They looked at each other in the noise of the counting centre. Both of them aware of everything that was the last thirty-two days and everything that was going to be the thirty-two days after and the specific position they were now in, which was: she had won and he had lost and they were standing two feet apart in a school hall in Lucknow while both their teams watched and this was the specific reality of a situation that had been, from the beginning, one of the more complicated ones she had occupied.
"There are things to figure out," she said. Quietly, under the noise.
"Yes," he said. "There are."
"Starting with the flat," she said. She said it with the slight dryness that was her version of lightness, the dry quality she had developed over thirty-two days of being in a situation that required both seriousness and the occasional acknowledgment that the situation was also genuinely absurd.
He almost smiled. "The title dispute," he said. "Technically still unresolved."
"Technically," she said.
"The court did say the matter would return to them post-election," he said.
"Yes," she said. "It did."
A pause. Both of them in the pause. His team was waiting. Her team was waiting. The hall was the hall. The result was the result.
"I'll come to collect my things," he said. "Tonight, if that works."
"Tonight works," she said.
He looked at her one more time — the full look, the personal one, not the political surface. Then he turned and went back to his team and the professional management of a loss, which he was going to do well, because he did most things well and he had the specific quality of someone who absorbed difficulty without being diminished by it.
She watched him go and then she turned back to her team and the celebration and the press calls and the party communication desk and the specific enormous work of being the elected MP for Lucknow North, which was what she had come here to do and had done and which was the only the beginning of the actual thing she had come here to do.
She was very good at beginnings. She had been doing this her whole life. She was ready for this one.
