Chapter 2: Night Two, Dandiya

The dandiya sticks at Malhotra House were handmade, brought every year from the same craftsman in Vadodara — painted red and gold with small mirror-work embedded near the handles that caught the lamp-light and scattered it across the courtyard walls. My mother considered this detail important. I had, as a child, considered it magic.

At twenty-six, standing in the courtyard in a chaniya choli, I considered it logistically useful, because the mirrors made it easy to track where everyone was on the dance floor without appearing to look.

I was tracking Arjun.

Not because I was invested. Because he had told me he danced badly and I wanted to be prepared.

He was not wrong.

He was standing in the outer ring with my cousin Rahul, holding his sticks with the particular expression of a man who has been handed a task he intends to complete correctly and is rapidly realising the gap between intention and execution. He watched the couple in front of him demonstrate the basic pattern — one-two-three, strike, turn — and then attempted it.

The sticks went somewhere. Not quite where they were supposed to go.

"He looks like he's trying to defuse something," Meera said at my shoulder.

"He told me he was bad," I said.

"He undersold it."

The garba began. I am a competent garba dancer. Four years in London had not entirely erased the muscle memory of twenty-two previous Navratris. I moved through the circles and let myself be absorbed by it: the music, the lamps, the warm October night, the particular sensation of being in a large group of people all moving to the same thing and wanting to.

London had not had this. London had had a great many excellent things, but it had not had this.

When the dandiya portion began, the circles reorganised — men in the outer ring, women in the inner, rotating in opposite directions so that each beat brought a new partner before the circles moved again.

I came around to Arjun on the third rotation.

He looked, briefly, relieved.

"You actually dance," he said.

"Did you think I wouldn't?"

"I thought you might be too—" He searched for the word.

"Corporate?" I suggested.

"I was going to say controlled," he said.

He struck the sticks together approximately on beat. I compensated without making it look like compensation — a skill my grandmother had drilled into me aged seven: never make a partner look bad, Priya. Make them look good. That is how you are both beautiful.

"I grew up doing this," I said.

"You left for a long time."

"Some things don't go away," I said.

The circles rotated. We separated. He went to the next woman in the inner ring — my aunt's friend, who was an excellent dancer and clearly found his incompetence endearing rather than frustrating.

I came around to him again on the sixth rotation, which was faster now.

"You're getting better," I said.

"I'm getting louder," he said. "It's not the same thing."

"You're hitting the right beats."

"I'm hitting beats. Whether they're the right ones is a philosophical question."

I laughed — not performed, involuntary, the kind that happens when something is actually funny. My cousin Meera, passing in the outer ring, raised her eyebrows at me.

I faced forward.

The music built. The circles accelerated. The mirror-work sent their scattered light around the walls and the marigolds glowed in the lamp-light and the courtyard became what it always became on Navratri night — not a house, not a wealthy family's property, but a specific kind of alive.

We came around to each other a fifth time, then a sixth. By the sixth the pace was fast enough that conversation was impossible, just the rhythm and the sticks and the eye contact that happens naturally when you're dancing with someone — not pointed, just: I see you, you see me, we're in this together.

The music stopped.

Everyone clapped, breathing hard, and Arjun lowered his sticks and looked at his hands with the expression of a man who has narrowly survived something.

"Your hands okay?" I said.

"I missed twice," he said. "Hit my own knuckles."

"First night is always the worst."

"Does it get better?"

"You get used to the pain," I said.

He looked at me. "That's not reassuring."

"It wasn't meant to be." I paused. "You were fine. After the first circle you stopped overthinking it."

"I was very much still overthinking it."

"Less visibly," I said. "Which is what matters in public."

He was quiet for a moment. Around us the family was dispersing toward the food tables.

"Is that what you care about?" he said. "What matters in public?"

I looked at him. "It's what I agreed to deliver," I said. "A convincing public performance."

"Right," he said, with no particular inflection.

We went to the food table. I handed him a plate because he was looking at the spread with the focused expression of someone who was hungry and hadn't wanted to be the first to go for food.

"The sabudana is the tapioca dish," I said. "Festival fasting food, but it's genuinely good. The puri is better hot — take it now."

He took both. "Thank you."

"I'm not—"

"Ordering my food," he said. "I know. You're informing me. It's different."

I held his gaze. "Yes," I said. "It is."

---

Later, the family gathered on the terrace for the nightly lighting of the akhand jyot — the continuous flame my grandmother had maintained every Navratri for forty years, the oil lamp that would burn without interruption for all nine nights, attended each morning and evening with oil and with prayer.

We stood in a rough semicircle while she performed the small ceremony: oil replenished, mantra recited, the flame steady and gold.

The terrace was crowded. Arjun was beside me. We were standing closer than we needed to, though no one would have noticed.

He watched the flame with the quality of attention I had seen at the prayers — not performance, not polite interest. Something that went further in.

"You're actually religious," I said, quietly.

"Not in any formal sense," he said. He looked at the flame. Then: "I find them beautiful. The rituals." Like he'd been keeping the observation for a while and had decided to give it away. "The idea that certain things have been done the same way for a very long time, and carry all that time inside them."

I thought about this. About my grandmother's hands. About the flame she had tended for four decades.

"I find them complicated," I said. "I was away for a long time. When I came back, they felt like things I had to learn again."

"You haven't lost them," he said. "You knew the aarti words."

"My grandmother made me say them every night until they were automatic."

"Automatic is its own kind of knowing," he said.

My grandmother, across the circle, was watching us. Not pointedly. Just noting. The way she noted everything.

"She likes you," I said. "My dadi."

"She liked me when I was eight," he said. "She gave me extra ladoo at every puja and told me I had good hands for work."

"Do you remember that?"

"I remember everything about this house," he said, simply. "It's a particular kind of beautiful."

I looked at the haveli around me. The high stone walls, the carved jalis casting lattice shadows, the marigolds darkening in the lamplight, the family moving through the space with the ease of belonging.

I had spent four years in London thinking of this house as home in the abstract. I had come back and found it changed — or found myself changed — and had not quite been able to fit myself back into its shape.

"Yes," I said. "It is."

The flame burned.

My grandmother finished and began to move away. As she passed us, she paused and said to me: "He stood for the whole prayer. Your father's business associates sit down after five minutes."

She moved on.

I looked at Arjun.

"High praise," he said, with the gravity of something half-serious.

"It is, actually," I said.

---

We went back downstairs together. In the corridor outside our rooms, Meera appeared from the opposite direction, slightly flushed from the dancing, and fell into step beside me.

"He's good," she said, when Arjun had said good night and gone in.

"He's playing a role well," I said. "That's what I asked him to do."

Meera was quiet for a moment. Then: "Rahul and I had a fight today."

I looked at her. "What happened?"

"He doesn't want to move to Delhi. Long-term." She made a small gesture. "I always assumed we'd end up where my family is. He's not — I don't know if we want the same things. I don't know if I've been seeing what I want to see versus who he actually is." She looked at me sideways. "I'm in the middle of it. That's all."

"Tell me more," I said. "Not in the corridor. Tomorrow. Chai."

"Yeah," she said. "Okay. Thanks."

She went in. I stood in the corridor for a moment, then went to my room.

I lay in bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about the continuous flame and the word accurate and the six dandiya rotations and the way he'd said I find them beautiful like he was deciding to put something down.

Then I thought about the Cultural Centre tender, and the terms of the arrangement, and the clean logic of the agreement.

The logic was sound.

I went to sleep.

And if I fell asleep thinking about the way the lamp had looked in his eyes when he said all that time inside them — that was simply a function of having been back in this house for two nights and feeling the festival reawaken something London had put carefully away.

Not him specifically.

The festival.

I was entirely clear about this.