Incense and Sensibility

by Sonali Dev

  “Isn’t it your job to disappear in a crowd?” Yash said as soon as Nisha had introduced them, being deliberately and uncharacteristically ornery.

  “I don’t believe that is part of the job description. In fact, I would say warning people off is the job description, sir.”

  “Okay, let’s cut to the chase. There is only one condition on which I would hire you. If there is a shooting I need your assurance that you will not jump in front of any flying bullets.”

  Nisha knew better than to interrupt, but she threw him a look that would have maimed a man who hadn’t dealt with her his entire life.

  Ms. Hennessy met his stubborn gaze, stood, and shook his hand. “Well, it was nice meeting you, Mr. Raje. I hope you find someone who does the job the way you want them to.” With that, she turned and strode away.

  Nisha ran after her. “Brandy, listen, could you hold up a minute?” Before Nisha disappeared out the giant glass doors, she threw Yash the nastiest glare.

  With a deep, deep sigh, Yash followed the two women out. Both of whom were moving a little too fast. And Nisha was pregnant.

  Fortunately, Brandy noticed that Nisha was chasing her down and turned. Good, because the woman gave off a Terminator vibe, one that said she could outrun them if they were driving cars.

  “I’m sorry,” Yash said, catching up. “Can we come up with a compromise?”

  “A compromise?” Brandy said, as though it were a word Yash had just made up out of thin air.

  “Yes, in case of an assassination attempt, could you just shout me a warning or something? Oh, and could you wear a bulletproof body suit—head-to-toe?”

  Not a single muscle on her face moved. She looked as though the question were too far beneath her dignity to address.

  Yash raised his brows in a do-we-have-a-deal? gesture.

  “No.” Just that. A single word.

  “No to one or both?” he said, and tried to ignore the fact that Nisha looked like she was going to kick his shins, even as she texted away furiously on her phone. What was she up to now?

  “Both.” Another single-word answer from Brandy. He could work with this woman. Especially if she trained everyone else in his life in the skill.

  “Have you ever been shot?” he asked, determined to not sound like a scared little boy.

  “I’ve never been hit by a bullet.”

  “So you’ve been shot at?”

  “The person under my protection has been shot at.” The woman seemed to be entirely unfamiliar with these things called emotions. In other words, she was Yash’s inner world right now.

  “What did you do?”

  “I pushed him to the ground and the bullet missed.” Still no emotion. None at all.

  “How many times has this happened?”

  It took her a few moments, during which her face blanked out even more. She was actually counting the number of times in her head. “Four.”

  “Why do you do this job?”

  “Someone has to do it and I can do it better than most.”

  Nisha looked like a cat who had swallowed a giant tub of cream.

  Yash threw his sister a look that said, Don’t you dare say one single word, before turning to Brandy again. “You can start tomorrow.”

  He was about to leave, glad to be done with this, when Nisha spoke. “Actually she’s starting today.” She turned to Brandy. “Yash needs to go see someone in Palo Alto today. Now, as a matter of fact.”

  Yash didn’t even bother to glare at Nisha. How had she and Ashna managed to even get through to India so fast? “I’d like to do that by myself. Thank you.”

  “So you’re going to hire someone else for this job, then?” Brandy said.

  God, he hated his life.

  “No, he won’t,” Nisha said before he groaned out loud. “You’ll go with him. Your first assignment.” As if he didn’t know that Nisha had already hired Brandy before bringing her here.

  Yash sighed. “I didn’t say I was going to go see India today.”

  “You need to be back on the campaign trail. You don’t have the luxury of waiting until tomorrow.” Nisha no longer sounded smug, just worried. “Brandy and you can wait in the car. I just texted Ashna. She’s on her way down, she’ll take you over to India’s.”

  Nisha and everyone he knew had spent a lifetime working to make his goals a reality. It was time for him to stop being a baby.

  “Fine.” They walked in silence to his car.

  He hadn’t seen India Dashwood in ten years, and now he was going to have an audience when he did see her.

  At least there was zero chance that she would want to work with him. Which meant he had to show up, have her tell him she didn’t have time for him, and then . . . and then what, he didn’t know.

  For the first time in his life, when he looked into the future, he hit a wall. A wall that loomed as dark and endless as the numbness inside him. For the first time in his life, he had a problem and no idea how to fix it.

  Chapter Six

  India handed her mother a cup of steaming ginger and turmeric tea. The shadows under Mom’s eyes were deep and her aura was still completely off, but between the meditation and the medication her pain seemed to have eased. “Is China back from her cooling-off walk?” Tara asked just as the doorbell rang, startling them both.

  Their doorbell never rang. Not ever. Why would China ring the bell? Both the entrances had a security keypad with a code. Only the front studio entrance had a doorbell.

  “The keypad must not be working,” India said, dropping a kiss on Tara’s head. “Get some rest. I’ll let China in and then I need to file some patient records.”

  Making a mental note to get the keypad checked, India took the stairs down and made her way through the studio to the front door. She pressed her face to the mullioned glass to see who it was and threw the door wide open. The bells on the doorknob went off in a jingling frenzy.

  “Ashna! I’m so glad to see you.” She wrapped her arms around Ashna. “How is your cousin? I was so worried. Is everything okay? Did you need a session? How is the bodyguard? Is he going—”

  Ashna quickly returned her hug, then pulled away and looked over India’s shoulder at someone standing off to the side. India spun around.

  Oh.

  She had forgotten how tall he was. How long-limbed and athletic. How thick his hair. How stark the gray of his eyes against his dark skin. How wide his shoulders.

  She’d forgotten the sheer force of his presence.

  Like an absolute and utter idiot, she made a sound that belonged to no language on earth.

  His lips did the barest twist. She had no idea if it was a smile or a grimace. Raising his hand, he gave her a wave.

  A wave! As though he were onstage and she were one of his political groupies lapping up his speeches and waiting to shake his hand. Now that he was standing here all healthy and as vibrant as ever, she wanted to shove him away and slam the door in his face. She’d been waiting a long time to slam the door in his face.

  “I texted you and tried to call. But you didn’t answer,” Ashna said, and India spun to her, praying that the embarrassment burning her face wasn’t visible.

  She had turned her phone silent at the doctor’s office and forgotten to turn it back on.

  “Do you have a moment to talk?” Ashna asked.

  They wanted to come in? Both of them? Why? “Absolutely. Come on in.”

  Before India could step aside and let them in, a woman in a black muscle shirt and an earpiece stepped out from behind Yash. “Is there anyone in the studio?” She had red spiked hair and the palest blue eyes. The word assassin came to mind.

  “This is Brandy, Yash’s bodyguard,” Ashna said, sliding a quick look at Yash. “His new bodyguard.”

  The lines around Yash’s mouth tightened. He looked away when India caught the punch of pain in his eyes. Now that she was past the initial shock, he seemed drawn. His angular face had filled out, all of him had broadened and gained gravitas.
The streaks of silver radiating from his temples took the gravitas to the next level. Despite that, there was a hollowness to him. Not even a hint of the energetic sparkle she remembered in his eyes.

  Don’t think about his aura.

  His golden aura had been a magnet to her. The only aura that she had ever read wrong. It had dulled to a tarnished bronze.

  He’d just been shot, and the rate at which he’d been campaigning was nothing short of frenzied, so maybe she shouldn’t be surprised. Gauging people was her job, intuitively knowing what ailed them was her greatest skill, but there was something in his face that she couldn’t put into words.

  The bodyguard extended her hand and India took it. “It’s nice to meet you.” She hated how much she loved that his bodyguard was a woman.

  India could carry a grown man up five flights of stairs without breaking a sweat. She could bench two-fifty. Not many people realized how strong a lifelong yoga practice made you. The last thing she needed flashing in her head right now was that first time she had met Yash at his sister’s wedding. It had been years since she’d thought about how dazzled he’d been when she’d helped him move those heavy boxes.

  “Likewise,” Brandy said. To no one’s surprise she had an impressively assertive handshake. “Is there anyone else in there?”

  “The studio is closed.” India threw a look at the CLOSED sign hanging on the door. “My mother is upstairs and we don’t open again until six.”

  Yash was watching her. The awareness of it fell like sparks on her skin. She was glad for the tie-dye yoga jacket she’d thrown on over her usual yoga wear to go to the doctor’s office. No one needed to see the goosebumps that danced down her arms. He hadn’t said a word, but his presence was a hum in the air. Exactly like the breathing of a sleeping dragon in a fairy tale.

  “Are there any other entrances to the place?” Brandy asked.

  “There’s an entrance in the back that leads up to our home on the upper floors.”

  Yash looked up at the facade of the studio and the late afternoon sun caught his eyes. A crystalline gunmetal-gray she’d never seen anywhere else.

  She had been to the house he’d grown up in. Just the pool house on the Raje estate was larger than the Dashwood studio and apartments put together. But it was hers and she loved it. Childish as it was, she stuck out her chin as he looked at her, but he gave away nothing.

  “Is that entrance secured?” Brandy said, studying the building as though it might blow up if touched.

  “It’s locked and has a touchpad that unlocks it. This is the only public entrance.”

  “I’m going to go around the back and check it out. Please keep this door locked.”

  It’s a pretty safe neighborhood, India wanted to say, but Yash had just been shot, so India was happy for Captain Marvel here and her paranoia.

  “I will. Come on in. Please.” She pushed the door open and Ashna walked in. Yash pressed his hand against the door and held it, waiting for India to go in before following her. He still hadn’t said a word.

  She led them through the waiting area past the registration desk and the benches with cubbies for shoes and hooks for bags and jackets.

  Yash took in the place with that utterly flat expression he’d been wearing this entire time. The kind of expression a guilty person might paste across their face when invited to testify in front of a grand jury. Trying to get people to plumb the depths of their emotions was what India did for a living. Resistance was her daily companion. He was not here of his own free will. This was not in the least bit surprising.

  “Let’s go to my office.” Her office was her sanctuary. She loved what she’d done with it during the renovation. Self-consciousness kicked in her gut when she thought about the dramatic beauty of his parents’ estate. She kicked it right back and led them past the yoga rooms and showers and threw her office door open.

  Fading sunlight streamed in through the wall of windows lined with shelves that held her grandmother’s bonsais. They were now her bonsais. They had been since Grandmona died almost ten years ago. White walls and white furniture were offset by an orange couch and carpet. The perfectly balanced beauty of it made her feel just a little bit less off-kilter.

  Ashna sat down on the couch, but Yash walked straight to her bonsais, mouth slightly agape. A universal reaction to the miniaturized trees her grandmother had tended for fifty years and India would cherish for as long as she lived. She would not let the fact that he looked awestruck by her cherished trees affect her. It was perfectly normal to be fascinated by an art that harnessed the splendor of a giant life-form.

  “Is this a banyan tree?” Those were the first words he uttered. The first words he’d addressed to her in ten years. Not that it was anticlimactic or anything.

  The way he talked had changed. There was a deliberately understated quality to his diction now. The boundless enthusiasm that had struck her as so endearing was completely leashed. This new voice was the one she’d heard on TV. His jaw barely moved and each word came out laced with careful sincerity.

  “It’s the bodhi satva tree,” she said, her voice even more deadpan than his.

  “The one Gautama Buddha meditated under when he achieved nirvana.”

  She met his flat look with one of her own. “One doesn’t achieve nirvana, they attain it.”

  He stiffened so slightly she only noticed because she was trained to notice. It was a professional hazard.

  “Didn’t you break your arm while swinging from the roots of a banyan tree in Sripore once?” Ashna said, a smile in her voice from the memory.

  India wanted to give her a hug. How terrifying the shooting must have been for the Rajes. Especially since they’d been through something like this with Yash when he’d had that accident in high school. Did the man have to be ambitious about being accident prone too?

  “There’s this three-hundred-year-old banyan tree on the grounds of our ancestral home in Sripore,” Ashna added, with all the fondness of a doting sister. “As kids we loved to swing by the hanging roots. Yash liked to pretend he was Tarzan.”

  Color crept up Yash’s neck, past his tightly buttoned collar. He cleared his throat and turned back to the bonsai. So he’d started to take himself quite seriously, then. What she’d found most appealing about him was how self-deprecating he’d been, how filled with humor.

  Enough. Time to stop with the Spurned Lover’s Tragic Musings. It had been one day. Fine, one day and one night. One magical night. But that didn’t make them lovers, not even close. He’d ghosted her, long before the word ghosted was minted. No one said he wasn’t a trailblazer.

  “Tarzan grew up to wear a suit,” India said, and Yash stiffened again.

  He wasn’t wearing a suit right now, just a crisp blindingly white shirt, and a long gray coat that looked like it cost as much as the studio’s monthly earnings.

  “There are hooks behind the door, if you’d like to take off your jackets.”

  Ashna took off her red leather jacket and hung it up. Yash pulled the lapels of his coat tighter around himself. A faint memory of something pricked at India’s mind, but didn’t fully form.

  “Do you want to sit down?” she asked, because suddenly exhaustion seemed to drag at the body he was holding so tall and proud.

  He turned away from her bonsai and looked at her funny. Admittedly, her voice had sounded a little too concerned. She barely knew the man. I care about everyone. You’re not special, she wanted to tell him. It was time to rein in her Mother Earth instinct. He didn’t need it. Even though he looked like he needed something.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” he said in his new voice.

  “As you know, Yash was shot,” Ashna said, every bit of her horror at the memory clear in her voice.

  India had already established how much that fact had bothered her when she’d first opened the door and vomited her concern to Ashna, so she nodded.

  “We need your help.”

  We?

  Yash cleared hi
s throat. “I. I need your help.” For the first time today his voice sounded real, tinged with the vulnerability she sometimes still heard in her dreams. He turned to Ashna. “Can I talk to India alone?”

  Ashna blinked as though he’d asked if he could take off his clothes and take a nap on India’s couch. The cousins exchanged a look. During the exchange, Ashna obviously didn’t find the answers she was searching for. His face was so stubbornly set, India would have been surprised if Ashna had argued with him.

  She turned to India. “Is it okay if I go visit Chutney and Tara? I’m guessing China’s not home.” China and Ashna were best friends, so naturally Ashna knew that China had barely left Song’s side in a month.

  “Mom’s upstairs. She’s not been feeling great. She’s resting, but she will be happy to see you and so will Chutney.”

  Ashna threw another gauging look at Yash, then squeezed India’s arm. “Thanks. Just holler if you need me.”

  Yash didn’t like that. He frowned as though Ashna had called his integrity into question.

  “Your mother’s sick?” he asked as soon as Ashna left. “I hope it’s nothing serious.” His politician’s voice again, the concern in it too smooth.

  “Thanks,” she said, and turned away. How badly she wanted it to be nothing serious was none of his concern.

  “You have someone named Chutney upstairs?” So his voice could still smile.

  Stop it. Stop overanalyzing every little thing about him.

  “My dog.”

  “You have a dog named Chutney?” She couldn’t be sure if that sound coming from him was a laugh, but when she turned around his shoulders were shaking and he’d buried his face in his hand.

  “Why is my dog’s name funny?”

  He looked up, his laughter barely brightening his eyes. “It’s a condiment.”

  He looked around the room and discomfort zinged through her. Being judged was a feeling India was familiar enough with. Hippie-dippie? Woo-woo? Mumbo jumbo? They ate labels for lunch in her family. “I am aware,” she said calmly, because snapping at people was not her way. And because she’d show him her emotions again when the netherworld froze over.