One year later.
Udaipur in October is unhurried and golden. The monsoon has passed, the tourists are manageable, and the lake is full and still. The old city breathes easier in October, as if it's finally exhaled after a long summer of holding itself in.
Riaan's exhibition opened on a Saturday.
Not in a gallery. In a courtyard—open walls, string lights, the kind of setting that didn't pretend art needed a fortress around it.
Sixty photographs. Two years of work. The kind of work you make when you've stopped running—toward or away—and just started seeing.
There were women in the photographs. Markets and temples and windows and rain. A girl on a motorcycle with marigolds in her basket. An old woman laughing at something off-frame. A child asleep on a platform bench with her shoes still on.
And one photograph at the end.
A studio. Morning light. A woman at a canvas, her back to the viewer, her hair loose, her left wrist bare. The painting she was working on was not visible—just her and the act of making, and the light finding her from the east window.
No name on the photograph.
Just the image.
People stopped at it the longest.
Meher stood beside him at the opening. Wearing a pale yellow salwar, a single thin silver bracelet—new, chosen by herself, not inherited from any house.
"You didn't ask if you could take it," she said, looking at the photograph of herself.
"No," he said.
"Bold."
"I've been told I take pictures of women like they're about to say something important."
She looked at him sideways. "And what am I about to say in that one?"
He looked at the photograph.
At her back. Her posture. The particular angle of her shoulders that meant she was somewhere between uncertainty and beginning.
"I don't know," he said. "That's why I took it."
She was quiet for a moment.
"I'm still here," she said. "That's what I was about to say."
He looked at her.
She met his gaze. Clear-eyed. Present. The most real thing in the room.
"Yeah," he said. "I know."
Later, after the crowds thinned and the string lights were the only illumination left, they sat together in the empty courtyard.
The photographs watched them from the walls — all those women with things to say.
"Do you think about her?" Meher asked.
He didn't ask who.
"Sometimes," he said. "The way you think about a storm after it's passed. Not with longing. Just—" he paused. "Acknowledgement."
"She made us find each other," Meher said.
"She made us find each other for her own reasons," Riaan said. "What we did with it after — that's ours."
Meher leaned her head on his shoulder.
The night was warm and still.
"Riaan," she said.
"Yeah."
"I think I'm going to take the estate provision. Not the money—the studio space. The old art library in the Haveli." She paused. "If they restore it."
He was quiet for a moment. "That's brave."
"It's just a building," she said. "Buildings are what you make them."
He thought about sandstone walls and ivy and a door that closed with a sound like fate.
"Yeah," he said. "They are."
Somewhere in Udaipur, in a private hospital ward, a nurse had once reported — though the report was filed and forgotten — that in her final hour, Devika Rana had asked for a brush.
They'd given her a felt-tip pen.
She'd covered the back of her hospital wristband in small, precise marks. A painting in miniature. Too small to read clearly.
The wristband was thrown away with the clinical waste.
Which meant that Devika Rana's last artwork was seen by no one.
Or perhaps by the right person, in the right light, it was visible in everything she left behind.
In the studio that Meher would eventually reclaim, a blank canvas waited.
It had been waiting for a year.
On it, in the lower right corner, barely visible—a single charcoal line.
Curved. Uncertain.
Beginning.