Chapter 11: Under cover of night, Tara bribes the guards and slips into Amartya's cell-like room, her jealousy and longing erupting into violent passion as she claims him with teeth and nails, marking him as her property amidst the dust and peeling paint.
The silence in the north wing had a different quality by morning. It wasn’t peaceful. It was vacant. A held breath after the scream.
Rukmini slipped through the service corridors just after six, a silk shawl pulled over her hair, a large leather folio clutched to her chest like a shield. She’d told Dev she was reviewing agricultural reports in the south sunroom. The lie tasted like ash.
The guard at the end of the walkway was one of hers, a young man whose mother she’d helped through illness. He gave her a tight, nervous nod and looked away as she passed. The lock on Amartya’s door was simple. The key turned with a cheap, tinny sound.
She pushed the door open.
The room was empty.
Not just empty of him. It felt stripped. The cot was made, the thin blanket stretched taut. The single desk was clear. The air, still thick with dust, held no warmth of recent breath.
For a heart-lurching second, she thought Dev had moved him again, to some worse place, without telling her. Then she saw it.
A single sheet of paper, folded neatly into a thick square, placed squarely in the center of the pillow. Her name was written on the outside in his familiar, looping hand.
Her fingers were clumsy as she picked it up. She sank onto the edge of the cot, the rough canvas cover scratchy through her fine chiffon pants. She unfolded the paper.
Bhabhi,
By the time you read this, I’ll be gone. Please don’t be angry. Or scared. It’s the only thing I can think to do that isn’t just waiting here to rot.
I am so sorry. The words are nothing, I know. They don’t fix the photos or the scandal or the look in Bhaiya’s eyes. I saw that look once before, when we were boys and I broke our father’s favourite chess set. He was disappointed then, too. But this… this was different. This was the end of something.
I loved him so much it was a fact of my life, like gravity. I think I forgot he could ever stop loving me back. I took his love, and your love, and I treated it like the air in this room—just there, for me to breathe. I never thought about what it cost you to give it. I never thought I could suffocate it.
What I did in Kabul was stupid. It was weak. But more than that, it was disloyal. To him, to you, to everything we are. To everything he built. I handed a weapon to people who want to hurt him, and I did it for nothing. For a pretty smile and a feeling of being clever. I wasn’t clever. I was the fool in the story.
I can’t undo it from this room. I can’t become someone you can be proud of from a cot.
So I’m leaving. I don’t know where. I don’t know how. I have a little cash I’d forgotten about in an old coat. It’s enough to get me to the city, to disappear. I need to learn what the world is when it’s not made of palace walls. I need to learn what I am when I’m not just a younger brother.
Please tell Bhaiya… no. Don’t tell him anything. He’s right. My words are just noise now.
But I will make this right. Not for forgiveness. I don’t deserve that. But because I finally see the size of the debt. I will learn to carry my own weight. I will become someone who doesn’t need to be protected from himself.
If you see me again, I won’t be the boy who broke everything. I swear it. I will be a man. A leader. Maybe even, one day, a brother he can look at without seeing a failure.
I love you both more than I ever knew how to say. That’s the one true thing I’m taking with me.
– Amartya
The paper trembled. A hot tear fell, smudging the ‘y’ in his name. Then another. She folded the letter quickly, as if to contain the emotion inside it, but it was too late. It poured out of her in silent, shuddering waves. She curled over her knees, the folio slipping to the floor with a thud, her hand pressed against her mouth to stop the sobs.
He was gone. Her sweet, infuriating, brilliant, foolish boy was gone into a world that would eat him alive. And she had stood there while Dev hit him. She had tried to stop it, yes, but she had let it happen. She had let her husband break him so completely that running into the unknown seemed safer than staying.
She didn’t know how long she sat there. The sun rose higher, a thin blade of light cutting across the dusty floor, illuminating motes of dust where he should have been.
She found Dev in his private study, not the grand king’s office. This was the room with the worn leather chair and the cricket memorabilia. He was staring at a wall of screens, news channels muted, data streams scrolling. He didn’t turn.
“He’s gone,” she said. Her voice was raw.
Dev’s shoulders tensed almost imperceptibly. He took a slow sip of water from a crystal glass. “Who?”
“Don’t.” She walked forward and placed the folded letter on the desk beside his elbow. “He left this. For me.”
Dev’s eyes flicked down to the paper. He made no move to touch it. “Where did he go?”
“He doesn’t say. He just… left. Sometime in the night.”
A long pause. The only sound was the hum of the computers. “Good,” Dev said, turning back to the screens. “One less problem to manage.”
Rukmini stared at the side of his face. It was a mask of granite. “Dev. Read it.”
“I don’t need to.”
“He’s your brother!”
“He was.” The words were final, absolute. “Now he’s a security risk who has voluntarily removed himself from the premises. That simplifies the protocol. No effort will be made to find him. He has chosen his path. Let him walk it.”
She wanted to scream. To throw the glass at his head. To claw the mask off and see the man she knew was underneath. Instead, she picked up the letter, her heart a shattered crystal vase in her chest. “I’m telling Tara. She deserves to know.”
Dev gave a short, dismissive wave of his hand, as if swatting a fly.
Tara was in the west sitting room, ostensibly arranging flowers. A riot of orchids and jasmine lay scattered on the table, but her hands were still, clutching a stem so tightly the sap ran over her fingers.
“Tara.”
Tara looked up. Her eyes were clear now, sharp. The devastation had been burned away, replaced by a frantic, searching intensity. “Where is he? Have they moved him? I couldn’t get any information from the guards, they’ve all been changed—”
“He’s gone,” Rukmini said softly. “He ran away. Last night.”
The color drained from Tara’s face. She slowly placed the ruined flower on the marble. “Gone.” The word was a breath. Then her eyes locked onto the paper in Rukmini’s hand. “What is that?”
“A letter. For me.” Rukmini hesitated, then unfolded it. “You should read it.”
Tara snatched it. Her eyes devoured the lines, scanning them once, twice. Her breath hitched. “A leader? A ruler?” she whispered, her voice a mix of awe and terror. “Alone? He can’t. He doesn’t know how to buy a train ticket, Rukmini! He’ll be hurt. He’ll be used. He’ll be…” She couldn’t say the words. Her knuckles were white around the paper. “We have to find him. We have to bring him back.”
“Dev has ordered no search.”
Tara’s head snapped up. “He what?”
“He says it simplifies things.”
A wild, unhinged laugh burst from Tara’s throat. It died instantly. Her expression solidified into something cold and terrifyingly determined. She carefully, meticulously, refolded the letter along its original creases and handed it back. Her touch was ice.
“Then we won’t tell him,” Tara said, her voice low and even. “I have resources. Quiet ones. I’ll find him. He doesn’t need to be a king out there. He just needs to be safe. He just needs to come home.”
She turned and walked out, her heels clicking a rapid, staccato rhythm on the floor, a woman on a mission only she could see.
Rukmini stood alone, the letter heavy in her hand. She looked out the window at the sprawling, teeming city beyond the palace walls. Somewhere in that chaos, a boy was trying to become a man. A king was pretending his heart hadn’t just walked out the door. And a woman with an obsession was sharpening it into a purpose.
Back in his study, Dev waited until he heard the door click shut behind Rukmini. He waited another five minutes, the data streams a meaningless blur.
Then his hand shot out. He grabbed the empty crystal glass and hurled it against the far wall. It exploded in a spectacular shower of shards, the sound violently loud in the sealed room.
He put his head in his hands, his fingers gripping his hair. His shoulders shook. Once. Twice.
No sound came out. The mask, for now, remained. But the fissures were there, deep and catching, spreading silently through the stone.