CHAPTER THREE

Meera was drunk, and she was rarely drunk.

But the Mountain Rest dhaba was right next to her guesthouse in Kullu town, and it had seemed like a perfectly reasonable decision at three in the afternoon to start drinking Old Monk and Thums Up to calm down.

Now she was calm.

Very, very calm.

The dhaba was not the kind of place that tourists wrote about on TripAdvisor. It was a narrow room with wooden walls blackened by decades of tandoor smoke, lit by two tube lights that cast everything in the blue-white glow of a mortuary. A Bollywood calendar from 2019 hung on the wall beside a framed photo of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The owner's son was watching Mirzapur on his phone behind the counter, and three old men in Himachali topis were playing cards in the corner, their conversation a low rumble of Pahari she couldn't follow.

And then there was the man behind the bar.

"Can I get you another, jaan?" He leaned forward, and the tube light caught his face in a way that turned his angular features into something out of an Ajanta cave painting. High cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass. A jaw dusted with dark stubble. Eyes so blue they looked like someone had stolen two pieces of sky and set them in his skull — not the brown-blue that Indians sometimes had, but a vivid, electric blue that wasn't natural. Wasn't possible.

A line of fine gold hoops climbed his left ear, and his hair — dark, almost black, with streaks of amber that caught the light — fell over the right side of his face like a curtain drawn across a stage.

God, she was really drunk.

Meera squinted. "Is everyone in this state ridiculously attractive?"

The man flashed her a smile that did something to the base of her spine. "I guarantee you no."

As if to prove his point, the three old men burst into a loud argument about whose turn it was to deal, one of them knocking over his glass of chai in the process.

"See?" The man's eyebrow arched like a blackbird's wing.

She raised her empty glass. "Point made."

"You're visiting from the plains." He narrowed his eyes and studied her with an attention that felt physical — like someone running a fingertip slowly down her arm. Then he leaned in, close enough that she could smell him — sandalwood and something wild, like crushed pine needles and the ozone tang of lightning — and his lips parted.

"What?" She looked down at her kurta. Had she spilled something? Highly probable at this point. "What are you —"

"You aren't from the plains, are you?"

Meera frowned. "I think I know where I'm from." Gorgeous cheekbones or not, the staring was becoming unnerving.

"But you were born by the sea, weren't you?" He kept his eyes on hers, and she had the unsettling sensation that he was reading something written on the inside of her skull. "In Gomantak."

"Goa." She blinked. "I was born in Goa. How did you —"

"Oh yes. Goa." The man's surprise dissolved into a smile so beautiful it hurt to look at, like staring directly at something luminous. "So you're visiting the mountains. Isn't this delicious?"

"Visiting?" Meera sighed. "Kind of. It's not exactly a vacation."

The long-limbed man slid into the booth across from her with the fluid grace of someone who had never in his life needed to worry about bumping into furniture. "Do you mind? I love a good story." He leaned forward, and his blue eyes held a light that had nothing to do with the tube lights overhead. "In fact, I live for them."

His cheekbones were high, and his jaw was dusted with stubble dark as kohl. Blue eyes shone from beneath brows that arched like the wings of a neelkanth — the Indian roller bird her father used to point out on their drives through the Western Ghats, the one whose wings flashed blue when it flew, so blue it stopped your heart. His lips were full and stained dark, as if he'd been eating jamun straight from the tree in the summer heat. She could taste the sweetness just looking at his mouth — the tart burst of jamun juice on her tongue, the way it stained your fingers purple for hours —

Meera blinked. "I should probably get a coffee instead of another drink."

"Should you?" The dark man produced a bottle of Old Monk from seemingly nowhere and refilled her glass, then a glass that was suddenly in front of him. Where had that second glass come from? "Why did you come to Kullu?"

That's right. She was in Kullu. Arjun's hometown. The town where he said he'd run through pine forests as a child and learned to ride horses and climbed mountains with his father. The town he'd described with such love that it had sounded like a fairy tale — which, now that she thought about it, was exactly what it had sounded like.

She stared at the glass in front of her. It hadn't been there a moment ago. Had it? Or had there been a glass on the table the whole time?

The room began to spin, very gently, like a top winding down.

"Jaan?" The man leaned in and spoke softly, and his breath against her ear was warm and smelled of honey and something ancient — old incense, the kind they burned in temples that had been standing since before the language you prayed in had a name. "Why did you come to Kullu?"

"I'm... I'm looking for someone."

"Who?" He took a sip of rum and watched her over the rim with those impossible eyes.

She hadn't seen the forests or mountains that Arjun had described — not really. The trees she'd seen were beautiful but ordinary. There were more apple orchards than ancient forests, more tourist homestays than mountain fortresses. Maybe she was in the wrong place after all. The childhood Arjun had described sounded like it came from one of the Puranic tales she taught in her Introduction to Indian Mythology course, not a hill town three hours from Chandigarh.

"Who are you looking for?" he asked again.

"Arjun Rathore." Meera looked up into the man's blue eyes. "Do you know him?"

His mouth formed a small o, but he covered his surprise with a grin so quickly she almost missed it. "Arjun of the Rathores? Oh yes, I know that name." He tilted his head, and a gold hoop at the top of his ear caught the light. "Tell me more."

"His name is Rathore, not —" She blinked when she processed his accent. It kept shifting — sometimes mountain Pahari, sometimes something older, rounder, a cadence she couldn't place. "You're not from Kullu."

"Is anyone from anywhere?" He smiled. "Tell me about your Arjun."

"He's my boyfriend. He was living in Pune." She looked at the bottom of her glass, where a thin ring of rum caught the light. "He disappeared about six weeks ago. No call, no text, no explanation. He left everything behind."

"Everything?"

"His guitar, his passport, his books — everything." She swallowed. "His brother says he's fine and that I should go home. But I don't believe him."

The man — she realized she didn't know his name — studied her with an expression she couldn't read. "You love this Arjun."

"Yes."

"And you came all the way from the plains to find him." He said it with a wonder that seemed genuine, as if the concept of travelling for love was both foreign and fascinating to him. "What is your name?"

Something in the back of her alcohol-fuzzed brain — the part that had studied trickster myths across seventeen cultures and could recite the rules of fairy bargains in her sleep — told her to be careful. The old stories were clear about this: you didn't give your name to a stranger with eyes that colour.

But the Old Monk had dissolved that part of her brain about two drinks ago.

"Meera," she said. "Meera Sharma."

His eyes widened, and for a fraction of a second, she saw something flash across his face — recognition? Shock? — before it was replaced by that insufferable, beautiful smile.

"Meera Sharma." He said her name like he was tasting it. "How absolutely perfect." He reached across the table and touched the back of her hand — just a brush of his fingertips, light as a moth landing — and her skin erupted in goosebumps that raced up her arm, across her shoulder, and down her spine.

"My name is Dev," he said. "And I think, Meera Sharma, that you and I have a great deal to discuss."

The tube lights flickered.

When they came back on, the three old men and the owner's son were gone. The dhaba was empty except for Meera and the man with blue eyes and gold in his ears, and outside the window, the sun had set without her noticing.

She couldn't remember when she'd lost two hours.

Dev smiled. "Now. Tell me everything."

---