The procession reached the royal cremation grounds – a city of domes with over 400 spectacular cenotaphs of the kings, queens and warriors of Ranakpour, each a striking reminder of a glorious past that would fill most members of the royal entourage with pride, even at the time of mourning. Decades later, though, the place would be called the ‘city of dead’ – a well-branded excursion for special interest tourists offered at a competitive price.

As the queen’s wrapped body was set upon the ornate funeral pyre, Abhimanyu’s thoughts turned to Meera. Had the queen spoken to Uday Singh about their relationship before dying? Abhimanyu felt a pang as he realized that his mother was no more – those kind, soft hands would never touch his cheek again. And yet, there he was, wondering whether she had kept her promise and lobbied for Meera. He wondered if he had somehow contributed to her heart attack. Maybe she couldn’t take the pain of fighting with her husband over Meera and preferred death. Maybe it was all too much for her gentle heart.

He shook his head; he couldn’t let guilt overwhelm him. But what about Meera? Where was she? He hadn’t seen her since the night before and felt terribly guilty for her having to experience his mother’s death while in Ranakpour.

Meera, for her part, felt like an intruder amid a grieving family. At Abhimanyu’s request, Ranjit Singh did his best to give her company, and she was thankful to have a known face around her in a palace of unknowns. She reflected on her own father’s death, Pandit Jayshankar Apte, who had also succumbed to a heart attack. A healthy man, all of forty-seven, he had just dropped dead one day. As a twelve-year old, she remembered thinking it was normal – that forty-seven was old enough to die. She couldn’t fully comprehend the shock and devastation around her as her family tried coping with the loss. Old, suppressed memories came rushing back in – flashes of his father slumped over his harmonium. ‘At first, I thought he had fallen asleep in the middle of riyaz,’ she remembered Kamladevi repeating the blow-by-blow account of that fateful morning innumerable times for the benefit of visiting mourners. ‘I can never forget the sound, the thud with which his body hit the ground.’

As she waited to hear from Abhimanyu, Meera recalled the melodramatic scenes around her father’s death. Relatives, close and distant, crying their lungs out for days. Her mother fainting on the ground as Jayshankar’s body was carried out of their house. Discussions and arguments over the cause of his death, over symptoms that the family members had failed to recognize. Her mother rued the fact that she did not act on Jayshankar’s complaints about chest pains just days before his death. Her uncles countered that chest pains weren’t symptoms of heart attack, and that it was just a mere coincidence. Even Kamal believed that his father’s love for sweets was his undoing. Lifelong helpings of jalebis dunked in hot milk, which Kamladevi used to serve him almost weekly, had done him no good. The elders agreed and urged everyone in the extended family to swear off fatty foods. Meera had noticed how Kamladevi became defensive about this and blamed god instead. In fact, Meera’s mother had punished god in her own way, by swearing off temple visits after her husband’s death. Even on Diwali, as the rest of the family made their annual visit to the temple, Kamladevi would sit outside, stony faced and unforgiving. Meera’s aunt would implore Kamladevi to stop the madness and accept god’s decision, pointing out that her rage against the wise one was the reason her husband never visited her in her dreams. Everyone else in the Apte family dreamt of the Pandit regularly, she declared. Meera’s father’s death was questioned, investigated and concluded many times over, with enough blame to go around and fuel conversations for months.