happened to be.

The library occupied a long, high-ceilinged chamber in the quieter wing of the haveli.

Arnav had come there more out of habit more than intention. He often found himself drawn toward shelves and books. The dry familiar scent of leather, glue, dust, and old ink surrounded him and the room steadied him. It had belonged first to his ancestors and then to itself. Persian chronicles beside English travelogues, legal texts crowding poetry, farm ledgers sharing shelf space with illuminated manuscripts. In old houses, knowledge was rarely orderly. It grew wherever someone cared enough to preserve it.

He had not expected to find anyone there.

For a moment, from the doorway, he saw only the curve of a figure by the far shelves and the pale gold of late light lying across the reading table. Then she turned slightly, a book in her hand, and recognition came with a swiftness that annoyed him for its force.

Khushi Farooqui.

Aman had left a note on his desk the previous morning informing him that the Farooqui family would be visiting officially. Daadi Begum had arranged the meeting in the central receiving room. He had read the note, set it aside, and returned to the day’s petitions. He had not connected the note later to the girl from the garden until she had walked through the receiving room doors.

This was, he acknowledged to himself in the library, an oversight on his part. Aman had been delivering information for years and the information had always been important. What had been insufficient was his own attention, he thought in terms of textile merchant, business connection, formal meeting. He had glanced at it partially. Another family. Another prospective alliance in a life already over-furnished with practical possibilities.

He had assumed, because he had been careless enough to assume, that the girl involved would be like so many he had met under such circumstances. Demure, instructed, anxious not to offend, speaking only when directly spoken to and in those polished agreeable phrases that concealed personality more efficiently than purdah ever could. Pleasant. Polite. Entirely impossible to know.

Then he had looked up in the receiving room and found the woman from the garden seated beneath everyone’s scrutiny, answering with caution and wit, meeting his gaze as though she had not spent half the afternoon believing him to be an impertinent household official.

And then they argued. He had found himself genuinely engaged, different from the professional deployment of intellectual authority. The engagement had felt unfamiliar. Like discovering a neglected muscle still capable of strength.

He had not decided why the memory still intrigued him.

At present, she had not yet seen him.

She stood at the section where poetry and essays had been allowed to intermingle by the sort of classification system only families understood, one finger tucked between the pages of the book she held open. Her brow was faintly furrowed with concentration, as though the world had withdrawn a few paces and left only the page before her illuminated.

He ought to announce himself plainly.

What he did instead was step forward and say, “If you continue standing in that corner much longer, the Persian poets will assume you intend to choose among them.”

She turned at once. Surprise crossed her face first, then recognition, before her features settled into thoughtful caution.

“I thought poets preferred unrequited affection.”

“Only when they’re writing about it.”

That brought the smallest change to her mouth, almost a smile. She closed the book around her finger and inclined her head. “That seems unfair.”

“Why?”

“Because they cannot defend themselves.”

“On the contrary.” He folded his hands behind his back. “They have been defending themselves for centuries. People are still arguing with them.”

She looked down at the book in her hand. “And losing?”

“Frequently.”

She looked at him with that same alert, faintly skeptical expression he was beginning to find disproportionately compelling. It occurred to him that if he did not correct the absurdity of their first meeting now, the moment would continue to lengthen between them awkwardly.

“I owe you an apology,” he said, sincerely without strain. “I should have introduced myself in the garden. It was discourteous.”

She seemed briefly taken aback by the directness. “You did not know who I was.”

“No,” he said. “But you did not know who I was either, and somehow you still managed to be properly civil.”

That did it; the smile arrived fully, though she lowered it almost at once. “Properly civil is a generous account of my confusion.”

“For what it is worth.” He came nearer the table but kept a respectful distance. “I had no notion that the woman trying to negotiate terms with a peacock was the guest I was expected to receive formally two hours later.”

“I was not negotiating. I was attempting diplomacy.”

“With worse odds, perhaps.”

“Considerably.”

She seemed to be going over his apologize, silently examining it, trying to find if it was proper, if it was enough. Silence settled for a moment, but it was not an uncomfortable kind. The library seemed to contain such pauses well, holding them closely. Then to whatever conclusion she arrived, she nodded her acceptance without a word.

Arnav glanced at the volume in her hand. “Kulliyat-e-Mir.”

Her fingers tightened slightly on the binding, as though she had been caught. “I saw the edition from across the room. I couldn’t resist.”

“Then your taste is melancholic but respectable.”

“And yours?” she asked.

He reached to the shelf beside him without needing to look. “Argumentative, vain, structurally brilliant, occasionally unbearable.”

He drew out the volume and held it up.

“Ghalib,” she regarded him with mock solemnity. “That is such a predictable preference that I am reluctant to give you credit for it.”

“Predictable to whom?”

“To those who enjoy sounding as though they have discovered the architecture of sorrow and would now like witnesses.”

“You’ve met some unfortunate readers.”

“And many enthusiastic ones.”

“Certainly. A man should not be reduced to his literary preferences.”

“Then choose better ones.”

“You have very severe opinions for someone standing voluntarily in a room full of poets.”

“I like poetry and honesty.”

He set Ghalib down on the reading table. “A wise principle. Though in fairness, Mir can be just as theatrical.”

“Mir earns it.”

“Ghalib would say he transcends the need to earn anything.”

“And that is why one must approach him with caution.”

He found himself smiling before he meant to. “You have thought about this a great deal.”

“My father allowed indiscriminate reading,” she said, and then seemed to hear her own earlier phrasing repeated back at her by memory. Something almost fond crossed her expression. “One develops loyalties.”

He rested his hand against the table’s edge. “Mir for you, then.”

“Since I was thirteen”

“A difficult age at which to discover Mir.”

“A dangerous age,” she corrected. “Everything feels final. Mir makes one feel understood in the most inconvenient way.”

The light from the tall windows had begun to lower, turning the dust in the room to visible gold. On the central table lay several books left open by earlier readers, and as Khushi set her own down she noticed the margins of one page feathered with old notes.

“Someone writes in these,” she said, touching the edge carefully.

“Several someones over many generations.” Arnav came beside her, though still not so near as to crowd. “My grandfather annotated like a prosecutor. My mother marked recipes in medical texts and botanical observations in histories, apparently on the theory that all knowledge should remain in conversation with all other knowledge.”

“And you?”

“I have been accused of underlining lines only to disagree with them later.”

Khushi looked like she wanted to say something, but then she bent, examining the lines of annotations.

They turned pages together for a time, speaking now with less ceremony than before. The conversation wandered in the effortless leaps permitted only by genuine curiosity, from whether sorrow was more truthful in Persian or Urdu, translations that polished poetry to death, to books secretly read too young and understood only years later.

He showed her an old margin note in which his grandfather had objected to an entire school of criticism with the single sentence. The man mistakes obscurity for depth.

She laughed openly, and the sound altered something in the room. He found himself absurdly pleased by it and with increasing and unhelpful clarity, that she did not behave like anyone he had prepared himself to meet.

She was guarded, he could feel the self-command in her, the care with which she chose what to reveal and what to leave unnamed. Yet beneath that restraint lived quickness and intelligence, a restless vitality that shifted direction without warning. One could not predict her next sentence by the last. She did not offer agreeable responses simply to preserve harmony. She entertained absurdity without surrendering to it. Even her caution had character.

Who are you?

He thought, not for the first time, and now with more danger in the question because it no longer referred to family name or social suitability.

He knew the essentials now. Khushi Farooqui. Daughter of Shafiq Farooqui. Educated, clearly more widely than most families would admit as prudence. A possible addition to his own household. But the facts did nothing to satisfy him.

He wanted smaller details. Which books had first shaped her. What angered her and what delighted her. What sort of child she had been.

It was absurd.

He knew this even while standing there listening to her rant whether Shakespeare understood human nature better because he wrote about people who wanted power or because people who wanted love.

“You disagree?” she said suddenly, catching his expression.

“Not at all.”

“I think,” Khushi said, closing the book gently, “that people reveal themselves more through the things they challenge than through the things they praise.”

“I shall have to be careful.”

“Why?”

“About which books I admit to disliking in your presence.”

“You should have considered that before revealing yourself as a Ghalib admirer.”

He looked at her with mild disbelief. “You’re still holding that against me?”

“Perhaps.”

“Then I shall have to recover my reputation.”

“How?”

He looked toward the shelves. “By discovering which poet you dislike.”

She narrowed her eyes. “That feels like an interrogation.”

“It is research.”

“A convenient word for a very intrusive habit.”

“You object to research?”

“Only when I am the subject.” She rested her hand against the bookcase. “Especially when the researcher has spent years perfecting the art of asking questions while revealing very little himself.”

He let the sentence land because it deserved to. Then he said, “And that sounds like something said by someone tired of watching other people praised for withholding what women are punished for expressing.”

The stillness that followed was not controlled.

Khushi’s eyes lifted to his fully then, and whatever had been merely playful between them shifted into something more exact. Recognition, maybe.

At last she said, more quietly, “Perhaps.”

He inclined his head in equal concession. “Then perhaps Mir and Ghalib must continue their dispute without us.”

“They were never waiting for permission from readers.”

“No,” he said. “They do seem constitutionally opposed to modesty.”

The tension eased by degrees. She looked down again at the page between them, and when she spoke her voice had regained its lighter register. “I misjudged you.”

He did not pretend not to understand. “In the garden?”

“In the formal room,” she said. “In the garden I had too little information to misjudge you properly.”

He laughed. “That is kind.”

“It is honest.”

“Which, I am beginning to suspect, is your preferred weapon.”

She tilted her head. “Only when necessary.”

“Then I shall endeavor to remain on the safer side of necessity.”

But inwardly he was thinking that safety had already become improbable.

When they finally left the library, he understood very little more about her than when he had entered and somehow, that only deepened his curiosity for which he had no sensible explanation.

He wanted to know.

Every impossible, inconvenient, fascinating thing there was to know about Khushi Farooqui.

Abbas Farooqui had spent the better part of yesterday evening and today morning in alternating states of strategy and despair.

He had always believed that anxiety was most useful when it produced action.

A person worried about a business matter could inspect accounts.

A person worried about a journey could prepare earlier.

A person worried about a negotiation could rehearse every possible outcome until even surprise became predictable.

Unfortunately, none of those skills were particularly useful when the matter causing concern was a Nawab, a marriage proposal, and a cousin who had never once in her life considered that silence might occasionally be the wiser choice.

By noon, Abbas had reached a level of worry so refined that it had almost become a form of scholarship.

He had reviewed every conversation from the previous day three times over, rearranging words in memory as though one might yet yield a better conclusion if tilted differently. Had Khushi spoken too openly? Had the Nawab found it refreshing or intolerable? Had Abbas himself erred in pressing the textile matter too hard, or not hard enough, or with the wrong measure of humility? Nargis, who was nerves given embroidery, had only worsened the atmosphere by voicing each possibility the moment it occurred to her.

He, at least, worried quietly.

Now, he had reached that exhausted plateau at which anxiety became dull and permanent, like a stone carried in the pocket.

How, he wondered, was one meant to turn such a situation around if indeed it needed turning around? One could hardly approach a Nawab and say, Kindly overlook whatever impression my cousin made yesterday and judge her instead by the considerably improved impression I assure you she is capable of making if granted another attempt. One did not request a revised first meeting as though renegotiating cloth samples.

Nobility, Abbas reflected bitterly, prided itself on refinement while running on the same invisible humiliations as every other form of power.

He was still constructing and dismantling hypothetical salvage operations in his head when they were called to luncheon.

The meal was set in a smaller family dining room open on one side to a shaded courtyard where light pooled quietly on stone. It was not grand in the ceremonial sense, which somehow made Abbas more nervous. One knew how to behave in a room designed to remind everyone of their position. One sat correctly, spoke carefully, accepted compliments with moderation, and avoided mistakes.

Family rooms were intimate and depended on subtler mathematics and familiarity.

And familiarity required people to be themselves.

Abbas was not entirely certain that anyone involved in this arrangement should be trusted with being themselves.

He entered prepared for strain.

What he found instead unsettled him so thoroughly that for a full half minute he suspected he had misread the room.

Khushi was already seated, and not with the chastened reserve of a girl expecting dismissal, but with a composure that seemed oddly settled. Across from her sat Nawab Sahib and he was speaking to her in a tone Abbas could only describe as… cordial.

There was no measured politeness of a man enduring obligation.

Cordial.

By the time Abbas took his seat, Arnav had just finished recounting a story about a manuscript copyist blessed with excellent instincts and catastrophic spelling.

“…who corrected the poet,” Arnav was saying, “and misspelled the correction.”

Khushi laughed softly. “Then the manuscript deserved preserving.”

Nargis, lowering herself onto the cushion beside him, went so still that Abbas could practically hear her thoughts stop.

Finally, Abbas whispered, “Am I seeing things?”

Nargis did not look away. “I was about to ask you the same.”

“Good.”

She blinked. “Why is that good?”

“Because it means I have not become unreasonable alone.”

“That is not comforting.”

“It is not meant to be.”

Servants moved in and out with dishes, setting down fragrant yakhni, saffron rice jewelled with browned onions, delicate vegetable qorma, cooling bowls of curd while the conversation continued with alarming normality.

Abbas looked from one to the other.

Khushi noticed him then and, to his increasing disorientation, appeared neither guilty nor rattled. “Abbas bhai,” she said, as though all realities remained in their natural order, “the library here contains at least three generations of people arguing in the margins of books.”

“Does it?” Abbas managed. His own voice sounded oddly cautious to him.

“It does,” said Arnav, with what Abbas could have sworn was the ghost of private amusement. “A dangerous archive to expose curious guests to.”

“I can think of worse dangers.” Khushi said, then glanced toward Abbas, her brow knitting slightly. “Are you all right?”

Was he all right?

Was anyone all right?

“I am perfectly well.” Abbas nodded and accepted the cup placed before him and stared into it briefly as though tea might offer interpretation.

Had they met privately? Clearly yes. Had it gone badly? Apparently not. Had something been resolved? Impossible to say. Was he, Abbas Farooqui, currently seated at a family luncheon in the Malik haveli while the prospective bride and the Nawab exchanged observations about annotated poetry like old allies?

This seemed, on available evidence, to be the case.

Across the table Arnav asked, “Do you always defend poets with such determination, or only the ones most devoted to despair?”

Khushi reached for the serving spoon before answering. “Despair has the advantage of honesty.” She glanced up. “Unlike optimism in political households.”

Abbas nearly choked on his first sip of tea.

Arnav, infuriatingly, only smiled.

Abbas set down his cup very carefully.

Am I dreaming? Had anxiety finally tipped me into some merciful hallucination shaped like social recovery?

No. The dishes were too fragrant, the cushions too hard, the stakes too real.

He glanced at Nargis.

She looked back at him with the fixed expression of a woman who had entered one play and found herself midway through another. After several minutes she leaned slightly toward him. “I do not understand.”

“Neither do I.”

“What happened?”

“I have no idea.”

“Yesterday we thought everything was ruined.”

“Yes.”

“And now?”

“Now apparently she has convinced the Nawab that arguments about poetry are an acceptable form of conversation.”

Nargis considered this. “Is that…good?”

Abbas looked across the table. “I believe it is. I just wish I knew sooner because I spent all morning planning how to repair a disaster.”

“And?”

“And apparently the disaster repaired itself while I was making plans.”

Nargis tried not to smile and failed. “It does happen.”

“Never to me.”

“That’s because you insist on being responsible for every possible outcome.”

“Someone has to.”

“No,” Nargis said, graciously a serving of rice from one of the attendants before continuing. “Sometimes people simply have conversations.”

He fell silent. Something had changed. He did not know when, how, or in whose favor. But for the first time since their arrival, the future no longer looked like a corridor closing.

AN: The site isn't letting me post the entire thing at once, even in chunks, I get spam warning, will try again later :/