Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 13: What the grandmothers arranged
PRIYA
Nani arrived the next morning in a car that was slightly too small for the road, driven by a man who had been driving her to clan gatherings since Priya was a child. She came up the path with the specific unhurried quality of a woman who had been to this house before — which she had, Priya realised. Of course she had. Thirty-two years of liaison work.
She embraced Priya in the entrance hall and said: “You look tired.”
“I was up until midnight with Aryan’s uncle and seventy years of route maps,” Priya said.
Nani looked pleased. “And?”
“The western record gaps I told you about three years ago,” Priya said. “Filled.”
“Good,” Nani said, with the specific satisfaction of a woman whose investment in the project had matured as expected.
Devraj Singh appeared at the end of the entrance hall.
The two of them looked at each other: Nani and Devraj, seventy-two and fifty-eight, the two people who had been managing this situation from their respective ends for the longest. Priya watched them look at each other and felt the specific texture of a long history — respect, familiarity, the complexity of people who had been working toward the same goal from positions that were not always fully aligned.
“Nani-ji,” Devraj said, which was the formal address of the clan for an elder liaison.
“Devraj,” Nani said, which was not the formal address of anyone for anything, just his name, said with the particular ease of a woman who had been calling him by his name for thirty years.
“We should talk,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “We should have talked three years ago but you weren’t ready.” She handed her bag to the waiting attendant. “Tea first.”
They went to the smaller sitting room together. The door did not close completely; Priya, who was standing in the entrance hall and was not going to eavesdrop, went upstairs to her room and thought about what she was not eavesdropping on.
She had a sense of the conversation’s shape: the Mehta inquiry, the succession, the other clans’ position, the specific question of what a formal liaison binding looked like in the current political landscape and whether it served the clan’s interests or complicated them. These were the questions Devraj had been holding.
Nani would tell him it served the interests. She would use the historical record, which she carried in her head because she had been building it for fifty years. She would tell him about Priya’s great-grandmother and the pattern that ran in the family, and she would tell him that the pattern was not compulsion but it was also not coincidence, and she would tell him that a Sharma woman making this choice had always strengthened the Singh clan’s position rather than complicated it, and she would be right.
She would also tell him, Priya suspected, some things she had not yet told Priya. That was the shape of Nani’s information management — the clan patriarch got certain things, the Sharma women got certain things, and the overlap was sufficient for the collaboration but not total.
Priya unpacked the documentation materials for the collection review and set up her workspace by the window and thought about the pattern.
It ran in the family. Her great-grandmother. A cousin she had not known about until recently. Now her. The choice was always free and always the same — or not the same, she corrected herself. Freely made toward the same family, different circumstances each time. Different women, different moments, the same fundamental shape.
She thought about what made the shape.
She had been thinking about this since Nani told her about the pattern. Not romantically — the documentation instinct preceded the romantic instinct in her, by habit and training. She thought about it structurally: what the Sharma family provided that the Singh clan valued, what the Singh clan provided that the Sharma family needed, the specific fit of two very different kinds of knowing.
The Sharmas kept the records. They maintained the long memory. They navigated between the clan world and the outside world with the fluency of people who belonged to both and were constrained by neither.
The Singhs were ancient and powerful and deeply embedded in a network of obligations and politics that made the kind of thinking her family did essential. They needed someone who understood their world completely and was not confined by it.
The fit was real. The fit had been real for three generations and the bonds that had come out of it had been genuine, not transactional.
She was not thinking about Aryan as a structural fit.
She was also, she noted, not not thinking about him that way.
She was thinking about him as the person in the gallery who had conceded the lion-labelled lion without ceremony. Who had spent three years maintaining distance because the politics required it and had managed his tiger’s recognition with a discipline she understood now was enormous, ongoing, and quietly exhausting. Who sat on the edge of a table in a museum room and traced manuscript passages with his eyes and had not checked his phone once in three hours.
Nani’s voice came from downstairs.
Then Devraj’s.
Then both, quieter.
She worked on the collection review notes and did not listen, and after two hours she heard the sitting room door open and her grandmother’s steps in the hall, and Nani appeared in the doorway of her room.
“Well?” Priya said.
Nani sat in the chair by the window. She looked, Priya thought, slightly tired — which meant the conversation had been substantive, because Nani did not look tired from small things.
“He is a good man,” she said. “He has been holding a difficult position for a long time and he has held it with more integrity than I would have given him credit for in the beginning.” She folded her hands. “He is ready to form his position.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The history,” she said. “Your great-grandmother. The record of the previous bindings. What the clan’s position looked like after each one.” She paused. “And what your mother would have wanted.”
Priya looked at her.
“She knew,” Nani said. “Your mother. She made me promise not to tell you until you were ready, because she thought the knowing would feel like obligation. But she knew, and she was glad about it, and I told him that.”
Priya sat with that.
She thought about her mother, who had died when Priya was nine and whom she had been carrying in the work ever since — the records, the scholarship, the careful maintenance of a family legacy that her mother had loved.
“She was glad,” she said.
“She said: she’ll be good at it. She’ll be better than any of us.”
The warmth that produced was not the managed kind. It was the kind that went to the places where the management didn’t reach.
“Nani,” she said.
“I know,” her grandmother said. She reached out and put her hand over Priya’s. “I know, child.”
They sat by the window with the mountain light coming in and the forest outside and the clan gathering below them in the house, and Priya thought about her mother and the pattern and the choice, and she thought about the hills above the estate where Aryan had said he wanted to walk before the formal review began.
She thought: I know what I want to say in those hills.
She thought: I was ready some time ago. I have been giving myself time to be sure I was ready for the right reasons.
She thought: I am sure.
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