“It is magic.” I watched the candlelight play on the embroidered tablecloth, the china. Then I glanced at Dev, who still wore a hint of a mischievous smile. I had to ask: “Did you actually wear a banana costume to a UN summit?”
He shrugged. “I had to sneak it in. It sounds silly, but it made people actually pay attention to what I had to say.” He leaned closer and whispered in my ear, “Besides, it was either a banana or a bunch of grapes, and I figured there’s got to be a meeting on the wine industry at some point. I’m saving my grapes. Don’t tell my father.”
I laughed loud enough that half the table turned to look at us. A radiant smile spread across Mrs. Rajesh’s face to see us getting along, and my father seemed to relax a little.
“Our fathers have been friends since childhood,” Dev said. He sat back to let a server take away his empty paneer plate. “But I don’t really know your brother and sister.”
He glanced down the table, where Lydia and Cole were chatting with the younger Rajesh children.
“I did know Oliver when we were children,” Dev continued. He bowed his head. “Such a tragedy.”
Oliver?
A voice chimed in from my other elbow before I could ask Dev what he meant. “How is it that we’ve met your lovely siblings, but we’re only just meeting you now?” Mrs. Rajesh asked.
“I grew up away from the Circle,” I said, giving the polite but vague answer to that inevitable question that we’d practiced, and then moving the conversation in a different direction as quickly as I could.
After a dessert of cinnamon cake and sweet, milky chai, I let myself glance up at Jack again. He stood stoically inside the door, like he had all through dinner. This whole night had felt like an odd, though pleasant-enough dream, but his presence reminded me it was time to get back to the real world.
I got ready to say my thank-yous and good nights. Besides the fact that Jack and I had somewhere to be, I actually liked Dev—I’d want to be friends with him. But I didn’t want to marry him, and because I did like him, I didn’t want to lead him on more than I already had just by being here.
But before I could excuse myself, Mr. Rajesh stood up and clapped his hands. “Now it is time for the party.”
I set down my cup with the last dregs of chai. “Party?”
“Dinner’s only the beginning.” Dev offered a hand, which I took tentatively.
“I didn’t realize.” I met Lydia’s eyes, and my father’s. Neither seemed surprised by the party news. Jack, however, met my eyes briefly and frowned.
Everyone rose from the table, chatting, and I glanced at my watch. “Can you tell me where the restroom is?” I asked Indra Rajesh quietly, and she called a servant to walk me down the hall.
I locked the door and pulled my phone from my little beaded clutch. We’ll be later than we thought, I texted, and adjusted the jeweled hairpiece over my forehead before the servant girl escorted me back out to the dining room, which had cleared out except for Dev.
“We’re to make a grand entrance,” he said, and with no other choice, I took his arm once more.
? ? ?
I should have known there would be a ballroom in the Rajesh home. Two men in white opened the tall, carved doors, and a hush fell over the room as Dev and I walked inside.
I stopped still. There were hundreds of people here under a ceiling dripping with jewels and flowers. From the bottom of the steps, Arjun Rajesh raised his arms, a distinctively Indian dance beat came from the speakers, and a cheer swelled from the crowd, so loud it reverberated from my chest down through my toes.
“Are they all Circle?” I asked Dev over the commotion.
“At least distantly,” he yelled. “They all want to see you.” He laughed as a dozen men ran up the stairs and, without so much as a hint of warning, swept me and Dev onto their shoulders. Dev grinned, and I yelped and held up my precariously pinned sari as the men bounced us into the crowd.
We were moving so fast, I could only catch flashes of the beaming faces staring up at me, but I could tell their expressions were magnified versions of what Mr. and Mrs. Rajesh’s had been all night. This shining, open look of . . . what? Admiration? Yes, but that wasn’t all. Optimism. Trust.
Hope.
I’d known what I was signing up for when I agreed to my father’s plan. But it was only there, on the shoulders of two men I didn’t know, being twirled to the rhythm of a Bollywood dance track, confetti being thrown at me from every side, catching like snowflakes in my hair, that I realized what I was really doing. I’d been viewing it as politics. But until this moment, I hadn’t realized that I’d also agreed to be the symbol of the hopes and dreams of the most powerful people in the world.