“You’re Rajkumari Jaya Rao,” he said. “My mother knows your father. We met six years ago, at the wedding reception for Nehika and Pritam Gupta. You were wearing a beaded red lehenga, and your sister, Isha, was in a matching yellow one. I would say more, but I’m very invested in the outcome of this chess game.”

Jaya gawked at him, though every well-mannered bone in her body told her not to. “You’re playing chess? That fast?” His hands were practically blurry with the speed of his moves. “Surely no one could make moves that quickly?” Jaya looked at Leo, sure Rahul was pulling her leg.

Leo laughed. “Please. Do not get him started on how chess is just a formalized logic system.”

Rahul said immediately, “Chess is just a formalized logic system. If you look at the discreet graph, for instance—”

“Wait. How did you remember what we were wearing when we met? That was so long ago!” Isha said. Oh yes. Jaya had been so distracted by his swift chess fingers, she’d failed to see the more alarming part of what he’d said.

They all stood there in awkward silence until Rahul coughed.

“I… I have a knack for remembering details,” Rahul said, still not meeting their eyes. “I’m not being creepy. That’s what some people say, but my brain just works differently from most others’. I suspect those people don’t understand the neuroscience of memory—”

Leo interjected with a sudden laugh and clapped Rahul on the back. “D’accord,” he said jovially, though his smile looked like Appa’s when a teacher told him Isha excelled at physics but had the lowest grade in home economics. “Let us not distress the new girls on their first day. There will be plenty of time for them to hear the rumors on their own.”

Isha and Jaya glanced at each other, and then Jaya forced a laugh of her own. “You haven’t distressed us at all. I’m glad we made such an impression on Rahul.” It was coming back to her now, the reason Rahul’s parents had sent him away from the public eye in India. He was too different, too strange, to be a politician’s son. She’d known that some of the villagers in rural Delhi thought his mother had been cursed before he was born, due to her “mannish” (read: ambitious) nature.

“Wait just a moment. Did you say ‘Rajkumari’?” Leo said to Rahul, turning to look at them with renewed interest. “As in, princess?”

Here it was, the inevitable question Jaya was prepared for. Even at St. Rosetta’s. She shook her head. “Rahul’s too generous. India doesn’t have an authoritative monarchy anymore, but yes, we do come from the Rao family that used to rule Mysuru in South India.”