She came out of the booth and her team was waiting and the cameras were there and she smiled for the cameras with the specific smile that was not a performance of confidence but was actual confidence — she had done everything she could in thirty-one days and the result was the result and she was ready for the result.
The counting would begin at eight AM the following morning.
She went back to the flat. He was not there. He came back at nine-thirty PM, after what must have been a full day of the same booth monitoring she had done. She was at the kitchen table with a cup of chai that had gone cold. He came in and sat down and she looked at him and he looked at her and neither of them said anything about the election for the specific reason that neither of them wanted to, not tonight, not in the hours before the counting began.
"The ramp," she said. "Ward 11."
"The election commission had said they couldn't manage it," he said. "It was the correct thing to do."
"Yes," she said. "It was."
He made his coffee. She made fresh chai. They sat at the table — her end and his end, the same ends they had always occupied — and they were quiet in the way of two people who had said what needed to be said and who were now simply present in the room together before the thing that was going to happen happened.
At eleven PM he said: "Zara."
"Yes," she said.
"Whatever happens tomorrow—"
"Don't," she said. "Whatever happens tomorrow, we deal with it tomorrow. Tonight we're just — here."
He looked at her. The under-look, completely unmanaged, the look that was entirely him and not the candidate. "Yes," he said. "Tonight we're just here."
She stood up. She looked at him. He stood up. They were standing at the kitchen table — the same kitchen table, the same positions, the same room they had been in every morning at five-thirty for thirty days. Except it was not the same. It had not been the same since the powercut night, or possibly since the debate, or possibly since the first morning with the budget allocation document.
"Aditya," she said. She stepped around the table.
He waited. He was very still in the way he was still when he was choosing not to move — not passive, not uncertain. Fully present and waiting.
She put her hand on his arm. The simplest gesture. The first one. His hand came up and covered hers — warm, certain, the same warmth she had felt in that first handshake thirty-one days ago, the handshake that had told her absolutely nothing about him and now told her everything.
