Was it true, then, Abhimanyu teasingly pressed on, that all she would do was smile when asked to explain her feelings towards him? Is love only to be experienced, and not expressed? Surely there were reams of pages written about the peculiar condition they were experiencing. A man of few words all his life, Abhimanyu was unashamed to admit that he had started relating to the mawkish love poems he used to look down upon – from Shelley, Keats and Drayton to Kabir, Faiz and Ghalib. On that night, sitting by his lover’s side, they all made perfect sense to him.

‘True love is inexpressible, yes,’ Meera said after a moment’s pause.

‘I can express and explain my love for you all night, Meera!’

‘Go on.’

Abhimanyu went on to talk about her quiet confidence and the chutzpah she had showed that day on the field when he first saw her. How he was fascinated by her humility when it came to her incomparable voice and yet her lack of compromise when it came to her singing – how she refused to settle for less. How she gracefully floated between worlds – from a girl who needed to run endless errands to a carefree artist, from a responsible sister to a shy lover, supremely confident at one moment and then so vulnerable the next – that it hurt just to look at her. He told her about how he wanted to possess her, from her head to the ends of her toenails, and yet how he would gladly become her slave just to be with her.

‘I am beginning to suspect you know me more than I know myself,’ she blushed, overwhelmed by Abhimanyu’s passionate declarations.

‘I haven’t even started.’

‘Started what?’

‘Expressing my love for you.’

‘You certainly have a lot to say, Abhimanyu Singh, lekin woh baat hi kya jo aasaani se alfaaz ban jaaye,’ she said. ‘For all you know, this is you justifying why you are here with me, in the middle of nowhere, when you could be anywhere else.’

‘You think? You seem to know a lot about love. So tell me, why are you here with me?’

Why had she travelled from the west coast to the edge of the desert with a man she hardly knew, a former prince, to be paraded in front of a family of entitled royals, who she had imagined ruling over people, at times brutally, with no real justification of their status other than some kind of divine birthright? Why did she love him? He wanted to know.

‘The night you—’

Hooves. Meera fell silent as the sound filled the air around them. The rustle turned into a thunderclap as the ground shook and Abhimanyu raced to his horse to pick up his rifle from the saddle. He took guard, aiming at the direction of the forest, and pulled Meera behind him. He thought it was a wild animal charging at them until he saw the palace guards and horses pounding through the trees. He recognized their uniforms.