Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 1: The collection
PRIYA
The gallery smelled of climate-controlled air and old money, which was not a combination she encountered often.
Most galleries she’d worked in were either very expensive or very old. The Singh collection was both, which should have been Priya’s first indication that this was not a normal curatorial appointment. She’d known the Singhs for as long as she could remember — they were the family at the centre of her grandmother’s world, the family that made the phone ring at unusual hours and brought men in expensive cars to the door of the house in Bandra where Nani kept the records. She had grown up understanding that the Singh family was important in ways she was not to ask about directly.
She had also grown up understanding that important, in Nani’s vocabulary, meant something specific. Not important the way politicians were important or industrialists were important. Important the way the old things were important — weight, continuity, power that did not announce itself.
She unpacked her documentation kit with the methodical attention she brought to first days. Camera, lighting rig, the laptop with the catalogue software, the cotton gloves for handling anything that required handling. She had been here since seven in the morning; the gallery’s human staff — there were four, all of them aware that the Singh family had unusual requirements and none of them given specifics — had let her in and retreated to their various offices.
She was alone with the collection.
It was extraordinary.
The gallery presented itself as a contemporary art space — the kind of spare, well-lit Mumbai gallery that hosted the region’s significant artists and attracted the city’s cultural elite. This front was accurate and well-maintained. What was not visible from the street, what she had been given access to document for the first time, was the back rooms: a sequence of climate-controlled spaces that held pieces spanning three thousand years of South Asian history. Sculpture, textile, manuscript, metalwork. Things that should have been in museums. Things that she recognised from her grandmother’s records as belonging to families and traditions that the public record did not acknowledge.
She had been documenting for four hours when she found the tiger series.
Eleven bronze pieces, each no larger than her palm, arranged in a locked case at the end of the third room. Tigers in various postures — alert, resting, mid-stride — with a quality of craft that she found difficult to place. Not Indian exactly. Not quite anything she had a clean reference for. She photographed them with the specific attention of someone who understood they were looking at something that mattered in ways the label did not say.
She was making notes when the door at the end of the room opened.
She heard it before she registered it — the particular quality of a step, which she was accustomed to being the only person in a space and had developed the curator’s sensitivity to arrival. She looked up.
The man in the doorway was tall and had the specific quality that Nani’s family sometimes called *presence* and that Priya had learned to recognise as something more than bearing. He was in a dark jacket, no tie, the kind of clothes that were perfectly ordinary and looked exceptional on him in the way that some people made everything they wore look like it had been designed for them specifically. He was perhaps thirty, perhaps older. He had a face that was striking without being classifiable — strong jaw, dark eyes, an expression that was currently doing something she was not sure she was reading correctly.
He was looking at her in the bronze tiger case the way people sometimes looked at things they had been waiting to see.
“Hello,” she said. It was her gallery voice — composed, professional, the voice of a woman who was exactly where she was supposed to be. “I’m Priya Sharma. The new lead curator. I have access clearance from Mr. Devraj Singh’s office.”
He was quiet for a moment. Long enough that she would have found it unusual if her grandmother’s training had not specifically included: *the Singhs take their time. Don’t fill the pause with noise.*
“I know who you are,” he said. His voice was — she noted it with the precision she brought to details — low, and very even, the voice of a man who had learned to be measured in how he used it. “I’m Aryan Singh.”
She absorbed this. She had not been told he would be here today. She had not been told when she might encounter him at all — the position had been arranged through Nani’s contacts, the paperwork had come from a Singh family solicitor, and the expectation had been established that the heir managed the collection at some remove.
“Mr. Singh,” she said. “Your collection is exceptional. I’ve been documenting the back rooms since seven. I’d like to ask you about the bronze series in this case when you have time — the provenance notes are incomplete and I’d like to get them right.”
He looked at her for another moment. Then he walked into the room.
He came to stand beside the case and he looked at the bronzes, and she watched him look at them — the specific quality of a man looking at something that was his, deeply and non-acquisitively his, something that carried weight he understood completely.
“What do you want to know?” he said.
She asked. He answered. He knew the history of every piece with the fluency of someone who had been told it rather than read it — the specific warmth of oral knowledge, the alive quality of a thing passed down rather than archived. She took notes. She asked follow-up questions. He answered those too.
Three hours passed.
At some point his jacket came off and he sat on the edge of a table and they were looking at the same manuscript together, both of them tracing the same passage with their eyes, and she thought: I have been in this room for seven hours and I am not remotely tired, which is unusual.
She did not examine what was causing the unusual.
“I’ll need to see the full records for the bronze series,” she said. “The acquisition documents, the family history, any authentication correspondence.”
“I’ll have them sent to your office,” he said.
“Thank you.”
She began packing her documentation kit. Professional, efficient — the close of a first working day. She looked up when she had the camera back in its case and found him still there, standing at the bronze case, looking at the eleven small tigers.
“They’re very good,” she said. “Whoever made them understood tigers.”
He looked at her. The expression she’d been not-reading all afternoon was there again — specific, focused, something underneath the composure that she was not going to catalogue on a first day in a new workplace.
“Yes,” he said. “They did.”
She said goodnight and left.
She called her grandmother from the car.
“Nani,” she said.
“Hm?” Nani said, which was her sound for *I’m listening and I already know what you’re going to say.*
“He was there.”
“Was he?”
“You knew he’d be there.”
Nani was quiet for exactly the right amount of time. “I knew he might be,” she said. “How is the collection?”
“Extraordinary,” Priya said. “Nani. The bronze series in the third room—”
“Yes,” Nani said. “I know those.”
“Why are they in a contemporary gallery?”
“Because they’re safest where they’re visible,” her grandmother said, which was the same sentence Aryan had used, word for word, when she had asked him. She put this down as a coincidence and noted, privately, that she was not entirely convinced.
“We’ll talk properly this weekend,” Nani said.
“Yes,” Priya said. “We will.”
She put the phone down and looked at the Mumbai evening traffic and thought about a man standing beside a bronze tiger case with the specific, contained quality of someone who had come to a conclusion and was waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to it.
She thought: I am going to need to know what that expression was.
She thought: I suspect I already know.
She thought: Nani, you absolute chess player.
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