There are some books which read like an excerpt. Like there should have been more, it finished too early leaving you wanting for more. Royals is one such book.

Imagine this. Two young beautiful people. With blemished families. With a large heart full of love. With eyes full of appreciation for beauty. With minds full of ardour for art. Meet for a few weeks. Develop friendship of a weird yet liberal, brazen yet shy kind with each other. Only for it to end abruptly and never return again.

Steven :

A young beautiful boy of 18 years old, living with his brothers, father and mother and a couple of unmarried paternal aunts working on their family business a stone's throw away. On reading this, one may possibly think what could be wrong with this boy, he is surrounded by his family. But, Steven is a boy whose love for fashion and colours and music give others the impression that he is gay, though internally he hasn't decided yet. He loves his mother to the core and she loves him to no end as well. His mother probably breathes only for Stephen 'cause her husband always returns home to knock the wind out of her. His ultimate aim is to walk out of that coop that everyone else calls home with his mother, and chalk out a different life full of love and light for the two of them.

He has a few quirks of his own, which is something every teenager child has. Steven says he would love to be taken in by Oscar Wild. He felt if Oscar Wild was alive, he would have surely adopted him.Colours are his only resort to this abusive life of his. He keeps thinking of different colour combinations and what materials they would look good on to keep his mind distracted from hurtful thoughts. He even dressed himself while listening to the Top 40 songs of England.

A blow from his father sends him to the hospital, only to change his life in the most wondrous yet sorrowful way possible.


Jasmine : 

A lovely little girl of 19, often attempting suicide, yet has a heart full of feelings and a mind full of constantly popping weird thoughts just to avoid the painful ones of her mother. A young girl left in a mansion to fend for herself, when her mother is in the heavens and her father was finding his heaven wrapped in the smooth, slender, often exotic arms of youthful beauty around the world.

She states that being suicidal is in the genes, but maybe she has more reason to feel so. Maybe her attempts will bring her beloved Daddy back more often, is what she thinks. A strange Daddy for anybody to have. He comes home after months without any news of arrival, snorts coke with his daughter and vanishes in a fashion similar to that of his appearance, leaving his daughter with a few moments of happiness and a long trail of loneliness, drugs, and suicide attempts.

She is a charmer, a lover. Her words, even the rudest ones don't seem so rude because her pretty face seems to coat those words in the sweetness of caramel before darting them as arrows to people who were hopelessly in love with her. She had sex. Quite a lot of it. Not a surprise to your ears when you hear that she has a heart brimming with love. She is a person who has sex because her body loves it, and her mind thinks that the moment is such a beautiful one that it must be commemorated in some way. She often forgets the face of the person, and sometimes doesn't even bother to know the name, yet she always remembers where she had sex, how the sky looked when she had it and how she felt when she had it.

Jasmine's mind is only calm when she applies makeup, and she applies a lot of it. Other times, she has random thoughts of doing weird things apart from suicide.


Steven and Jasmine's Friendship :

Their friendship starts at a hospital. Steven is in, recovering from blows from his father, and Jasmine for recovering from her latest suicidal attempt. He catches her applying makeup and immediately his soul starved of companionship, gets attracted to this pretty girl who understands and shares his tastes and doesn't ridicule him for being himself.

The way Jasmine treats him, is difficult to fathom. He is at the intersection of a boyfriend, best friend, a human treated as an object whose owner places it in different ways out of whim and a person with whom she can share her deepest darkest fears, emotions and solitude. She kisses him full on the mouth when she wants to, just cause she wants to and knows that he wants it too. Surprised to think that Steven, a potentially gay boy could want the kiss of a woman? Well, Steven has received the love and attention of a mother only. If a man or a woman gave him attention, sought him, and kissed him, he would turn his lips to them without any hindrance, because it is not the gender of those lips that matter to him now. The fact that there are lips wanting to touch his, fills him up.
She undresses before him, giving him a full view of her bare naked body and gets into the bathtub with him. All because she knows she is safe around him and she loves him, homosexual or not doesn't irk her. Her love for him is enough to make her comfortable enough to shave her pubic hair before his eyes, for she knows Stephen's eyes are not filled with the hunger of lust, his eyes are filled with adulation for her. Jasmine thinks Stephen's penis is beautiful. No, it was not a discovery met in a moment of passionate throes, 'cause despite all the undressing and kisses, they never once touched each other in a sexual manner. Yes Steven had looked at her breasts, but it was because he was seeing a full grown female body in all the glory of its nakedness for the first time. But neither of them ever felt the need to touch each other for gratification or for consummating their friendship.
There is a haunting question asked by Jasmine, which I believe is so very relevant in today's world of confused sexual identities, and that is "Would you ever go straight for me?" This question made me rethink love. It made me question love. In fact, the entire outlook of Jasmine has made look at love from a different angle. She loves Steven for not his identity, but for his ideas, his beauty and for himself. Steven may never make love to her, yet the love they share is so genuine. Jasmine is in love with the human, not with his gender. This simplifies love to such an extent. Yet complicates it so much more.

Their friendship is also about doing things undone like sending fan letters unsent (oh, don't we all have a phase where he have penned our hearts out to those we have idolized yet not posted out of fear that those ideologies may come shattering around us lest those go unreplied to?), applying to that fashion institute which churns out geniuses yet we have no balls to buy the form, about sharing an intimate love for art and fashion and glamour and grace, about being a fearless teenager yet being a coward, about dreaming of living together, about dreaming of every fashionista's one true love - Paris. And all of this happens with the royal matrimony of Prince Charles and Princess Diana in the background. How this teenager duo feel that Diana is not happy and that she is a beautiful soul, looking like a ravishing lady in the prettiest of clothes, carrying a big heart along with a sense of directionless inside that petite,demure frame of hers.

This is a friendship where there is love, velvet, dance, silk, music, corsets, Paris, kisses with the girl, brazenness,  kisses with her dad, moments of high, moments of hurt, and lastly, the potent moment of death. Short lived, yet full of vigour, is what I would describe the relationship between Jasmine and Steven, and I believe that even though they had a lot more to achieve together, the summer that they had spent together shall always be theirs, can never turn sour, can never turn stale and most importantly can never be shared or relived.

Note : I received the uncorrected proof of Royals from Bloomsbury Publishing House in exchange of an honest review.