He pulled back. He looked at her. He had the expression — the real one, the personal one, the one that was entirely him and not the candidate — and in it she could see thirty-two days and everything they had been and the specific complicated interesting thing that they were going to be going forward, which was exactly as complicated and interesting as two people on opposite sides of a Parliament with an ongoing court order over a flat and a mutual commitment to honest disagreement could be expected to be.
"I'm still going to win the next seat I run for," he said.
"You're not going to win Lucknow North," she said. "I intend to hold it for two terms minimum."
"Challenge accepted," he said.
"It was always a challenge," she said. "That's the point."
He picked up his suitcases. She walked him to the door. He stood in the doorway — the same doorway he had stood in on Day One, the same corridor, the same lift, the same building in Civil Lines. Everything different.
"The title dispute settlement," he said. "For the flat."
"This week," she said. "I'll call."
"No loose ends," he said.
"No loose ends," she agreed.
He went. She closed the door. She stood in the flat — her flat, her constituency accommodation, her base for the work that was about to begin, the work she had been working toward for years. She stood in it and she looked at the blank whiteboard and the empty table and the kitchen where the chai things were on the left side of the counter and his coffee things were not on the right anymore, and she thought about all of it with the specific and honest attention she brought to everything that mattered.
Then she picked up her pen. She went to the whiteboard. She wrote: Parliament — Session 1 Priorities. She underlined it. She began the list.
She had work to do. She had always had work to do. The work was the point. The work was what she had come here for, what she had been building toward, what the thirty-two days and the court order and the kitchen table and the powercut and all of it had been in service of.
The work was the point. Everything else was in addition to the point. And the everything else was, she was clear-eyed enough to acknowledge, going to be one of the most interesting things she had ever done.
