“That sounds exhausting.” “It is, rather.
But I don’t mind it, not really — not if it means Arun and Uma get exactly the engagement they deserve, without any of this other business casting a shadow over it.” She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice had grown rather more serious.
“I only hope, Deba-da, that I’m not simply papering over something that’s actually growing underneath, the way you paper over a crack in a wall without ever properly fixing whatever’s causing it to spread.” Debabrata reached for her hand, some of his own quiet worry showing through his usually steady composure.
“Our fathers have weathered nineteen years of disagreement, Kamala.
I don’t believe this one, however sharp it currently feels, is any different in kind from the ones that came before it.” “I hope you’re right,” Kamala said — the same quiet hope she had voiced once before, in this same small room, some weeks earlier, that whatever was unfolding in Delhi would stay in Delhi, and not find its way down their own lane. New chapters come out on novelping . com first.
She did not yet know, saying it again now, exactly how much weight that particular hope would eventually be asked to carry, nor how soon it would be tested by something considerably more personal, and considerably harder to smooth over, than a delayed date for a formal proposal visit.
— The visit itself, when it finally took place a fortnight later, unfolded with all the warm, careful ceremony such occasions deserved — Bidhu Ma and Satyen Babu arriving at the blue gate with the traditional sweets, an elderly aunt brought along once more for the formality of her approval, the whole familiar choreography of a proposal properly made, echoing almost precisely the joyful ritual that had, eighteen months earlier, formalized Kamala and Debabrata’s own match.
Arun stood at the edge of the gathering through most of the formal proceedings, watching with an intensity he made no particular effort to disguise, and caught Uma’s eye across the room at the exact moment the two families’ formal blessing was pronounced — a look that carried, between the two of them, everything that had already passed privately beside the tank some weeks earlier, now, at last, being made properly, publicly real.
“You look thunderous with happiness,” Uma murmured to him afterward, finding a quiet moment amid the general celebratory chaos to stand beside him near the mango tree.
“Rather like you looked the evening you defended my sitar playing to a stranger at Anila’s wedding, except considerably less subtle about it.” “I don’t feel any particular need to be subtle today,” Arun said. Follow the newest chapters on novelping dot com.
“I’ve spent three weeks being patient.
I intend to spend the rest of this particular evening being exactly as happy as I actually am.” Watching them together from across the courtyard — the two families gathered, for one evening at least, in a joy that seemed, briefly, to set aside every careful political distance that had grown between the fathers over the preceding months — Kamala allowed herself, for the first time in some weeks, to believe fully in the hope she had voiced so many times to Debabrata: that whatever tension currently ran between the two houses’ politics, the deeper bond beneath it — the bond that had produced this evening, this match, this whole joyful gathering under a tree that had sheltered every important moment of both families’ lives for two decades — remained, for now, entirely, unshakeably intact.
She would remember that particular evening, in the difficult years still to come, as one of the last times she allowed herself that hope without any shadow of doubt standing behind it.