The surgery wasn’t conclusive by any means, but the doctors were able to remove a bone fragment lodged in Abhimanyu’s eye socket. The good news was that his retina was intact. The bad news was that they couldn’t do much until the optic canal decompressed. All the first surgery achieved was allowing Abhimanyu’s injury to bleed out freely. Meera saw more blood soaked bandages in the first hour after the surgery than she had used during the day and a half it had taken Ranjit Singh and her to get Abhimanyu to Bombay. As the painkillers wore off in the middle of the night, through the agony that followed surgery, all Abhimanyu could think of was how in the world he would break the news to Meera that he won’t be able to marry her. It was as though the lingering misery of this thought was robbing him of the ability to cope with his debilitating injury – that feeling of swollen brain tissue pressing up against his skull; a paralyzing pain he would feel for the rest of his life in the most unpredictable moments. At times, he was sure his head was going to burst. A cocktail of painkillers would become his staple diet – five colourful tablets after breakfast, two after lunch and seven at dinner. Over the years, the monstrous throb in his head became a way for Abhimanyu to predict the weather. A throb every six seconds meant a cold front was coming. A throb that lasted more than an hour meant that the humidity was well above 80 per cent. And yet, at that moment in the hospital bed, the thought of confessing to Meera was a thousand times more agonizing than the clockwork-like tremble in his mangled right eye.

In the following days, Meera would religiously come to Breach Candy during visiting hours, running out of excuses to get out of her home. In the past, she had suspected her family knew that something was brewing between her and the prince, but since neither of them were seen together or mentioned each other in public, her family had thought that the initial spark they’d seen between the two, especially at Pandit Bhairo’s concert, had faded over time.