‘That’s great, then, for all of you,’ Abhimanyu snapped, ‘I couldn’t care less.’

By then, Abhimanyu wanted nothing to do with his family – it had cost him Meera. ‘The title of Mahamahim Rajadhiraj has ceased to exist,’ Ajay Singh explained, ‘but it was never erased from Daata’s mind. You see, he wants to run for elections and lead not because he wants power, but because leadership is the only way of life he knows, Abhimanyu. It’s not going to be easy. The pendulum of history had swung and royalty is becoming a dirty word with each passing day. That’s the reason I stand here humbly, at the behest of Daata, asking for help.’

Abhimanyu sat in silence, his jaw clenched.

‘It’s time to move on, dear brother,’ concluded the adopted son of Ranakpour family. ‘Daata found it in himself to move on after mother passed away. Now we need you, together, united, to face the future.’

‘Who is to say I made the right decision?’ Abhimanyu would quip later, reminiscing about his deal with his elder brother. ‘Ajay was there with the right offer to get me out of my misery,’ he would confess. ‘I needed something to do in order to keep my mind occupied, or else I would have gone mad.’ Had the two brothers switched their arrival at Mount Sinai – had Vihaan knocked on his door after Meera’s sudden departure, Abhimanyu would have gladly bought into his delirious plans. But what mattered was that for the first time in his life, the prince of Ranakpour had taken a stand. Whether he stood on the right or wrong side of history, only time would tell.

Chapter 16

In 1951, Ranakpour saw a wetter than normal monsoon. It made the usually parched land so green that it was easy to forget, even for the locals, that the state was but an extension of the desert. The village wells were full to the brim, the lush green mountain slopes seemed more like a southern Indian hill station rather than the heart of Rajasthan. A closer look, however, revealed Ranakpour’s arid character. The cacti still lined up most of the village houses, acting like a fence. The sand, the fine brown powder that travelled miles across the state from the dunes of Thar and engulfed each and every surface of Ranakpour life, had turned into a wet, stubborn slick.

These were certainly not ideal conditions for the distressed velvet wingtips Abhimanyu had on while canvassing across the state for his father. Over two years had gone by since he had last seen Meera. To him, the heady days with her in Bombay and New York felt like a different life by then. He missed her of course. Not the lover’s longing kind of missing. He missed Meera with the finality of a sunken shipwreck deep in the ocean. The idea of her was gone forever, buried, never to be brought back whole. What remained was a bittersweet memory. A memory he had been fighting hard to erase by diving head first into a life of purpose. A purpose defined not by some innate sense of reason or objective but simply the act of doing something. He had to fill the vacuum left by Meera by fooling himself whole-heartedly into action. His father’s run for parliament provided him an excuse to get busy.