Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 4: The heir considers his options
ARYAN
His father’s list of concerns arrived by text at seven in the morning, which was how his father communicated when he wanted to appear casual about something he was not casual about.
*Succession implications. Council of elders will require formal consultation. The Mehta family inquiry is still open. The other clans will position against any human liaison binding as precedent. Your aunt has opinions.*
He read it over coffee. He read it a second time. He sent back: *I know. We’ll discuss it at dinner.*
His father sent: *Your grandfather would have said the same thing.*
He put the phone down and finished his coffee.
His grandfather had, in fact, said the same thing — the family history was specific on this point, documented in the records that the Sharmas kept better than anyone. Three generations back, a Singh heir had looked at the political situation and looked at his mate and said *I know. We’ll discuss it.* The discussion had lasted five months. The clan had required significant management. The outcome had been, by the records’ accounting, the best succession in four generations.
He was aware of his grandfather’s precedent. He was also aware that the current political landscape was more complex than it had been three generations ago, which was the argument his father would make and which was not wrong.
His tiger did not find the argument convincing.
He drove to the gallery.
She was in the second room when he arrived, which had apparently become their convention — he arrived and she was already working and there was no performance of beginning, they simply picked up wherever the previous session had left off. He found this specific quality remarkable. Most of his interactions with people began with the management of the interaction itself — the greeting, the positioning, the careful establishment of register. With her there was none of it. She was working and he joined the work and the rest arranged itself around the substance.
“The authentication dates on three pieces in Room Two are inconsistent with the acquisition records,” she said, without looking up. “Either the acquisition records are wrong or the authentication was done by someone who didn’t have access to the full provenance. I need the original correspondence.”
“I’ll find it,” he said.
“The discrepancy is about a century,” she said. “Which is significant.”
“Which pieces?”
She showed him. He looked at the documentation she had assembled with the specific organisation of a person who had built a system and was using it, and he thought about thirty-one years of a file in the clan intelligence that described the Sharma girl who had learned the old records and who would eventually be here, in this room, finding the century-old discrepancy that everyone else had missed.
“The acquisition records are wrong,” he said. “The authentication is correct. The original correspondence is in the estate archive. I’ll have it brought to the gallery.”
“Thank you.” She made a note. “Can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
She looked up. She had the specific quality of a person who asked questions they already knew the answer to, or knew part of the answer to, and was testing the completeness of their knowledge against the primary source. “Why did your family acquire all of this in the format of a contemporary gallery? The cover is functional — the Singh family as arts patrons is well-established and the gallery has real standing. But the specific form of it. The way the contemporary work in the front rooms calibrates the expectation of anyone who visits before they reach the back rooms.” She held his gaze. “That was a deliberate decision about the container for the collection. Who made it?”
“My grandmother,” he said.
She nodded. “The records mention her. Sunita Singh. She ran the liaison network for twenty years.”
“Thirty,” he said. “The records understate her involvement in the early period.”
She looked at him with the specific expression of a curator encountering a gap she was going to fill. “Then I’ll need to correct that too.”
He sat on the edge of the table — the same edge as the first day, the position he had arrived at without planning and found suited the room — and he thought about his grandmother and the gallery and the thirty-year span of decisions that had led here, and he thought about his father’s text and the dinner tonight and the list of concerns he had been living with his whole adult life.
He thought: the dinner is going to be a significant conversation.
He thought: I have been preparing for it my whole adult life.
“Your grandmother and my grandmother knew each other,” he said.
She looked up. “Yes. Nani has been the Singh family’s liaison for—”
“Not in the professional sense,” he said. “As people. They were friends.” He paused. “My grandmother told me, the year before she died, that the Sharma family had been the Singh clan’s steadiest relationship for three generations. She said it in a particular way.”
Priya looked at him. “What way?”
“The way she talked about things she had planned,” he said, “and was pleased to see arriving.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“My grandmother told me yesterday,” she said, “that she helped the timing along.”
“Yes,” he said.
“She was working toward this.”
“As was mine,” he said. “They were both working toward this. I think they decided together, probably twenty years ago, possibly longer, and they were patient and methodical about it.”
She looked at him with the expression he was learning. “That is either the most romantic thing I have ever heard,” she said, “or the most alarming.”
“In my experience,” he said, “those are often the same thing.”
Something moved in her face — the precursor to something, a warmth he was cataloguing with the same attention he brought to everything. She went back to her notes.
He thought: the dinner tonight is a formality.
He thought: the thing itself is already in motion.
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