Page 105

“Get up now,” Samarth commanded. His brother huffed and glanced at her — “He has a secret chip installed inside you. Beware. I’ll run my next research on it.”

Avantika bit her lip as Sharan vacated the seat. It was taken by his elder brother.

“Papaaaa, see my mehendi!” Brahmi came shooting to him and he caught her by the forearms before she could smear her little hands all over his koti.

“Show me.”

“This is my flower,” she held her hand up with tiny round florals in the centre of her palm. “And this is Chloe,” she turned sideways to show him her little horse on her bicep.

“Wow,” he mouthed.

“But it smells too bad,” she sniffed her hand and made a face.

“Let me see?” He pushed his face close to her and she held up her palm. Samarth made a face, identical to hers. “It does smell.”

“Can we wash it?”

“Of course, come with me…” he began to stand up.

“No!” Avantika protested. “The colour won’t darken. Wait for another hour, let it dry and then wash it.”

“But it smells, Mama!”

“Brahmi, baby…”

“If she doesn’t like it we’ll wash it,” Samarth interrupted. She gave him a look.

“Come, baby…”

“I’ll take her, Rawal saheb,” Ananya offered.

“Thanks, Ananya,” Samarth smiled. “I’ll take her.”

“Ava is right,” Rajmata remarked from afar.

“Brahmi, do you want a dark brown colour like mine and your Naniji’s,” she showed her own hands.

“Or light orange like that?” She pointed to the mildly rusted leaves on a tree over the pool.

Brahmi’s eyeballs rolled up to examine the leaves, then her Dadi Sarkar’s palms, followed by her Naniji’s. She finally made a face and shrugged.

“Like that,” she pointed to them.

“Then we will wait for another thirty minutes, then wash it. You, me and Dadi Sarkar. Ok?” Her mother cued. Were they best friends now?

Brahmi nodded. Samarth kissed the top of her head, picked her up and set her on his knee as he leaned back. Avantika knew she wouldn’t sit still for long and was proven right when Aniket walked across them with a stick of ice cream.

“I want! I want!” Brahmi jumped down and ran after him.

“Use your other hand!” Avantika called after her but stopped short as the song changed. Suddenly the beats went to full blast. Her heart thudded. She whirled her head to him — Are you serious? She mouthed. He smirked.

Bhabho kehdi hai pyara Singha velna le aa…

“Where is that video, Raje?” Ananya began clapping to the beats, her foot thumping.

“I don’t even know,” she laughed.

“Kresha Raje will remember the steps!” She grinned slyly. For all her sweetness, Ananya knew which buttons to push.

“No way!” Kresha pushed farther into her cushions.

“Gopi Jijaji!” Ananya waved to him.

“She remembers,” he blurted.

“Gopiii!”

“Come on, Kresh!” Avantika felt her own shoulders thump to the beats in spite of so many eyes on her. It was like she was back in her maiden home, in her palace in Gwalior, in her bougainvillea garden, a princess — but a princess known to dance like nobody was watching.

Gopi came dancing, clapping his hands to Kresha beside her. He pulled her by her forearms with her hands still wet and everybody joined them right there, close to the cushions. The dance floor shifted.

“Where is it then?” Samarth’s voice startled her out of that vista.

“Huh?” Her gaze whirled to meet his eyes.

“Behind the stables after class,” he spelt and her eyes stuttered. How the fuck did he know that?

“You have a chip in my mind!”

Samarth laughed, picking up her right arm as everyone else danced, distracted.

He turned her hand, his eyes scanning the length of her arm done up in intricate patterns.

They came back and stopped — at that exact spot on the moon of her right palm, where on a July morning in Class 9A of Saraswati Crest, he had written those exact words.

He smirked.

Behind the stables after class was so intricately hidden inside the mango paisley. And yet he smirked. He grabbed a cone from the platter in front of her, the crowd still distracted.

“Samarth!”

“It’s incomplete.”

He held her palm in his, bent his head and did some intricate work that she could not even feel after her entire arm was covered in so much mehendi. When his head pulled up she saw it.

SAMARTH

In tiny, botched-up handwriting squeezed in some tiny space under the mango. But there, readable, clear as day.

“Ava!” She turned her head and Kresha was there, reaching for her bicep.

“No!” She resisted. “I can’t here…”

“Go!” Samarth pushed her and she felt her body hauled right into the crowd of her school friends who had moved to the spot close to her throne, still clapping and dancing.

She glanced back at Samarth, her eyes wide, then sought Rajmata.

She was not going to live here as their Maarani or anything but the people of Nawanagar, these ladies, the chaperones didn’t know that.

Rajmata’s head cocked in insistence, her smile wide. The claps rose around her, the loudest coming from behind her. Samarth.

“Go, Bhabhi!” Sharan’s squeal tore through the air from somewhere.

Kresha broke into their school-time dance, Gopi clapping along.

“Oh what the hell!” She muttered and matched Kresha. Loud hoots went up, the circle tightening around her. Gopi joined, following them and doing much better than he once had.

“Do you practise?” She laughed. In answer, he reached behind her and pulled Samarth to his feet.

“Let’s see if he practises.”

Avantika thought he would stand by her side and clap. Shock of all shocks — the Rawal of Nawanagar broke into the steps they had forced onto him 20 years ago. His dancing skills were still as abysmal as they once were but at 34 he was just as cute as he once was. Hotter.

The cheers were deafening then, cameras and gimbals swivelling.

“Where is Harsh?” Samarth called out. Somebody pushed Harsh into the circle and Kresha reached for him. He just stood there clapping, a head tall over everybody else’s.

“Kirti didi!” Kresha called out. The music was so loud. “Kirti didi!!!”

“Badri group!” Avantika hollered, now liberated in her dancing. The circle opened and Kirti didi was pushed in, colliding with Harsh. They all cheered. And just like that, it was like she was 15 again.

————————————————————

“I need water,” she panted, walking down the empty palace alley, Samarth running behind her.

“There’s enough water to sustain you for a month outside!”

“Yeah but I need it from you,” she glanced over her shoulder and winked. His surprises and that final dance had broken all fetters of her inhibitions in his palace. And for that, he deserved a reward.

“Ava!” He glanced around, scandalised.

“Relax!” She slowed, letting him catch up. “I need to use the washroom and somebody to push all this up,” she gestured to the wide folds of her ghaghra and duppatta. His answering grin was blinding.

“Always ready for that work, Raje.”

“Your room?”

“Are you crazy? The palace is full of people. Let’s go to my office bathroom.”

He guided her down the palace corridors, some of which she had begun to identify now after a month’s stay.

As they neared his office, the corridors ripe with palace guards began to thin away.

This entire part of the palace housed the offices — the Rawal’s, his Prime Minister’s, Bade Rawal’s, and their Council’s.

She had been here once and was amazed at how ancient some of the items in Samarth’s office were.

“We have to be quick,” he went around her to open his office door with his fingerprint.

“Before or after I finish?” She went on her tiptoes to whisper in his ear.

“Depends on how fast you finish,” he smirked. The door beeped and he pushed the handle open, making way for her. They froze.

There sat his father, Bade Rawal, on a visitor’s chair, head buried in a folder. Avantika bit her tongue. Had he heard them talk trash outside? She jogged her memory to recollect what she had said…

“Papa.”

Samarth’s solemn voice made her eyes whirl to him. He was white. Like he had seen a ghost.

When his father’s head lifted and turned to them, his face was livid. Cold, but livid. His eyes swivelled between them.

“Close the door.”

“This is not how you were supposed to find out…”

“Close the door, Samarth.”

Avantika’s eyes fell on the folder in Bade Rawal’s hands. It was a cream padded official-looking folder. Bade Rawal snapped it shut and her eyes widened.

Project Loire

Samarth’s plan to transition power back to his father. He had told her about some of it in the little time they had gotten together in this last blur of a month. If half of what he had told her was in this folder, his father’s reaction was massively controlled.

She recalled the things he had vaguely outlined to her — Phase One: Financial decoupling.

Phase Two: Quiet structural cession of ceremonial power…

or something of that sort. Phase Three: Legal succession prep for Sharan.

He had also mentioned backup plans in case of political turbulence, even a transition script for the palace press office.

She had read a draft. It was good, but a bomb to stir up emotions after the overwhelming love she had seen in his people’s eyes for their Rawal.

“Explain.”

“It’s a transition plan, Papa.”

“Why is my name listed under ‘ interim Rawal reinstallation procedures ’ ?”

“ Papa —” he began.

“ Is this why Vishwajeet has been AWOL?” Bade Rawal’s voice was low, but thundercloud-dark. “ Why I ’ ve been summoned to 'review old files' like some doddering relic all last month?”

Samarth ’ s mouth twisted. “ It was never meant to be a secret from you. Just… not yet.”

“ Not yet?” Bade Rawal shot to his feet. “ You were going to abdicate. After the wedding.”

Samarth nodded. Slowly.

“ For me to take over.”

“ Yes.”

“ For Sharan.”

Samarth’s sharp inhale was audible in the silence of the room. He looked in his father’s eyes, and his stance hardened.

“Yes, Papa.”

“Why?”

“I made a promise…”

The door to the office opened and Rajmata pushed in — “What is happening here? Your voices can be heard outside! And why is half the family here leaving the function…” she trailed, glancing from father to son and back.

“Sid?”

“What promise?” Bade Rawal zeroed in on Samarth.

He swallowed, his eyes falling on his stepmother. Then, as if something had again hardened inside him, Samarth held his head high in front of his father and folded his hands in front of his stomach — “I made an oath to Rajmata and her parents that her heirs will rule Nawanagar.”

“And she relieved you of it. Remember?” Bade Rawal bit. “I wasn’t around but I got a word-to-word account.”

Samarth nodded.

“Then what is this now?”

“I sat on the throne of Nawanagar on the promise to myself that one day I would hand it over to Sharan. I wouldn’t have any heirs to challenge his claim…”

Silence.

“Is that why you spent all these years opposing marriage?!” Rajmata’s voice echoed — shocked, sharp, zapped.

He remained silent.

“Samarth?” She demanded.

He kept quiet.

“My ancestors’ throne is not your Russian roulette.” Bade Rawal’s quiet voice boomed. His eyes were fire, his face rock. Avantika couldn’t reconcile this man with the one who rubbed his beard on Brahmi’s cheek and taught her how to hold a bat.

“You made this decision in your head, spent 8 years with it in your head. Be that as it may.”

“Sid, stop…”

“No, Tara. Rawal has made his decision and I am done explaining, asking, pleading things of him. I could order him as a child and as a teenager. Now he is Rawal and the father of a daughter. If even after all these years, after the life that we made here, all four of us, if still he can’t understand the simple truth that he is the heir of my blood then it’s better he leave the throne.

I cannot have Nawanagar go through bouts of hope and despair as per Samarth’s whims.”

Bade Rawal’s palm landed on the closed folder — “Keep this locked until after your wedding. I don’t want anybody else to stumble upon it like I did. These four days should go without a hitch.”