Months of excruciatingly slow progress and setbacks went by and there was still no clear verdict on Abhimanyu’s condition. The surgeons would cut him up with plans to ameliorate his injury, only to find damaged nerve fibers deeper in that had to be attended to first. Meera’s dedication through the first two surgeries only aggravated Abhimanyu – in addition to his injury, he was weighed down by the cruel secret he had kept from her. He imagined telling Meera about Uday Singh’s demand a thousand times over in his mind, and he knew that there was no way to make those words sound better; no way to blunt the edges of his betrayal of the promises he’d made to her. In his drugged up state between surgeries, he would dream about Meera weeping, or flying into a rage, or worse, simply being indifferent when he would tell her that they could not have a future together. Each time he would wake up, he’d wish that Meera would act differently. But how should she have reacted? He had no answer to that question.

There were days of hope against hope. Maybe his father would come around, he would think. Maybe if he just hunkered down in New York, shutting out his family for months, time would heal everything and cooler heads would prevail? Moments later, he would oscillate back to a rush of despair knowing how wishful his thinking was.

‘Why do you love me, Meera?’ he asked her one morning, trying to broach the subject as delicately as he could. It wasn’t an unfair question – after all, Meera was thousands of miles away from her family without knowing exactly what was in store for her, no questions asked.

‘That night in Ranakpour, just before the guards marched in,’ he continued, ‘I had asked you the same thing. You were about to say something, but didn’t get a chance. Tell me now. Why are you with me?’

Meera looked out the window, seemingly transfixed by the familiar site of Central Park. Morning joggers were circling the park’s reservoir, later to be renamed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, and tourists had just begun trickling in.