Ram Prasad unfolded the printout on the low glass table with the reverence of a devotee laying out banana leaves for a deity’s propitiation.

“Sir, madam, please just look once. Only once.”

Ramakrishna adjusted his reading glasses. Vasumathi sat with her hands folded in her lap, the pallu of her cotton sari drawn tight over her shoulder like armour. The ceiling fan turned slowly overhead, stirring the smell of the Boost their son had drunk from that same steel tumbler ten years ago, when he was still a schoolboy with ink stains on his middle finger.

The printout was a spreadsheet. Rows and columns in the aggressive blue borders of a man who had learnt Excel late in life and now used it to his advantage.

“Average IAS salary, three lakhs a month. Multiply by twelve months, that’s thirty-six lakhs a year. Multiply by thirty-five years of service, that’s twelve crores, sixty lakhs. Minus thirty per cent tax, still eight crores, eighty two lakhs in hand.” Ram Prasad tapped the cell with a thick forefinger yellowed by decades of gutka. “This is what Nikhilesh will earn in his whole career. His whole life, understand?”

“We understand, Prasad garu,” Ramakrishna said, looking away.

“Wait, wait, I haven’t finished. I’m offering twelve crores in cash. Twelve. Cash. Straight into any account you name. Plus twelve crores in property. Two granite quarry shares in Rajanna Sicilla district, one commercial complex on Mukarampura main road, one farmhouse near Manair dam. Twenty-four crores total. Meaning what? Meaning Nikhilesh earns his lifetime salary before he sits in his first official chair.”

Vasumathi’s hand moved to her throat. Her thali chain, two tulas of gold from 1994, felt suddenly heavy against her collarbone.

“Prasad garu—”

“Akka, one more thing. My Pushpalatha, she’s simple girl. Fair. Intermediate pass. She knows to run a house. She won’t argue with an IAS officer husband. She’ll feed him well and give him healthy children. What more does a man need?”

Ramakrishna removed his glasses. He looked at the ceiling fan. He looked at the framed photograph on the opposite wall, Nikhilesh at age sixteen holding a district-level elocution trophy, his hair oiled flat, his smile the smile of a boy who already suspected the world would eventually kneel to him.

“Prasad garu. We’ve told you. The decision is Nikhilesh’s. He’s in Mussoorie. We can’t answer for him.”

“Ayyo, sir. What is this? Whose son is he? Yours or the government’s? You just say yes, he’ll say yes. Fathers still have some respect in this country, no?”

Vasumathi rose. Her knees clicked. “I’ll bring more tea.”

She went into the kitchen and stood at the sink with the tap running over her wrists and thought—Rama Rama, when will this end? When will one of them understand that our boy isn’t a bullock at Sunday cattle market?

~*~

He had been fourteen the first time she gave him a jasmine.

It was the last period on a Friday, moral science, which everyone treated as an unofficial free period. Saraswati sat two benches ahead of him in the girls’ row. She had thick black hair that she oiled every morning with the precision of clockwork, and she wore a string of jasmine tucked into her plait that the whole classroom could smell by second period.

That afternoon she had turned in her seat, pretending to borrow an eraser from Lalitha, and as she passed the eraser to the boys’ row through the aisle, she also passed something else—a single jasmine bud from her own plait, pressed between two pages of the moral science textbook.

The book landed on Nikhilesh’s desk. He opened it. The bud fell out, small and closed and still cool with the dampness of her hair oil.

He did not look at her. She did not look at him.

He closed the book. He put the jasmine bud inside his breast pocket, the pocket that held his identity card and his father’s telephone number in case of emergencies. When he cycled home that evening, he felt it there against his ribs, a pulse he had not been born with.

That night he pressed it inside his geography atlas, on the page showing the Deccan Plateau.

He never mentioned it. She never asked. It was the entire vocabulary of a love that would spend the next ten years refusing to open its mouth.

~*~

Independence Day at the parade ground. The collector—a thin Malayali man named Krishna Kumar IAS—took the salute, and every schoolboy in Karimnagar felt something small and hot go off in his chest.

Nikhilesh felt it more than most.

He stood in the third row of the college NCC contingent, his boots too tight, watching the collector’s white Innova with the tricolour on its bonnet ease past the saluting dais. Two DSPs walked beside the car. A tehsildar held an umbrella over the collector’s head against the drizzle. The local MLA stood on the dais with his hands folded like a man visiting his own funeral, forced into humility for one hour by protocol.

Look at that, Nikhilesh thought. The politician has to fold his hands to the officer. Not the other way. That man is the youngest one on that dais, and everyone older than him is bowing. Whatever that is, I want it.

He did not want it for the power exactly. He wanted it for the geometry of the moment. He wanted to be the still point around which the loud men had to arrange themselves.

He went home and told his father.

Ramakrishna, who had taught mathematics in government high schools for twenty five years and had never once been offered an umbrella against anything, put down his cup of chai.

“IAS?”

“Yes, Nanna.”

“You know how many people write that exam?”

“I know.”

“You know how many clear?”

“I know.”

His father was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Alright. But listen to one thing. If you become a collector one day and some poor teacher’s son stands in the third row of the NCC and watches your car pass, you turn your head and see him. That’s all I want.”

“I promise, Nanna.”

Vasumathi, standing at the kitchen door drying her hands on the end of her sari, said, “Ayyo, both father and son are dreaming. Nikhileshu, why don’t you just try for a bank PO first? At least there’s a job at the end.”

“Amma.”

“I’m only saying. Don’t put all the eggs in one big basket. Your Nanna’s salary isn’t so big.”

Swapna, his sister, seventeen years old and already sharper than both her parents combined, looked up from her chemistry textbook. “Amma. Let him try. If he fails, he can still write bank PO. If he doesn’t try, he’ll blame you for the next forty years, and none of us can afford that.”

Vasumathi threw the dishcloth at her daughter. It missed. Everybody laughed. The decision had been made.

~*~

The mist at LBSNAA was different from the mist in Telugu films. It was not romantic. It was cold and wet and it stayed on the collars of your shirts for hours.

Nikhilesh stood at the window of his room in Ganga Hostel, phone against his ear, listening to his mother’s voice thinning across sixteen hundred kilometres.

“Nikhileshu, another one came today. Somayya from Hyderabad. Pharma impex business. Imports APIs from China and exports bulk drugs to Russia. He’s offering eight crores cash, a flat in Banjara Hills, and a Toyota Fortuner.”

Eight crores, a flat, a Fortuner—as if the service list had a rate card printed next to my name. He pulled the phone away from his ear and mused. If I had got a police constable’s job or a peon’s job, would they come offering even one per cent of that dowry? Of course not. They just stand at the finishing line and wait, these men, swooping in to woo the winner with a rich prize. An easy way to appropriate my hard-won achievement, to bask in my glory by buying their way into it.

“Amma.”

“I’m just telling you what he said. I’m not asking you anything.”

“What did you tell him?”

“What can I tell? Same thing. My son will decide. My son is not here. My son is busy. I’ve said this line so many times, I hear it in my sleep now.”

“Amma, has any father come and told you his daughter is a nice girl? Just that? Nothing about money, nothing about property, just that the girl is nice and would make a good wife?”

Silence on the line. Then a small dry laugh. “Nikhileshu. In our community. In this decade. You’re asking for rain in Rajasthan desert.”

He smiled at the mist. “Alright, Amma. I’ll be home in December for the mid-training break. We’ll talk properly then. And Amma—” 

“What?”

“Don’t lie to them so much. It’s exhausting you. Just say no. Practise it. Two letters. Nnn. Ooo. Try.”

“Chi, go away. Teaching me to talk now, silly boy.”

He laughed and cut the line and stood at the window and thought—There’s one visit I need to make when I’m home. Before Karimnagar. Before anything.

~*~

The state minister’s call came on the landline at four-fifteen exactly, as though such calls were scheduled by an astrologer.

Ramakrishna picked up. “Hello.”

“Namaste, Ramakrishna garu. This is Dharma Raju speaking. Cabinet minister.”

“Namaste sir. Chala santosham”—so nice.

“Ramakrishna garu, Prasad is a very close family friend of mine. His proposal for your boy—very sincere. Very generous. I personally recommend.”

Ramakrishna held the receiver a little away from his ear. Vasumathi, listening from the kitchen doorway, saw her husband’s jaw tighten.

“Sir, we’re honoured that you called. But the boy has to decide.”

“Master garu, listen. Your boy will be posted in Telangana. Depending on where he goes—Ranga Reddy, Medchal, some good district—the earnings can be very handsome. Very handsome. You understand what I’m saying? A father-in-law like Prasad, a well-wisher like myself, the boy’s career becomes smooth like ghee on a hot dosa. Otherwise—”

“Otherwise, sir?”

“Otherwise, postings are strange things. Some officers spend their whole life in Tribal Welfare Department, counting goats. It would be a waste of a rank-sixteen boy, no?”

Ramakrishna closed his eyes. He was fifty-five years old. He had taught the quadratic formula to four thousand children. He had never once in his life spoken to a cabinet minister.

He opened his eyes.

“Sir. My son will count goats with more dignity than some men count crores. Namaste.”

He put the receiver down. Softly. Not a slam. Just a placement, like setting down a warm bowl after finishing the last of the semiya payasam.

Vasumathi came out of the kitchen. She looked at him with something new in her face—something she had not looked at him with since 1995, when he had stood up to her elder brother over a land dispute and lost.

“Emandi.”

“What, Vasu?”

“Your voice was shaking.”

“I know.”

“But you still said it.”

“I know.”

She sat down beside him on the wooden swing. The chains creaked. Outside, a koel in the neem tree made its two-note call, over and over, as though the bird itself was practising the word no.

~*~

The auto-rickshaw let him down at the mouth of a narrow lane in the Ramnagar colony of Adilabad. The house was the third one on the left, painted an uneven off-white like sun-faded limestone, with a small tulasi plant in a terracotta pot by the front step.

Saraswati opened the door.

She was wearing a plain cotton sari the colour of turmeric. Her hair was in a single plait, no jasmine today, just the plait itself, thick and glossy and finishing at the small of her back. She had put on her glasses since the last video call. Small round frames, the kind that a girl who reads too many library books buys because she has stopped pretending she does not need them.

She saw him.

Her hand went to the doorframe, gripping it as though the world had tilted five degrees.

“Nikhilesh.”

“Saraswati.”

Ten seconds of silence. Somewhere behind her, a pressure cooker whistled. A neighbour’s radio was playing an old Ghantasala song about a boat crossing a river.

“Come in, come in. Ayyo, why didn’t you call? Nanna went to college, he’ll be back only at six. Amma is at the temple. Only I’m here.”

“I know. That’s why I came now.”

She looked at him. She understood.

She stepped aside to let him in. The house smelt of camphor and mint leaves. On the wall was a framed photograph of her graduation, Saraswati holding a rolled-up degree, standing between her parents, none of them smiling with their teeth because that was not the sort of family they were.

She brought a steel tumbler of water. He drank. He set the tumbler down on the coaster.

“Saraswati.”

“Yes.”

“You remember the moral science period. Class ten. The eraser.”

Her face did the thing that faces do when a person is trying very hard not to cry and also not to smile and the two impulses cancel each other out into a strange, still radiance.

“I remember.”

“I still have it. The bud. It’s in an atlas. Page forty-seven. Deccan Plateau.”

“Ayyo.”

“I’ve come to ask something. Not through my parents. Not through your parents. Not through anyone. Directly.”

“Ask.”

“Will you marry me?”

She sat down. Not on a chair. On the floor. Just sat, legs folded, sari pooling around her, hands in her lap, looking up at him with a face that had waited ten years for a sentence of four words.

“Nikhilesh. There are girls in Karimnagar, in Hyderabad, all over Telangana, whose fathers are offering crores. I’ve heard. Everyone has heard. My own father heard it in the staff room and came home and told Amma, and Amma cried in the kitchen because she thought—she thought—”

“She thought I would take the crores.”

“Yes.”

“Saraswati. If I take the crores, I have to spend the rest of my life pretending to love a girl who was sold to me like a granite slab. Do you know what happens to a man who does that? He becomes the same man who sold her. I’ve seen it. Half the officers in Mussoorie are already becoming it. I don’t want to become it.”

“But—”

“There is no but. I’ve come to Adilabad. My parents know I’ve come. They said yes before I got on the bus. I’m not asking permission. I’m asking you.”

She was quiet for a long time. Then she stood up, went into the inner room, and came back with something small in her closed fist.

She opened her hand.

A single jasmine bud. Fresh. Still damp with hair oil.

“I keep one in my plait every morning,” she said. “Since class ten. Every single morning. Even when Nanna was in hospital, even during exams, even on the day my grandmother died. My mother thinks I’m vain. She scolds me for wasting money on flowers.”

She placed the bud in his palm.

“I was keeping it for you. In case. Even one day. In case.”

He closed his hand around it. It was almost weightless.

But it was heavier than twenty-four crores.

Heavier than a minister’s phone call.

Heavier than the entire caste standing on his doorstep with garlands and greed.

He looked at her, and for the first time in ten years, he said the thing his eyes had been saying since a Friday afternoon in July.

“Saraswati. I loved you before I knew the word for it. I’ll love you after I’ve forgotten every other word I know.”

She began to cry. Not loudly. The way rain begins on a tiled roof, one drop and then another and then a soft continuous music.

Outside, a koel in the neighbour’s neem tree began its two-note call, and this time it did not sound like the word no.

It sounded like the word yes, repeated slowly, until the sky itself agreed.

~*~

Ram Prasad was told the news over the phone by Ramakrishna himself, in a voice that no longer shook.

“Prasad garu. My son has chosen. Not your daughter.”

“What? Who? Whose daughter?”

“A junior lecturer’s daughter. From Adilabad. No dowry. She gave him one jasmine flower, that’s all.”

There was a long silence on the line. Then Ram Prasad, who had never in his life encountered a currency he could not convert into rupees, said the only honest sentence he had spoken in thirty years—

“Master garu. I don’t understand your son.”

Ramakrishna smiled at the ceiling fan.

“Prasad garu. That’s exactly why he’s the most eligible bachelor. And exactly why he was never for sale.”

He put the phone down. Softly. Not a slam. Just a placement.

In the geography atlas on the top shelf of Nikhilesh’s boyhood cupboard, on the page showing the Deccan Plateau, the ten-year-old jasmine bud lay pressed flat and brown and almost transparent—a small dry map of a country that two people had been silently building between them, one silence at a time, since the last period of a Friday afternoon in 2016.

And on that same page, tucked in beside it now, a second bud. Fresh. Still faint.