by Sonali Dev
But DJ being DJ continued to skewer Samir with his patronizing gaze. If the bastard wasn’t half his size, Samir wouldn’t think twice about pummeling his agent’s face.
“Listen, Sam. The scandal from the bar last month isn’t cold yet. This is going to look really bad.” DJ leaned back in the hideous red velvet chair that totally fucked up the richly wood-paneled conference room at the studio. The ugly chairs were one of the updates the owner’s son had put in, undoubtedly to prove to the world that running the studio he’d inherited from his erstwhile superstar father involved some actual work. Samir wished he’d leave the décor alone and focus on upgrading the recording and editing equipment instead.
“I thought my trusted agent likes that my scandals keep me in the news.”
DJ gave him that look again—as if Samir-the-brat was throwing a tantrum and swami DJ in all his patient glory refused to indulge him.
But Samir wasn’t in the mood for this bullshit. He had to get back to the editing studio and finish up the edit on the ad film, which by the way he’d done only as a favor to one of DJ’s other clients. A fact the bastard seemed to have conveniently forgotten. “Being accused of punching a few hundred-kilo fuckers is different from being accused of hitting a woman. And just to jog your lazy-arse memory, I only pounded their ugly faces because they were dragging a struggling kid into the bathroom. I was actually rescuing her. So much for fucking heroism.”
DJ’s face softened. Oh, now he cared. “The girl’s parents called again, by the way. They wanted to thank you for keeping it out of the press. Her dad just made another donation to the Tirupathi temple for your long life and success.”
Samir waved away his words. Whatever. Now DJ wanted to go all hero-worship on him. Last week he couldn’t push hard enough to use the girl to make Samir look good. This is your chance to salvage the Bad Boy, Sam. But no way was Samir going to ruin some teenager just because she was too stupid to know what kind of bastards guys were. He didn’t need to give her any more life lessons. Those bastards in that bar had done the job well enough.
“Those pictures in the Times today are really god-awful, Sam.” His trusty right-hand man could always be counted on to gnaw off all the sugar coating from every bitter pill.
“She fell down my stairs and landed smack on her face, naturally she looks bad. And before you look at me like I’m a bastard, let me remind you that I ran two kilometers with her in my fucking arms. Fuck, I have to stop being such a hero. For all the good it does me.”
Someone pushed the door open and both DJ and Samir turned to see the errand boy poke his head into the room. One look at their faces and he started to back away.
“Hey, Ajay, come on in, boss.” Samir pulled the door open and the boy limped in with two glasses on a tray, his polio boot thunking on the ceramic tile.
“No sugar, all black, Sam-Sir. Just way you like.” He handed Samir a glass of what had to be the strongest coffee in all of Mumbai. “They asked me to tell you they’re ready for you in the studio.”
“Thanks, this is perfect.” Samir took a sip and ruffled his hair. “I’m going to look at the final cut of an ad film and Ria Parkar’s in it. I know you’re her biggest fan. So give me ten minutes and you can come and watch, what say?”
The boy’s face split into the widest grin. He nodded furiously and hurried away.
DJ’s jaw worked as he took a sip of his coffee. Twenty years ago DJ had been an errand-boy at this exact studio. “At least make a statement telling the press what happened, Sam.”
And they were back to the inquisition.
“Sure, I’ll run right along and tell them: ‘I didn’t hit my girlfriend. She tripped and fell down the stairs.’ They’ll have no trouble believing me. And while I’m at it why don’t I tell them ‘we’re just good friends.’ They should lap that up too.”
DJ opened his mouth.
But Samir had had about enough. “Before you start your broken record again, no, I won’t run and I won’t lie low. I’ve done nothing wrong.” His phone vibrated in his pocket. “Neha is just being vicious. She’ll clear the record with the press when her anger dies down. I’ll talk to her.”
“Sam, you know how conservative Shivshri Productions are. The whole playboy image is one thing, but an abuse scandal and they could drop you like a hot potato.”
“They’re not going to drop me. I’ve worked my ass off giving them three hits in three years. And I spoke with Shivji this morning. Unlike my agent, he had no trouble cutting me some goddamned slack.”
DJ rolled his eyes and raised his hands in surrender. Good. About time the harassment section of the meeting was over and they got some work done. Except DJ chugged down some more coffee and jumped straight to uncomfortable topic number two. “How’s the script coming along, by the way?”
He fucking knew how it was coming along. It wasn’t.
His phone vibrated again. Samir reached for it. No way was he telling DJ he still hadn’t been able to write one single word. It had been half a damn year and nothing. He didn’t need another lecture on finding someone else to write his script for him. Samir always wrote his own films. And that was never going to change. Usually he could pull scripts out of his ass at two weeks’ notice. Now he had the green light for the project of his heart and he was frozen. Frozen. Hours at the laptop and not one word to show for it. He tapped his phone.
It was his mother.
He pulled the phone to his ear. “Yes, Baiji?” he said in Hindi, holding up his hand at DJ, asking for a minute.
His mother didn’t answer. He heard a sob, then silence.
The room went completely and utterly still around Samir. “Baiji? Hello?”
Another muffled sob. “Samir . . . Samir, beta . . .”
His mother never lost her cool. She rarely even frowned. The only time he’d ever seen her cry was when she’d held him that last time his grandfather had made like Charlton Heston in Ben Hur and whipped his back to shreds.
He wanted to ask her what was wrong but nothing came out.
The voice on the line changed. It wasn’t Baiji anymore. It was Rima. Only it sounded nothing like his sister-in-law. It sounded like a dead woman with Rima’s voice. “Samir?” she said.
Of course it’s Samir. What the hell is wrong? He wanted to scream, but he said nothing.
“Come home,” the hollow voice said. “Your brother . . . Oh God, Samir . . . Virat’s plane went down.”
5
“You know, Mill, sometimes I think about Ravi, and I feel like my heart is going to explode. There are no words, no words to describe what just thinking about him does to my entire body.” Ridhi popped another square of the Hershey bar into her mouth and closed her eyes.
They were sitting cross-legged on Mili’s mattress on the floor of their shared bedroom, the chocolate bar dwindling rapidly in its glossy brown wrapping between them. Mili broke off another piece with the reverence it deserved and popped it into her mouth. Oh. Heavenly. God! Whoever discovered chocolate was a genius and this Hershey person—may all the gods from all the religions in the world bless him ten times over—was a divine angel. Pure pleasure melted through her entire being. Surely there was no other sensation quite like this in the world.
Ridhi grinned at her like a fool and gave her one of those looks that indicated she had done something “adorable” again. “If I were a man, I’d want to eat you with a spoon, Mill. I don’t know how your Squadron Leader let you out of his sight.”
Mili stuck out her tongue at Ridhi. “Is that what your Ravi does, use a spoon?”
Ridhi made a face but the deflection worked and her eyes grew instantly dopey again. She threw herself back on the mattress. “You know, the first time Ravi touched me, I thought I was going to burst into flames. I think I had an orgasm even before we got to the good stuff.”
Mili sucked furiously on her chocolate and squeezed her eyes shut.
Ridhi giggled. “How was it for you the first time with your Squadron Leader?”
Mili’s cheeks warmed. She had told Ridhi she was married. The truth. But she hadn’t mentioned that she hadn’t met her husband in twenty years, so to have had a first time with him would have been magical in more ways than one. “Unreal,” she said, her eyes still closed. The truth wasn’t as hard as people seemed to think it was. You just had to phrase it right, so it wasn’t a lie.
“Get out!” Ridhi yanked Mili’s arm so hard she fell back on the mattress, laughing. “I mean if he’s a military man, he must be all aggressive in bed, ha?”
Mili’s cheeks went so hot they had to have turned maroon again. What was the point of being dark if you couldn’t even hide a stupid blush? Ridhi said a very American “aw” and went up on her elbow next to her. “You know what the sweetest thing about Ravi is? He’s so unsure of himself. I feel like I’m totally corrupting him. But it’s also so annoying. Sometimes I want him to just lose his head and totally come at me, you know.”
Oh, Mili knew all about wanting someone to come at her, come to her, come for her. Anything but neglect her as if she were a crumb on the verandah no one bothered to sweep up.
“So, is your Squadron Leader going to come see you while you’re here or are you going to go without sex for a year?”
Mili tried not to choke on her chocolate. Every single person she’d ever known would have swooned in a dead faint before asking a question like that. “You know, I used to believe he would come for me, but now I’m starting to think he might wait until I go to him.”
“OMG, Mill, I just realized we’re both waiting for the men in our lives like good little Indian women.” Ridhi burst into giggles.
Mili’s heart did a little twist. Yes, but yours can’t wait to be with you. Mine . . . well, he doesn’t have that problem. Yet.
Ridhi popped the last remaining chocolate piece into her mouth. “I can’t wait a moment longer to finally be free of Daddy. He has never let me make one single decision for myself. He chose the courses I took in high school, tried to choose my career. ‘Medicine is the most gratifying, most lucrative profession in the world. Why would you want to do anything else?’ ”
She did a pretty authentic male falsetto with a Punjabi accent and Mili giggled.
“The first time I had my way was when I did badly on my SATs and he couldn’t do a thing about it except rant and shut me out. I wish I had figured out sooner that there are things he can’t control.”
Mili sat up and pushed a wispy strand of hair behind Ridhi’s ear. “Ridhi, do you ever wonder if—”
“No. I’ve thought about it—whether wanting to be with Ravi has to do with getting back at Daddy. But no. Ravi is—you have to meet him. He’s the most handsome, the kindest man I’ve ever met. And Daddy can’t keep me away from him by marrying me off to some Punjabi doctor. I’m not marrying anybody just because he’s Punjabi and certainly not just because he’s a doctor.” Her eyes shone like bright lights.
Envy swirled in Mili’s chest, hot and heavy. What must it feel like to have that kind of freedom? The freedom to forsake everyone and everything, to break every bond and reach for the man you chose for yourself. For a moment she wanted it so badly it burned a hole inside her.
Then just as quickly it was gone and guilt flooded where it had been. She smacked her forehead. “I’m sorry, Ridhi, I don’t know what I was thinking asking a question like that. Ravi and you are going to be so happy. I just know it.”
Just like she knew Virat and she were going to be. She would make it happen, whatever it took. So what if she hadn’t chosen him? She had vowed to be his forever, body and soul, and in the end that’s all that mattered.
A horrible, bottomless feeling settled inside Samir. Not just the sadness that had squeezed around him like shrink-wrap ever since he’d picked up the phone. This feeling was layered on top of that sadness, under it. This feeling he had carried inside him for as long as he could remember in that unforgiving hollow that held up his ribs. It had woken him up on countless nights, screaming, drenched in sweat. As a child Baiji had held him, rocked him back to sleep. In adulthood he had simply learned to silence the screams.
This feeling was the reason he avoided shooting in America. One film in New York—that’s all he’d done. New York he could handle. The choked-up concrete jungle he could handle. It was this open-earth, open-sky America that made his insides cave in. He didn’t need a shrink to tell him exactly where that came from. This icy hollow inside him was the only thing he’d taken from here—from the country of his birth. The country he’d been tossed out of like so much garbage. The country where mothers could just pick up their children and give them back like clothing that didn’t fit.
He gave the Corvette some juice and she purred under him like the sweetest lover begging for more. He was going to drive to the chick’s house, hand over the papers, get her to sign and then get the hell out of here. And if she happened to be in need of some persuasion, well, it was a good thing persuasion was one of Samir’s best talents. He had never had an actor refuse him a role, no matter how big of a star, and he had yet to meet a woman who wouldn’t give him exactly what he wanted.
Already she had been too much trouble. Talk about being hard to find. Thank God for DJ and all those damned contacts of his. From Balpur to America. If finding her hadn’t caused him such heartburn he’d be impressed. The vaguest memory of a chubby-cheeked girl bawling amidst wedding fires flashed in his mind. And like all memories from his childhood, it blew the raging hole in his gut open.
He forced himself to think about the letter instead. About laughing with his brother. About Rima’s tears.
If Rima isn’t my legal wife, that makes our child a bastard, Chintu.
Those had been Bhai’s first words when he came out of his coma. God, what if no one ever called him Chintu again? He still couldn’t believe Virat had escaped with two broken legs and a few broken ribs. But the weeklong coma had left Samir as terrified as the child who’d been thrown into a well in a fit of rage. Who’d been branded a bastard and then beaten for it. It had been Bhai who had jumped into the well after him and pulled him from the darkness. It had been Bhai who had thrown himself across his back to shield him when their grandfather’s belt came out to play. If anything ever happened to Bhai, there would be no one to pull Samir away from the terror. Horrible hot anger rose inside him and a desperate need to do something, anything, to make it go away.
The GPS showed ten miles to Ypsilanti. Where had she found a town with a name like that? Ip-sea-lan-tee. That’s how the car-rental lady had pronounced it. He repeated the ridiculous tongue twister under his breath. And why did it have to be Michigan? Fifty states in this godforsaken country and she had to pick the one where he’d first felt the burn of hunger in his belly, felt the horror of finding the woman who’d given birth to him lying in her own vomit, her white cheeks sunken, her eyes rolled up in their sockets, blood trickling from her nose and mixing with the acrid yellow liquid pooled under her head. He had crawled through the snow on bare hands and feet, unable to stay upright in the waist-deep snow, absolutely sure she was dead, absolutely sure he was going to die too. Even today, when he woke from the worst of the nightmares, he couldn’t feel his arms and legs.
He let go of the steering wheel and rubbed his hands on his jeans. This was fucking bullshit. Ancient history that had no place in his life anymore, thank you very much. He rammed his foot on the accelerator. How long would it take the chick to sign the papers? If only Bhai were here to make a wager. Not that Samir had much choice but to get it done in a few days and get his ass back to Mumbai. If the script wasn’t completed by the end of this month he was going to need a new career. This was his biggest budget yet. International-market big. With what they were giving him, he could actually make the kind of movie he’d been dreaming of since the first time he touched a camera. But if he’d had trouble writing before Virat’s plane crashed, after the accident it was as if his brain had forgotten what it took to make words, let alone make stories.
He had spent the entire plane ride from Mumbai to Detroit staring at his open laptop with nothing but buzzing white noise inside his head.
It was another strike against the girl. Not only had she piled worry and guilt on his brother’s head when he should’ve been focused on his recovery, but she had also dragged Samir from his work. Away from doing what he should be doing—writing, taking care of Bhai, doing anything that did not involve coming back to this godforsaken country and being sucked inward into the hollow that was suddenly too close to the surface.
Next to him the legal notice she had sent the day after Virat’s accident taunted him from inside his messenger bag and set his blood to boil. What kind of sick bitch sent a wounded soldier a legal notice demanding a share of his ancestral property? He’d made damn sure his lawyers wouldn’t let her get her greedy little paws on anything. But he didn’t trust anyone but himself to make sure she didn’t come anywhere near Bhai and Rima ever again. He would carry the expression on Rima’s face, as she sat by Virat’s side waiting for him to wake up, to his dying day. Bhai was right in keeping this from Rima. Some chick who crawled out of nowhere was not going to subject Rima to any more pain. At least not until the baby came.
Samir switched gears and caressed the sweet spot with his foot. “Would you prefer an automatic, sir?” the lady at the rental counter had asked. Who needed the flat lifeless ease of an automatic? What he needed was to feel the throb of each one of those four hundred and thirty horses as they pounded beneath his foot and he harnessed them into submission with his bare hands. If the village girl gave him any trouble she better be ready to have her life turned upside down. He was in no mood to suffer gold-digging opportunists. Hunger for vengeance against every injustice that had ever made him helpless raced through his veins. Maybe he wouldn’t let the sneaky little bitch off that easy. Maybe he’d turn on some Sam charm and make her fall so hard she’d be panting to sign the annulment papers. The thought calmed the fire a little. But not nearly enough.