The candle moved — a breath from somewhere, a slight draft from the not-quite-shut window, and the flame bent and steadied. The amber light shifted across the room. She was aware, with the specific awareness of someone who had been in a room with the same person for seventeen days and had developed a thorough inventory of that person's qualities, that Aditya Malhotra at eleven forty-five PM in a powercut was a different person from Aditya Malhotra at the campaign event or in the courtroom or even at the kitchen table in the early morning. The powercut had removed something — she couldn't name what, exactly. The last layer of management. The layer that was not deceptive but was simply protective, the layer that every person had between themselves and the world, and which circumstances occasionally stripped away.
"Why did you come into this specifically?" she said. "You could have been in party leadership. You didn't have to run for a seat."
"Because I want to represent people," he said. "Not manage them from a distance. Not make policy in a committee room and send it to the constituency. I want to be the one answering for it. If a road isn't built, I want to be the person who has to explain why to the people who needed the road." He paused. "My father never ran a constituency. He was always in party structures or cabinet. I think he lost something because of that. I don't want to lose that."
"What did he lose?"
"The knowledge of what a person in this constituency actually needs from a representative," he said. "Not in the aggregate. Specifically. The water. The school. The voter ID correction." He paused. "You know that. You've done the ground work from the beginning. I've been catching up to you on that for seventeen days."
She looked at him. "You're better at the public aspect than I am," she said. "The room-reading. The warmth that lands on camera."
"You're better at the substance than I am. Your policy depth is—" He stopped. He made a small gesture — not dismissive, the opposite, the gesture of someone acknowledging something they've given up trying to characterise as merely good. "You're extremely good at this," he said. "I want you to know that I know that."
She heard this and did not know immediately what to do with it, so she looked at the candle. The candle was on the table between them. The table was approximately four feet wide. The room was quiet and amber and the whole city outside was dark in the section outage and there were fourteen days left and she was very tired and very aware of him — not in the abstract way, not as a candidate opposite her, but in the specific and inconvenient way of a person who had been learning someone for seventeen days and had arrived at a thorough understanding that included things she had not intended to understand.
