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.

The game plan for elections in the following year had been charted out months in advance. Uday Singh’s sons, minus Vihaan who had cut off communication from the family and stayed in London after his ignominious failure in bringing about a revolution, were to reach out to the population in a systematic way to make the case for their father as he ran for a Member of Legislative Assembly seat, backed by the All India Congress party. Abhimanyu and Ajay Singh divvied up the territory and went their own separate ways to ask for votes. Avantika stayed in Delhi to co-ordinate with the Congress leadership, the same people who had ended the Ranakpour dynasty.