by Sonali Dev
She shook her head.
“Love Lights?” Another proud, expectant look. “It’s a dark love story.”
She crinkled her nose. “How can love be dark?”
He raised a patronizing eyebrow at her. As though he couldn’t believe anyone could be naïve enough to ask such a question. “Well, it’s set in Kashmir. They get separated and she gets involved in a terrorist group and when he finds her again she’s training to be a human bomb.”
“Good Lord, that is dark.” Maybe it was a good thing she hadn’t watched his movies. They sounded positively morose.
He smiled and picked up his laptop again.
“What are you working on now?” Although after what she’d just heard she was afraid to ask.
He searched her face for a few moments. Just when she thought he wasn’t going to talk about it, he spoke. “It’s the story of this boy from a small village who comes to Mumbai and makes a name for himself.”
“You’re writing about yourself?”
“Myself?” He looked startled. “You think I’m from a village?”
“Aren’t you from near Balpur?”
All the color drained from his face.
“Don’t worry,” she said quickly, laying a soothing hand on his arm, “you’re a very authentic city boy. It’s just your Rajasthani dialect. You sound like you’re from near my village.” She’d never forget how amazing it had felt to hear that perfect accent of his that first time they’d met. “Have you ever visited your uncle in Balpur?”
His already clenched jaw tightened some more. “A long time ago. When I was very young.”
It had been close to twenty years since Samir had been back. You couldn’t drag him back to that hellhole with a crane. None of them had ever gone back. Not Baiji. Not Virat. Not even for the sadistic old bastard’s funeral. Samir tamped down on the reflex to reach behind him and touch the welts that were no longer visible on his back. He willed the swish of the belt not to sound in his head. But it did.
“Samir, are you all right?” Mili moved closer to him, her eyes wide and limpid with concern.
“I’m fine.” What the fuck was it with all these flashbacks suddenly? He lifted Mili’s hand off his arm, meaning to remove it, but her fingers were so soft, so warm, he hung on.
She pulled her hand away and didn’t push for more. “Tell me about this boy,” she said instead, her voice so gentle his heartbeat calmed.
“He has a gift. He can see the future. Only when he uses his gift for his own gain something catastrophic happens to someone he loves.”
“That’s awful.” She looked horrified again. “Are all your stories this sad?”
“Not all of it is sad. It’s set against the backdrop of the Mumbai bomb blasts. And he’s able to save thousands of lives.”
“But he loses someone he loves? Forever?”
“Yes, but he learns to use his gift to benefit others, learns how that’s a gift in itself.”
She pushed her mass of curls back with both hands and didn’t say more. But she didn’t meet his eyes.
“What?” Something was bothering her and, idiot that he was, he had to know what.
She let her hair go and it sprang back around her face. “You can’t learn anything from losing someone you love. Any lesson you learn from that isn’t a lesson. It’s a compromise with life. A lie you tell yourself.”
“Our mistakes cost us those we love all the time. We can’t stop living, can we? We have to find meaning in something else and keep going.”
“See, that’s cynicism. Not growth. If you wanted him to truly learn that helping others is a gift in itself then he has to lose things he thought were important, not things that are important, like someone he loves.” Her brows drew together over eyes that shone with sincerity and idealism. Which in his book was no different from stupidity.
“It’s not cynicism. It’s reality. What you’re talking about is a tidy little happy ending. Have you ever known life to be like that?”
She met his eyes, in that way she had. As if there was nothing separating them, as if there was nothing in the world to be afraid of. “It doesn’t matter what my life has been like, Samir. What matters is hope. If you don’t believe in a happy ending, what are you living for?” The hope that sparkled in her onyx eyes was so intense, so absolute that dread clamped around Samir’s heart, and squeezed.
“I’m sorry,” she said after he had been silent too long, and lay back down. “It’s your story. I shouldn’t have said anything.” She turned on her side and closed her eyes.
He stared at the words he’d spent a week pounding out. Damn straight it was his story. And he was determined to write it his way.
Samir had never rewritten a script in his life. Stories came to him whole and he wrote them down. But once Mili got inside his hero’s head the bastard started to do all sorts of weird shit and rebel until Samir had to capitulate and let him have his way. But that just meant less sleep and more watching Mili sleep while he worked.
In her waking hours, they talked. Mostly about her school and her years in Jaipur and the women she worked with, at the Institute where they provided a safe house to abused women and trained them in skills to make them independent. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who lost himself when he worked. Watching Mili talk about her work was like experiencing the power of a tiny tornado—she became hungry and focused. It consumed all of her, made her lose track of time.
Made him lose track of time.
So much so that when Samir knocked on Mili’s door and turned the key to let himself in, the two weeks he’d spent with her felt like a moment that had sped by too fast.
“Come in,” Mili shouted from behind the door and beamed at him as he entered and put his laptop down on the mattress. She chugged down the contents of her teacup with a bandaged hand. The doctor had changed the cast on her wrist to a crepe bandage yesterday and she was able to use both hands now. Her ankle cast would take another week to come off but she had talked them into letting her carry a cane instead of those crutches she hated so much.
“What are you doing?” Samir asked as she hobbled to the kitchen on her cane. Her wet hair was all scrunched up and even curlier than usual. The water dripping from it painted midnight stains on her blue cap-sleeved tee. The only clothes she seemed to own were that exact T-shirt in all sorts of colors, and jeans. That’s all he’d ever seen her wear. She was also probably the only woman on earth who looked so distracting in an ill-fitting T-shirt.
She leaned over the counter and poured another cup of tea. Okay, so the T-shirts weren’t all that ill-fitting. She hobbled back to him with a cup in her hand. Something about the way the cotton clung to her curves gave the impression of poetry, of softness and strength threaded together in perfect cadence. The kind of perfect melding you had to witness, to feel to believe. Only he wasn’t going to be doing any feeling anytime soon. Not anytime ever.
She pushed the teacup at him and flicked her chin up as if to ask him what he was thinking.
Yeah, right, like she needed to share in that cesspool of thoughts. “Thanks,” he said and took the tea from her. “You going somewhere?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I am. It’s this thing called school, and this other thing called work. Missed both for two weeks, so I’m hoping they’ll both still have me. And you heard the doctor yesterday. I need to get back on my feet now. Otherwise awful things could happen to my body.”
“Oh, we could never allow awful things to happen to that body,” he said before he could stop himself.
Her eyes turned to saucers again and he wanted to whack himself upside the head.
He took a long sip of the tea. “Are you going to walk to college then?” he asked lazily.
She unfroze. “Nope. You’re driving me.” She smiled and pushed the teacup to his lips to hurry him up. The moment he was done, she snatched the cup away, put it in the sink, and dragged him out of her apartment.
“Hold on, Mili, my laptop’s still
in your apartment.”
“Don’t you want to write in there?”
“Well. Yes. But—”
“Drop me off and then come back here and write.” She handed him her cane and let him help her into the car. “You get your writing done in my apartment so you might as well just do it there, right?”
“Right.” He gunned the engine. “And this has nothing to do with the hot rotis or dal you might find waiting for you when you return.”
“Oy, what kind of girl do you think I am?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. How far are you willing to go for hot rotis?” Seriously, what the fuck was wrong with him?
Again that look. Wide eyes, dark irises opening up to expose even darker pupils that left her bare. And that furious blush.
He settled into the driver’s seat, refusing to let his face reflect the stupid wide smile in his heart. “So where to, memsaab?”
Her fingers relaxed in her lap. “I need to go to the office first. From there I can walk to class and then to Panda Kong.”
“And then?”
“And then . . . could you please come and get me?” She joined her hands together in a pleading namaste.
He grunted. He knew she was teasing him but he still hated the hesitation in her voice. “What time do you get off work?”
“Five-thirty.”
“And class?”
“Seven-thirty.”
“And Kung Fu Panda?”
That made her smile. Good.
“Around midnight.”
His grip tightened on the wheel. She was going to wash dishes with that hand for four hours? Over his fucking dead body. But no point in arguing with her now. He was going to drop her off and then pay Kung Fu Panda a visit. Good thing she’d pointed it out to him on their way here.
“There it is,” Mili said, and Samir pulled up to a squat, ivy-covered building with wide steps leading up to heavy wooden double doors. An embossed concrete slab jutting out of the lawn proclaimed it Pierce Hall.
Samir pulled himself out of the convertible and jogged around the car to help Mili out. He handed her the cane, then leaned into the car door and watched her make her way up the concrete path.
Suddenly she turned around. “Samir?” she said softly, as if she were throwing his name into the wind. Her forehead crinkled under the wet curls. She looked so serious.
He didn’t respond. Just stared at her, afraid of what might come out of her mouth.
“Can I tell you something? You won’t be angry?”
Again, he didn’t respond, but his entire body hummed with anticipation.
“You are the most decent guy I’ve ever met.” She gave him that sunshine smile. “Thank you.” And with that she limped the rest of the way up the stairs and disappeared into the building.
Samir did a U-turn in the parking lot, spinning so fast the tires screeched. He loved the way this baby took curves. He turned around and threw one last glance at the spot where she had stood and declared him decent before jamming his foot into the pedal.
When he pulled the Corvette into the Panda Kong parking lot it was isolated. The fluorescent red sign was missing a g, making it sound like “Panda Kon?”—Hindi for “Who the heck is Panda?”
He smiled. Mili would’ve found that funny too.
Walking in, he found the lights turned low. It was three in the afternoon. Obviously they weren’t open for dinner yet. A few Chinese women sat huddled in a circle at the back of the restaurant, singing. Not loud jamming kind of singing. Not even the women gathered around the dholki drum kind of singing at festivals and weddings back home, but more a barely audible chorus of lilting melody as their hands worked on piles of green beans.
It took them a few moments to figure out someone had entered the restaurant.
“Not open for dinner yet,” one of the women said. The singing stopped, and Samir felt oddly sad.
“Can I talk to the manager?”
The woman gave him a worried sort of look and shouted something in Chinese at the door that led to the back of the restaurant.
“I wanted to talk to him about Mili.”
“Ah, Mili!” the woman said much more cheerfully. The women behind her repeated it in unison, looking at each other like the nuns in the abbey in The Sound of Music. Samir almost expected them to break into a Chinese rendition of “How d’you solve a problem like Mi-li.”
“How is she?” The woman who’d been talking to him pointed to her wrist and her foot. Then turned to the door again and this time bellowed something in Chinese in a substantially stronger voice. The only word Samir recognized was Mili.
“She’s much better, thank you,” he said.
“Mili very nice.” She peeked at his left hand, patted her own ring, and asked with some alacrity, “You husband? You new one?”
Now there was a question. No, he wasn’t the new one and he certainly was not her husband. She didn’t have a fucking husband.
“I’m a friend.” Samir found his hands in fists and tried to relax.
“Ah, friend!” Another chorus of whispers rose behind her amid scoffing giggles and disbelieving glances. How many times had this happened to him? Just good friends, ha? Nudge nudge, wink wink.
A man with a rather nasty frown entered the room and snapped something even nastier at the women snapping beans in a circle. His head was curiously egg-shaped.
“Can help you?” he asked Samir with a look that was anything but helpful.
“Yes, I’m a friend of Mili’s. Can we talk for a moment?” Samir threw a glance at the circle as if they were in a Bond film from the Roger Moore days. “Privately.”
The man looked suddenly interested. He beckoned Samir to follow him into the kitchen. “Mili good dishwasher. No lazy like friend. Ridhi.” He made a face as if he had swallowed something foul. “She no good. Think too much like American brat. No notice before quit.”
Of course Mili would be a good worker. Groucho Marx was just going to have to live without his trusty little elf for a few more weeks. “Actually, Mili can’t come back to work for another two weeks.”
“Why?” The guy looked crestfallen, as if Samir had just told him a family member was on her last leg. “She say she come today. She say she fine.”
“But she isn’t fine,” Samir said. And she was too damn stubborn to admit it.
“Why she not tell me herself, then?”
Because she needs the money, you idiot. “Because she doesn’t want to leave you hanging. But if she hurts herself while working here when she shouldn’t be, she can sue you.”
The man jumped. “No, no. Don’t need her. Tell her she no need come back.”
Fuck, wrong thing to say. “Listen, relax. She’s not going to sue you. All she needs is for you to give her two more weeks.”
“No, no. Too much trouble.” He pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his egg-shaped head.
The man was at least a foot shorter than him. Samir stepped closer and loomed over him. “Listen, how much do you pay her?”
The man cowered and studied Samir with beady eyes.
It didn’t take Samir much to convince him to give Mili two weeks with full pay and a bullshit explanation about the laws requiring her to be paid when she was hurt. All it took was twice Mili’s two-week salary. One half for Mili, the other half for Egghead.
When Samir walked out of the darkened restaurant a few hundred dollars lighter, he felt better than he had in a very long time.
11
Of course Mili believed in miracles. But there were miracles and then there was what Egghead had just done. For someone who had never so much as strung two kind words together for her, he had lectured her about taking care of herself because health was wealth and so forth. She’d been contemplating throwing herself at his feet and begging him to let her work—she needed the money, no point in hanging on to her dignity—when he’d informed her that the law required him to pay her since she was missing work because of an accident. She had t
hrown her arms around him, taking them both completely by surprise. Her appreciation for this great country was growing by the day.
She started down the path that led from the restaurant to her apartment. Samir wasn’t going to pick her up until midnight. The mile-long walk had seemed like nothing when Ridhi and she had made the journey every day. Now she seemed to be moving so slowly she might as well be walking backward. Her ankle weighed her down and refused to move the way ankles were supposed to. But the cane was so much easier than those cursed crutches. In fact the cane was kind of fun. It made her feel like a retired colonel in an old film. Grinning at her own silliness, she spruced up her gait. But then it struck her that Egghead might find someone else to do her job and not want her back in two weeks and she didn’t feel like smiling anymore.
She could say with the utmost honesty that she had done everything in her power to do her job well, scrubbing every utensil until it shone, wiping down every counter after Egghead had wiped it down himself. And she’d done all this while keeping her mouth shut and her eyes down. Her ideal-woman act would have made her naani proud, right down to no answering back and plastering a patient smile across her face. She’d even helped Egghead’s niece with her homework.
She just could not lose this job. She needed the two hundred dollars to send to Naani. Although this month she was going to need the money to make her rent, if she ate nothing.
The thought of food made her stomach growl and the sound of her growling stomach brought Samir’s Greek god face blazingly alive in her mind. His face and his body and that presence of his that swirled around him like a sweeping Rajasthan sandstorm everywhere he went. Her mouth watered. Not because he looked like a minty-fresh toothpaste model but because he cooked like the goddess of domesticity.
He’d solved some of her food problems by stocking her fridge with groceries. She could go a good month on that food. But he ate like a bull—or was it a pigeon? She could never remember which one of those animals ate twice their weight in food every day. Maybe she could steal food out of her own fridge and hide it in the office fridge to use after he was gone. Was that stealing from him or stealing from herself?