The thing about falling in love with your best friend's brother was that there was no good time to do it and no graceful way out of it once you had.
Meera had established this rule through extensive personal experience.
She was sitting on the floor of her assigned room — the blue room, which was lovely and had a window that looked out over the courtyard — helping Anaya sort through a delivery of wedding favours that had arrived in a state of creative disorganisation, and her mind kept drifting. This was a problem she had been having for approximately five years, which was how long her mind had been in the habit of drifting toward one particular subject.
"You're not counting," Anaya said without looking up.
"I am counting."
"You said forty-seven three times."
"There are a lot of boxes that look like forty-seven." Meera set another down. "I'm counting."
She was not counting. She was thinking about a college festival that had taken place five years ago, in September, when the Delhi heat had finally started to break and everything had smelled like rain and marigold garlands and deep-fried things, and Anaya's brother had shown up to collect Anaya and had, through a series of events that were nobody's fault exactly, ended up staying for three hours.
— ✦ —
The college fest had been Anaya's idea. Most of the good and chaotic things in Meera's life were Anaya's idea — that was just how their friendship worked. Anaya saw things she wanted to experience and then she experienced them, and she'd learned early on that Meera was always willing to come along.
The fest was spread across three courtyards, loud and warm and full of the particular energy of several hundred students who'd been told they could have a party and had taken that very seriously. Meera had eaten three different types of chaat, won a goldfish she did not want at a ring-toss stall, and was in the middle of trying to figure out how to rehome the goldfish when Anaya's phone rang.
"My brother," Anaya said, glancing at the screen with a small frown. "He said he'd come at nine. It's eight-thirty."
"He's early?"
"He's never early. Something must have—" she picked up. "Veer? What— yes, I know where that is, but — okay. Yes. Fine." She hung up. Looked at Meera. "There's an issue with his car somewhere near the main gate. He needs me to come."
"Go," Meera said, gesturing vaguely with the goldfish bag.
"I'll be back in ten minutes. Do not eat more chaat without me."
She was gone. Meera stood with her goldfish and surveyed the crowd and waited.
Fifteen minutes later, Anaya reappeared with a man behind her who was not, in any immediately obvious way, anything like his sister. Where Anaya was all quiet precision, this person was — significant. He was taller than Meera had expected from the stories, though she didn't know why she'd formed an expectation in the first place. He had Anaya's sharp eyes and a quality of stillness that Meera found, immediately and inconveniently, extremely interesting.
"This is Veer," Anaya said. "Veer, this is Meera. She has a goldfish."
"I can see that," he said.
"I won it," Meera said, because she felt this context was important. "I didn't choose it. It was just — there."
He looked at the goldfish bag for a moment. Then back at her. Something moved at the corner of his mouth that was not quite a smile.
"What will you do with it?"
"I'm working on that."
He nodded, as though this were a reasonable answer. Anaya's attention was immediately captured by someone across the courtyard and she made the brief 'two minutes' gesture and drifted away, and suddenly it was just Meera and the goldfish and this particular person standing in the middle of a college festival.
She'd expected it to be awkward.
It wasn't awkward.
She still couldn't entirely explain why. He wasn't chatty — she'd learned that much from Anaya. But the silences he created weren't uncomfortable ones. He looked around the festival with the expression of a man taking inventory, and when she offered to show him around because Anaya clearly had no immediate plans to return, he said 'alright' and followed her, and somehow that turned into an hour of wandering through the courtyards with Meera pointing out things and making observations and him responding with exactly the right number of words — never too many, never so few that she felt unheard.
He ate the chaat. He declined the ring toss but watched her try it with an expression that was deeply unfair in its restraint. He found, through some quiet process of inquiry that Meera didn't entirely track, a girl in the biology department who was willing to take the goldfish, and he negotiated this transaction with a seriousness that made Meera laugh so hard she had to hold her dupatta over her mouth.
And then he looked at her when she was laughing.
Just — looked. Brief, direct, and then away. But something in the quality of that look was different from the way people normally looked at her, and Meera, who had spent twenty-one years being looked at by people, felt the difference immediately.
She told herself she was imagining it.
She told herself this for the next five years.
— ✦ —
"Forty-seven," Anaya said again, pointedly.
Meera set down the box. "Sorry. I was thinking."
"About?"
"Nothing." She picked up the next box. "The fest. When we first met your brother. Do you remember I had that goldfish?"
"The goldfish." Anaya's mouth curved. "He found it a home, didn't he. Within like twenty minutes."
"He negotiated a handover with a second-year biology student like it was a business transaction."
"That is exactly how Veer has approached every problem since he was approximately twelve years old." Anaya set down her clipboard. "Why are you thinking about the fest?"
Meera counted boxes. Thirty-eight. Forty. "I don't know. Wedding brain. Everything feels — circular right now. Like I keep thinking about how everything started."
Anaya was quiet for a moment. "And how does it feel? The circular thinking?"
Meera considered the question honestly, the way she always tried to do with Anaya. "Like I'm waiting for something," she said finally. "Like I've been waiting for something for a very long time and I keep thinking — surely it happens soon. Surely the thing I've been waiting for is going to happen soon."
Anaya looked at her with those sharp, quiet eyes. Said nothing.
"Forty-three," Meera said, and went back to counting.
She was marrying him in ten days.
Surely, she thought. Surely soon.