Chapter 2: The Ledger of Small Disasters

The Desai Cultural Hall's front office had once been a coat closet, back when the building was a Grange hall and not yet the beating heart of Ashford Grove's autumn. Kamla Desai had converted it into an office in her second year of running the place, on the theory that a festival director needed a door that closed, and Meera had inherited both the room and the theory along with everything else. Tonight the door was closed and Meera sat behind the desk with three ledgers open in front of her — the Hall's, the festival's, and the private one she kept in a notebook that never left this room, the one where she wrote down the numbers she didn't want her grandmother to see yet. She had been staring at the same line for ten minutes: SPONSORSHIP — CONFIRMED, and beside it a number that was, this year, embarrassingly, dangerously smaller than the number from last year, which had itself been smaller than the year before. Someone knocked twice, lightly, and Pri let herself in without waiting for an answer, because Pri had never in the nine years of their friendship waited for an answer to anything. "So," Pri said, dropping into the folding chair across the desk and kicking her sandals half off, "is it true. Tell me it's not true. Tell me the entire town is wrong and Rina's mystery dhol player is not who I think he is." "It's true." "Kabir Rana is standing on Main Street right now with a drum case and you are in here doing math." "Somebody has to do math, Pri, the sponsorship number is—" Meera turned the ledger around so Pri could see it, tapping the line with one finger. "Sixty-one thousand. Confirmed. We need ninety just to cover the lease renewal deposit Voss's people are dangling in front of the landlord, and that's before insurance, before the stage rental, before—" "Before I ask you again why you're doing tax spreadsheets instead of processing the fact that your childhood — " Pri paused, visibly reconsidering the word, "— your person is back in town." "He was never my person." The words came out faster and sharper than Meera meant them to, which told her, unhelpfully, exactly how untrue they probably were. "We were sixteen and seventeen and then his family's shop closed and his family left and that was it. It's been five years since he even set foot in Ashford Grove. He's here for nine nights to play a drum for his mother. That's the whole story." "Uh huh." Pri picked up a stray festival flyer off the desk and fanned herself with it, unconvinced and unbothered about showing it. "And how did it feel, seeing him?" Meera opened her mouth to say fine, or nothing, or some other word designed to end the conversation, and instead heard herself say, "Like getting hit by a bus that used to be my favorite bus." Pri barked a laugh loud enough that it probably carried into the main hall, where a handful of volunteers were still stringing marigold garlands along the stage rigging for opening night. "That is the single most Meera sentence you have ever said to me, and I have known you since we were both eight and you cried because someone folded the dandiya sticks wrong." "They were sorted by color." "They were sorted by color, and you were eight, and you're still exactly that person, which is why I'm telling you — as your best friend and also the person legally responsible for keeping this festival's schedule from imploding — that you cannot spend the next nine nights avoiding him. He's playing dhol at every event. You're running every event. Math, Meera. Even you have to see the math on this one." Meera closed the ledger with more force than the moment required. "I'm not avoiding him. I told him rehearsal starts at six tomorrow and I meant it." "Good. Great." Pri leaned forward, dropping the teasing for a second, her voice softening into something more careful. "How bad is it really? The sponsorship thing." Meera exhaled slowly and let herself, for one moment, look as tired as she actually felt. "Riverside Banquet & Events opened eight months ago with about four times our square footage, a full commercial kitchen, valet parking, and a marketing budget that could probably buy this entire block. Alden Voss has been taking our sponsors to lunch since July. The Ashford Grove Chamber pulled out in August — said Riverside offered better visibility for their logo. The credit union followed in September. If we lose the hardware co-op and the Patel family's grocery chain too, we don't make the number the landlord wants for the lease renewal, and Dadi loses the Hall she's run for forty-two years because some venture-backed banquet hall three towns over decided community festivals were a growth market." "That's not going to happen." "It's very much going to happen, Pri, unless this is the best Navratri this Hall has ever put on, and I don't currently have a lead dancer who isn't recovering from ankle surgery, a marquee performance that exists mostly on paper, or a dhol player I didn't have to hire, because apparently my grandmother called Rina Rana behind my back and told her the Hall needed a drummer and Rina volunteered her son without asking either of us." Pri's eyebrows went up. "Kamla did that on purpose." "Kamla does everything on purpose. That's not the point. The point is the marquee performance is supposed to be the thing that makes Alden Voss's sponsors sit in those folding chairs on Night Nine and remember why they came to this Hall in the first place instead of Riverside's ballroom with the chandeliers, and right now the marquee performance is me, a spreadsheet, and prayer." "You have a dhol player." "I have a drummer, not a dancer." Pri went quiet in the specific way she went quiet right before saying something Meera didn't want to hear. "You know he used to dance better than half the kids we grew up with. Better than most of the adults, honestly. I remember him at the Night Nine performance our senior year, before — " she stopped herself, tactfully, before finishing that sentence the way it wanted to be finished, before his father's shop, before everything. "That was five years and a whole life ago." "People don't forget how to move like that, Meera. Some things you don't unlearn." Pri stood, stretching, sandals flopping back onto her feet. "I'm just saying. You've got a problem shaped exactly like a solution standing on Main Street with a drum, and you're in here doing math instead of solving it." "I have a plan," Meera said, which was mostly true. She had, in fact, spent the better part of the afternoon quietly obsessing over exactly this problem, running through every dancer in the community roster who might be able to step into Priya Bhatt's role now that Priya's ankle was in a cast for the next six weeks, and coming up empty every single time, because the marquee performance required a level of partnership, of trust, of two bodies who could read each other without looking, that Meera hadn't found in anyone on the current roster. She had not let herself finish the thought that followed that one. She wasn't going to start now, with Pri watching her with that particular knowing look. "Sure you do," Pri said, entirely unconvinced, and let herself back out of the office, leaving the door open behind her — a small, deliberate act of chaos that Meera was too tired to correct. Alone again, Meera opened the ledger back up, but her eyes kept drifting to the window, to the strip of Main Street visible past the marigold-strung stage rigging, where the streetlights were starting to flicker on for the evening and somewhere out there, presumably, Kabir Rana was walking toward his mother's apartment with a drum on his back and five years of things neither of them had said sitting between them like a debt nobody had figured out how to collect. She thought about her father's old office, one floor up, that nobody had touched since he died six years ago — boxes of festival records going back decades, a locked filing cabinet she'd never had the stomach to open. She thought, unbidden, of the year the Rana shop closed, and how quiet her father had gone about it, how he'd never once explained to her why, and how she'd been too young and too grieving over her mother's death the year before to ask the right questions at the time. She pushed the thought away. There would be time, later, for the things she didn't understand about her own family's history. Right now there was a sponsorship number sixty-one thousand dollars short of what they needed, a marquee dance with no lead partnership, and nine nights standing between the Hall she loved and the possibility of losing it for good. Meera picked up her pen, drew a line under the sponsorship number, and started, very deliberately, writing a list of every dancer in Ashford Grove she hadn't yet considered — and found, three names down, that her hand had stopped moving, pen hovering over the paper, because the name her mind kept circling back to wasn't on any roster at all. She set the pen down and, instead of finishing the list, pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk, the one that stuck a little in humid weather, and lifted out a thin photo album she kept there and rarely opened — pictures from old festivals, curling at the edges, some of them older than she was. She flipped past shots of her mother in a green chaniya choli, laughing at something off camera, past a much younger Kamla mid-spin with both arms thrown wide, until she found the one she'd been looking for without quite admitting it to herself: seventeen-year-old Meera and seventeen-year-old Kabir, caught mid-turn in a dandiya set, sticks crossed overhead, both of them grinning at each other instead of the camera. Someone — Pri, probably — had scrawled a date on the back in marker. Five years before everything fell apart. She studied the photo longer than she meant to, tracing the easy, unguarded joy on both their faces, a version of the two of them that existed before grief had gotten its hands on either of them. She hadn't thought about that particular night in years — the last full festival before the Rana shop closed, the last Navratri when her father and Kabir's father had still stood together at the mandap during the opening aarti, two men who'd grown up two streets apart in this same small town, trading the same tired joke about whose family made better sweets. The office door creaked, and Meera startled, sliding the album half under a ledger before she registered it was only Pri again, poking her head back in for her forgotten sandals. "You're doing the thing," Pri said, catching sight of the album edge before Meera could fully hide it. "The thing where you look at old photos and get that face." "I don't have a face." "You have a face. I've known you nine years, I know the face." Pri crossed the room, retrieved her sandals, and paused at the desk long enough to tug the album the rest of the way out and glance at the open page, her expression softening at the photo. "God, look at you two. You were disgustingly cute even then." "We were seventeen." "Disgustingly cute seventeen-year-olds who clearly liked each other and were too chicken to say so, if I recall correctly, which I do, because I spent an entire summer listening to you agonize over whether he'd noticed you'd started wearing your hair down for festival nights." Pri closed the album gently and set it back on the desk instead of returning it to the drawer, a small, deliberate act. "Leave it out. Look at it again before rehearsal tomorrow. Remind yourself what it felt like before you built the spreadsheet version of your whole life around forgetting." Meera didn't answer, but she also didn't put the album away after Pri left again, this time for good, footsteps fading down the hall toward the parking lot. She sat with it open a while longer, the Hall settling into its evening quiet around her, the last of the volunteer crew's voices drifting up from the main floor and then falling silent as they finished for the night and let themselves out. Eventually she closed the album, slid it back into the drawer where it belonged, and returned to her list of dancers — crossing out every name but one, because there was, in the end, no version of this she hadn't already decided. She just hadn't let herself admit it out loud yet, not even in the privacy of her own converted coat closet, with only a stack of old ledgers and a photograph of who they used to be for company. It was standing across the street with a drum case, and rehearsal started at six.

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