by Sonali Dev
It didn’t matter. Tomorrow she would start to take some of the food he bought and cooked and put it in the office for after he was gone. Desperate times did call for desperate measures. She was not going to feel guilty about wanting to feed herself. And that was that.
She came to the end of the parking lot. All that effort and all she had done was cross it. Her ankle was starting to throb and she had that trembling, weepy sensation in her belly from the rising pain. Maybe she should go back to the restaurant and ask Egghead to drive her home. She turned around and gauged the distance and noticed a tall, bulky man watching her. Something about the way he was looking at her raised her defenses and she turned and started scrambling away.
The man broke into a run. She had no chance. Before she knew it, he was upon her.
“Wait, Malvika Rathod?”
She acted like she hadn’t heard him and kept on half walking, half hobbling along on her cane.
“Excuse me, ma’am, I asked if you were Malvika Rathod.”
“No,” she said and kept walking.
“Are you sure?”
“I would know if my name was Malvika Rathod, wouldn’t I?” She clenched her jaw and tried to keep her panic levels down. There wasn’t a soul in sight but it was still bright and she was on campus. She had nothing to worry about.
“Then what’s your name?”
“If you don’t stop following me I’m going to scream.”
“Listen, I’m Ranvir, Ridhi’s brother. I’ve been looking for her for a week. Everyone at home is sick with worry.”
Mili spun around. Ridhi’s brother didn’t stop in time and almost ran into her. She took a step back, stumbled, and fell on her bum.
Before she knew what was happening, a yellow convertible screeched to a halt next to her. Samir leapt out of the car and ran at Ridhi’s brother like some action-film superhero.
“Samir, wait!” Before her voice left her mouth, Samir’s fist connected with Ranvir’s jaw and he went flying back into the pavement.
Samir lifted the horrified boy, for all his chubbiness, like a bag of feathers, and pulled his fist back for another punch.
“Samir, stop. Stop!” Her voice finally seemed to reach him. He dropped the guy and ran to her. His eyes travelled over her body as she sat on her bottom on the sidewalk and his breath seemed to catch. He threw one desperate look at the cane lying next to her and his gaze met hers. His eyes softened with something so tender, so helpless she couldn’t breathe.
“My God, Mili, are you okay?” It was the first time she’d seen Samir like this. She had a clear view all the way inside, no filters, no fronts. He fell to his knees next to her.
“I’m fine.” She reached out and touched his knuckles. They were bleeding. “He was just asking me a question.”
“By pushing you off your cane?” His voice trembled.
“He didn’t push me. I fell. I didn’t realize how unstable I was.”
“Your leg’s in a cast and he assaulted you and you’re protecting him?”
The guy groaned behind them and Samir sprang up. “I’ll kill you, you bastard.”
“Samir, stop. At least hear me out.”
But Samir already had the guy pulled up by his collar. Ranvir had seemed so large and threatening when he’d approached her only minutes ago. Now, hanging from Samir’s hands, he looked like a pudgy little schoolboy.
“He’s Ridhi’s brother. My roommate’s brother. He was just asking me where she is.”
“I’ve been looking for her for weeks,” the guy squeaked. “I just want to know if she’s safe.”
“Samir, you’re choking him. Can you let him down? Please.”
He did. Then he scooped her up and carried her to his car with all the glowering finesse of a caveman.
Beating the shit out of the poor fuck might have been a more humane way to deal with him. As it turned out, Mili had different plans for her absconding roommate’s brother. Five minutes after delivering a neat right hook to his jaw, Samir was carrying the man a café latte—complete with a frilly cloud of whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles.
Mili sat by the huge mullioned windows in the university food court and dispensed her lecture as if she were Mother Teresa while the idiot stared at her openmouthed like a zealous devotee. She was sending him on a guilt trip so long he could’ve circled the globe by now. He looked ready to weep. Fucking bozo.
“She’s in love. Don’t you understand? If you force her to marry someone else, she could kill herself. You know Ridhi. She’s so filmy, she’ll do it just to prove her point. And you know who would have to live with it for the rest of his life?”
The idiot actually shook his head.
Samir slammed the latte in front of him. “You,” he said, because, really, the guy needed help. “The correct answer is you.”
Mili gave Samir a congratulatory look, using both hands to indicate his brilliance to the nincompoop. Suddenly Samir felt like an insider. He put Mili’s mocha in front of her and took a sip of his black coffee. He flipped a chair around, straddled it, and watched as Mili proceeded to empty one . . . two . . . three . . . four packets of sugar into her cup. If he had picked up more packets, she might never have stopped. It was a mocha, for fuck’s sake. Wasn’t the thing already sweetened for a diabetic coma?
She took one long slurping sip and looked like she was having another one of those food-induced orgasms. Dumbass drooled at her as if she, and not her mocha, were the sweet treat. Fan-fucking-tastic.
“Haven’t you ever been in love?” She skewered Dumbass with those sugar-softened eyes. He whimpered.
“You think it’s easy to find someone who will risk everything for you? Go on the run in a foreign country, jeopardize a career, risk deportation? You think it’s easy to find love like that?”
The guy stared at her, then turned to Samir for help.
“No. The right answer is no.” Samir was nothing if not helpful.
“No,” the guy repeated with a dazed but not entirely ungrateful expression.
Samir raised his coffee in salute and took another sip.
Mili waved another hand in Samir’s direction, indicating yet again his unarguable brilliance. “Look at Samir. Even with those looks, he still hasn’t found anyone. Can you imagine that?”
Samir choked on his coffee. Sprayed a goodly amount on the poor guy’s white shirt and earned a good beating on the back from Mili. But a little choking wasn’t going to stop her. She was on a mission. She continued to pat Samir’s back and skewered Dumbass with another glare. “You’re her brother. You. Are. Her. Brother. Her brother.” She gave the word brother so many nuances, such heartfelt emotion, that moisture danced in the guy’s eyes. “You should be fighting for her. Helping her and Ravi become one. You should be talking to your father, to your uncles. You should be helping your sister.”
Samir knew what was coming next. He rested his chin on the back of the chair he was straddling and watched. She is your sister. Your sister. Your. Sister. Samir said the words in his head as she spoke them aloud. He was grinning like a fool when she turned her eyes on him. He hadn’t had so much fun in years.
She narrowed her eyes and he gave her a big beaming smile for her effort. She shook her head at him and turned back to the brother. The. Brother. The bro-ther, who had tears spilling down his doughy cheeks now.
Samir had to work so hard not to laugh, his shoulders shook.
“I’m sorry. Will you help me find her?” the guy said and burst into sobs. Mili pulled him into a hug. Her arms went comfortingly around the idiot’s hiccupping shoulders. He took full advantage and completely let loose. Mili patted his back and winked at Samir over his head.
The laughter died in Samir’s chest.
All he wanted to do—with an intensity that sucker-punched him in the gut—was pull the bastard away from her.
Instead Samir gritted his teeth and watched as she pushed him away gently and asked Samir to drive them home. It wasn’t easy, but of course he
did as she asked, without tearing the sniveling idiot’s limbs out like he wanted to.
How could anyone be so smitten in such a short period of time? The asshole hadn’t pulled his jaw off the floor and shut his mouth once since he’d seen her. Even when they were back in her apartment, waiting for him to finish speaking to his parents, his eyes kept darting in Mili’s direction as he mumbled into the phone. Oh, and suddenly Dumbass was her best bud. No, make that Dr. Bestbud. Apparently med school wasn’t as important as hunting an errant sister down in full-blown seventies-film fashion.
“You’re muttering to yourself, you know.” Of course Mili, in her all-seeing wisdom, caught him being even dumber than Dr. Dumbass Bestbud.
“I am not.” As dialog went, brilliant!
“And now you’re glaring.” Her tone was soothing but it only made him angrier.
“The guy attacked you. Excuse me if he’s not at the top of my love list.”
She matched his glare. “Samir, he’s trying to do the right thing.”
Dr. Right-Thing came up behind Mili—standing a bit too close for decency if you asked him. “I just spoke to Mummy and Daddy. They were just getting ready to call the cops. I’ve asked them to hold off until—”
Samir cut him off. “This is all very touching, but how is it that your sister has been missing for two weeks and your family hasn’t called the cops yet?”
Both Mili and Dr. Dumbass turned to Samir as if he were from another planet, from Pluto, in fact, not even worthy of being assigned a real planet.
Mili spoke first. Of course Mili spoke first. “How can they call the cops on Ridhi?” Her tone suggested Samir was hanging from a stupid tree on non-planet Pluto.
“Yeah, how?” Dr. Glib added.
They looked at each other and nodded in mutual understanding of Samir’s endless thickness.
“Okay, enough with the how-can-he-be-so-stupid looks. Any normal person, any normal family would have called the cops first. Then pulled all the relatives out of their respective colleges and jobs to send them off in hot pursuit. I’m just saying.”
“Samir,” Mili said, drawing his name out even more than she usually did and making it sound like she was saying “you imbecile.” “Honor! How can you risk public humiliation by going to the cops? It’s a family matter. Family has to resolve it.”
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. He was stuck in a fucking seventies film.
“We’re Punjabi, man,” Dr. Dumbass-Ten-Times-Over chimed in because what Mili had just said wasn’t bizarre enough.
I know plenty of sane Punjabis, Samir wanted to say. But he didn’t think it would register with these two seventeenth-century escapees.
“You know what the problem with people like you is?” Mili said. “You live in your own little bubble and you have no idea what the real world is like.”
“And in the real world you only call the cops when it’s time to look for a body?”
“See?” Mili turned to Dr. Punjabi-Pride, who nodded, all knowing, all understanding. They started a side conversation, because “people like him” weren’t worth talking to.
He didn’t need this shit. He stalked into the kitchen and yanked the fridge open and wished he had picked up the six-pack that had been calling his name the last time he was at the store.
“I’ve asked Mummy and Daddy to wait until we get there before they take any action,” the newly minted, brave keeper of sisterly honor said behind him.
Samir spun around. “Hold on. Did you just say we?” That earned him another one of those non-planet Pluto looks from both of them, which he ignored. “Mili’s not going anywhere with you.”
“Of course I’m not, Samir.” She turned the full power of that sneaky innocence on him. “We both are.”
Mili had no idea what was wrong with Samir. But he had slipped into a full-on angry-young-man avatar straight out of an Amitabh Bachan film.
“Can I see you in the other room for a minute? Now.” His face thundered like a stormy night and that pulse in his neck was definitely going to pop.
“Sure. But first I need to get Ranvir another bag of ice for his face.”
Without a word, Samir snatched the bag of melted ice water from Ranvir’s hands and stormed to the fridge. He emptied it into the sink, yanked an ice tray out of the freezer, and dumped ice in the bag—amazingly it didn’t melt at his touch.
He thrust the bag at Ranvir. “Don’t move until we come back.” He gave the poor boy such an intimidating look he might never move again. Mili had no idea why he was being so rude to him.
“Anything else you need done before you give me a moment of your time?” When he looked at her like that, his eyes locked on her as if she were the only person in the room, in the world, she had the strangest sensation in the pit of her stomach.
She followed him into her bedroom.
“Are you crazy?”
So much for only person in the world. “My naani says I am, just a little bit. Why?” She tried to give him her sweetest smile but it didn’t work.
He looked like he wanted to shake her. “Because I thought the point was to keep your roommate’s family from finding her. Not to go off on a quest with them to hunt her down.”
“The point is to make sure Ridhi and Ravi end up together.”
“But they’re together now, Mili. And if you leave your long nose out of their business they might stay that way. Why can’t you just stay out of it?”
Because sometimes love needed a tiny push. A little help. Maybe if she’d had someone in her corner, someone to help her meet Virat just once, he’d have seen how much she loved him and she wouldn’t be here pining away for him and trying to make herself worthy of him.
“Because Ridhi is my friend and everyone deserves someone in their corner.” She touched her nose. Nobody had ever called it long before.
“And you’ve done great. You’ve stayed in her corner by not betraying her confidence. Hel—Heck, you jumped off a balcony for shi—God’s sake.”
“Samir, haven’t you ever needed help? Haven’t you ever wanted something so bad you wished the entire universe was in your corner? Haven’t you been in a place where you’ve done everything you possibly can and still it’s not enough? You need just that slightest bit more. Just that one helping hand?”
His face did that thing it did when he slipped behind his wall. It always reminded Mili of those photos of the Italian town of Pompeii when the volcano Mt. Vesuvius erupted. People in poses stuck in the middle of doing some everyday task—pouring water into a cup, stirring a pot on the stove. Frozen in the middle of life. She’d always imagined how the lava might have slipped over them, so fast they didn’t even pause in what they were doing. Samir’s face had a way of freezing over like that, as if a molten mask slid over his face so fast his very essence changed from human to stone in an instant.
“No. I always rely entirely on myself. At least I have ever since I became an adult. Ridhi and Ravi are adults. It’s between them and their families. Why should we get in the middle of it? Besides, don’t you have this thing called a job and this other thing called school?”
“It’s Friday today. I don’t work at the Institute on Mondays so I have the next three days off. I have school under control. And I don’t have to worry about Panda Kong.” She still couldn’t believe how well things had turned out at Panda Kong. She smiled. “Oh God, Samir, I just thought of something. It’s fate that we help Ridhi and Ravi. You won’t believe what happened today. I don’t have to go back to Panda Kong for two weeks. It’s a sign.”
Samir swallowed and squeezed his eyes shut. He looked like he might be sick.
“Are you okay, Samir?”
He didn’t respond, but he opened his eyes and looked at her with the strangest expression. He looked almost helpless.
“If you’re worried about my wrist and ankle, don’t be. I can hardly feel it anymore. I’m a really fast healer. I mean, in Balpur I was famous for it.”
Suddenly the helpl
essness was gone and he looked angry again.
“Oh no. You’re upset because I assumed you would go with us. See, this is what my naani says, that I get carried away. It’s just that I—I’m sorry. Of course, you don’t have to come. You have all that writing to do. I’ll just go with Ranvir.”
He grabbed her shoulders, took a step closer, and glared down at her. “You’re not going anywhere with that guy. You’ve known him all of two hours. What’s wrong with you, Mili? For all you know he might be a serial rapist.” His hands were as gentle as ever, but she felt the weight of his fingers as if they were brands on her skin.
“I had no idea you city boys were such drama queens.” She removed his hands and took a step away from him.
He narrowed his eyes at her, not so much drama queen as brooding film hero.
She hated seeing him this way. “I’ve known you all of twelve days, and you’ve done more for me than any friend I’ve ever had.” Suddenly she wished she hadn’t removed his hands.
Another tortured look flashed across his face. She wanted to reach out and wipe it off. “Samir, I should have said this sooner, but you have to know how much what you’ve done means.” She sniffed back the drop that trickled down her nose. “You took care of me when I had no one else.” Oh, forget it. She wrapped her arms around him. “Thank you.”
She had meant to give him a quick hug. But his arms went around her, pulled her close and held on. One huge hand pressed her head against his chest. She had forgotten how hard and warm it was, how wild his heartbeat under her ear.
“Mili.” Her name rumbled in his chest. She felt the sound rather than heard it and warmth melted through her like molten gold filling a mold at the goldsmith’s. It slid into her heart and into the deep dark crevices of her body.
She pushed away from him with both hands. Her wrist hurt and she winced. He reached for her hand, but she took two quick steps and backed away from his touch. She couldn’t look at him. A loaded silence wrapped around them. She couldn’t let it stretch into awkwardness. “Seriously, Samir, you’ve done enough. You really don’t have to come along. Look at Ranvir. Do you really think he could hurt anyone?” Something else struck her and she smiled. “You can still use my apartment to write. Just make sure I have some dal to come home to.”