Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 19: The inquiry
PRIYA
Nani called on Thursday morning before Priya had left for the gallery.
She had been expecting Saturday. She answered the call with her coffee still in her hand and said: “I thought you were coming Saturday.”
“I was,” Nani said. “The Mehtas filed a formal succession inquiry yesterday.”
Priya set her coffee down.
She knew the Mehtas. She knew them in the way she knew all the major clan families — from the records, from Nani’s running account of the political landscape, from the specific awareness of a person who had grown up understanding the map without always knowing her own coordinates on it. The Mehta family was old, powerful, not unfriendly to the Singhs. They had a candidate.
“Tell me,” she said.
Nani told her. The written inquiry, the succession office, the quarterly summit as the response deadline. The candidate’s name, her credentials, the political logic of the alliance.
Priya listened.
She noted, carefully, that she was not upset in the way she might have expected. She was not frightened. She was not feeling the vertiginous quality of ground shifting under her that she had learned to associate with information she was not prepared for.
She was — she checked the internal temperature — clear. Coolly, specifically clear, the way she got when a documentation problem became sharper rather than more complicated.
“When did this file?” she said.
“Yesterday morning.”
“Did Aryan know before it was filed?”
“He would have had intelligence suggesting it was coming,” Nani said. “Whether he had the specific timing — I don’t know.”
“I see.”
“You are not angry.”
“I’m not angry at Aryan,” Priya said. “I’m not even particularly angry at the situation. The Mehtas are doing something that makes complete political sense from their position. I understand why they’d file it.”
“Yes,” Nani said.
“What I want to know is whether this changes anything I need to decide.”
Nani was quiet for a moment — the particular quiet of a woman assembling her words with care.
“It doesn’t change what is already true,” Nani said. “Aryan has known for thirty years. His tiger has known. The inquiry doesn’t alter that. What it does is — force a timeline. The summit is the deadline for Devraj’s response.”
“Which means Aryan needs my answer before the summit.”
“It would help,” Nani said. “But not at the cost of the choice being rushed. You asked for a month and you should have it.”
“The summit is after my month,” Priya said.
“Yes.”
“Then the timeline is fine.”
She picked up her coffee again. It had gone slightly cool but she drank it anyway because she needed the momentum of the morning to continue, because she had work to do, because the documentation timeline did not wait for clan politics and neither did she.
She thought about the inquiry.
She thought about what it meant to be a documented candidate — to be a piece in a political calculation someone else was making. She had grown up understanding that the Sharma women were valued by the clans, that the liaison role carried real currency. She had not, until this moment, fully inhabited the specific experience of someone doing the calculation that included her as a variable without her input.
She noted that she didn’t like it.
She noted that the specific thing she didn’t like was not the inquiry itself — which was, as she had said, politically reasonable — but the being-without-input quality of it. The sense of being adjacent to a decision rather than inside it.
She thought: *this is why he said the choice has to be yours, entirely.*
She thought: *he has been managing around this exact dynamic for seven weeks.*
She called him.
He answered immediately. “I was going to tell you this morning,” he said. “In the gallery.”
“I know,” she said. “Nani called.”
A pause. She heard him register the order of information — her finding out from Nani first rather than from him — and she heard him decide what it meant.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have called last night.”
“You were going to tell me this morning,” she said. “This morning is fine.”
“The timing is—”
“The summit is after my month,” she said. “The timing is fine. I have enough time to complete my process and give you a real answer before your father needs to respond.”
“Priya.”
“I’m not worried about the Mehtas,” she said. “I’m not going to let their timeline become pressure on mine. I want you to hear that directly.”
He was quiet.
“What I am,” she said, “is — I need you to tell me these things directly. Not through Nani. Not the morning after. That night, or the next morning before nine, yes?”
“Yes,” he said, without hesitation.
“Good.”
“I can still tell you in the gallery,” he said. “The full version.”
“Yes,” she said. “Tell me in the gallery. I’ll want to hear all of it.”
She finished her coffee and went to the gallery.
He told her in the gallery — the full version, every piece of the political picture, the Mehtas’ position and his father’s timeline and his own. He was direct and complete and gave her nothing that was shaped to move her in a direction, which was the quality she had been calibrating for since the beginning.
She listened.
She asked: “Your father hasn’t refused the inquiry.”
“Not yet.”
“But you have.”
He looked at her. “Yes.”
“Internally. In your own accounting.”
“Since before the inquiry was filed,” he said.
She held his gaze. The direction in it — the full, arrived, non-negotiable weight of thirty years of recognition looking back at her.
“I’m not asking you to rush,” he said. “I’m not going to let the Mehta timeline touch your month.”
“I know,” she said.
She went back to her work.
She was, she thought, not worried.
She was also — underneath the not-worried, underneath the cool clear accounting — something warmer. Something that was aware, in a way it hadn’t been before the inquiry, of what it meant to be chosen. Not considered, not included in a political calculation. Chosen. By a man who had internally refused a formally filed succession inquiry without telling her, because the refusing was already so settled it didn’t require announcement.
She worked through the afternoon with this thought sitting alongside the documentation, quiet and warm and fully present.
She called Nani in the evening.
“Nani,” she said. “Is this something I can win?”
She asked it directly, because she had always asked directly, because there was no version of her that did the asking any other way.
Nani was quiet for exactly two seconds.
“Child,” she said. “You’ve already won. He just needs to say it out loud to the right people.”
Priya thought about this.
She thought about a man who had managed his tiger’s recognition for thirty years and had stopped managing it on a mountain terrace and had internally refused a political inquiry before it was even filed.
She thought: *yes.*
She thought: *let him say it.*
She went to bed and slept without difficulty, which she thought was probably a useful data point.
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