From: [email protected]
To: [email protected],
[email protected], [email protected] . . . and 24 others
Subject: Recall Notice
Date: Saturday, April 9, 2011, 18:36:01 EDT
Status: !!! Very Urgent
Please confirm receipt of Recall Notice #05B76T8-2, attached.
Item summary: One (1) industrial-strength multilevered lock for interior-exterior installation.
Recall issue: Erratic performance under field conditions.
Remember, workplace security is your friend!
Chapter Sixteen
Terrible Option
BACK IN THE DELUXE SUITE at the promenade Hotel, Dad and Chickoo Uncle are back from their quest. They sit across from each other wearing mournful looks. The lamp throws their shadows against the wall, so that Dad’s glasses and Chickoo’s nose take over. Dolly is staring at that wall as if she expects it to fall down. The conversation proceeds in short clips.
Chickoo Uncle: “We couldn’t find it. Looked everywhere.”
Dad: “Impossible. Needle in a haystack.”
Dolly: “Is it lost? Or stolen?” She looks as if she is weighing the options and finding them equally sickening.
What kind of dance includes passports and haystacks? Dini’s life is starting to feel like a piece of bad choreography.
“Trail ran cold,” Dad says.
“We filed a police report,” Chickoo Uncle adds. “They took down all the details.”
“The whole kit and caboodle,” Dad confirms.
“Called the Indian embassy. Left a message. Called the Smithsonian. Left a message.”
Lost passports and grumpy chefs and now Dini has to find an elephant—all these intrusive things are going to edge the grand opening right offscreen.
Maddie is waving her hands inches from Dini’s nose. She’s loud-whispering, “Dini. You’re not listening.”
Dini snaps back to here and now. “Sorry. What did you say, Maddie?”
“We can’t give up,” says Maddie. “We have to do something.”
Dini stares at her.
“We have to,” says Maddie stubbornly.
And underneath the set of her chin, behind the stubbornness, Dini can see hope and a kind of I-am-here-for-youness. And something else. Maddie is looking sure that Dini will get them all out of this jam. Which is crazy, plain crazy, because what on earth does Dini know about finding lost passports? Or elephants, for that matter? Precisely nothing.
The thing we call coincidence is big in Dolly’s fillums. It is neither good nor bad. It just is. Sometimes two people just happen to be in the same place. Their paths cross, whether or not they both know it.
Unknown to Dolly and her supporting cast, someone finds that passport lying facedown on the curbside at the airport (which locals call BWI or sometimes, affectionately, Beewee). Finds it. Picks it up. Looks at it. And then, instead of turning it in to the proper authorities as a well-behaved traveler should do, that someone pockets it and moves on.
In this place where everyone is in a hurry, the stream of people flows around and past that person, who disappears into the crowd.
Chapter Seventeen
Juggling and Jostling
DOLLY HAS STOPPED PACING AND is sitting in the wingback chair with a frown on her face. Dinner has arrived and been signed for. “Should I divide up the food?” Dini asks. Looked like plenty when they were in the kitchen. She doesn’t know about anyone else, but her stomach is sending her distress signals.
“Good idea,” Dad says.
Dini finds a bag of microwave popcorn in a cabinet in the little kitchenette of the suite. She takes a sniff. “What do you think?”
Maddie agrees that on a fresh-to-stale scale it will do. Soon the fragrance of buttered popcorn fills the air, together with the pop-pop-pop of kernels.
“Smells good,” Dini says.
Maddie brings out cups and glasses, dishes and silverware. “This hotel has everything,” she says. “I wouldn’t mind living here.”
“As in always? I don’t know about that.” Dini does not want to add any more places—even nice ones like this hotel—to her mental map.
Dolly is not distracted by these minor location digressions. She twists the rings on her hands. “What a bad beginning. An insidious incident. What a terrible turn of events.”
“Dolly worries about omens,” Chickoo Uncle explains.
“Obnoxious omens,” Dolly says, which seals any notion that she might take joy in simple pleasures like popcorn.
Dad divides up the sandwiches and soup. A bowl on the side contains tiny croutons, to which Dolly helps herself liberally. Popcorn makes a reasonable topping for the rest of them, although Dini has to eat it fast, before it turns to mush.
“Not enough salt,” Dolly says, adding a generous sprinkling from the shaker. She downs one of the three rose petal milk shakes, so that the rest of them have to share the other two. “I’ll just have water,” Dad says.
“I’ll share a milk shake,” says Dini.
“Wouldn’t hear of it,” Dad says. “Nothing like water.”
Dad pours himself a glass of water from the faucet, while questions pour into Dini’s restless mind. Did Dolly notice them all doing things for her? Does she ever notice when people go out of their way for her? Bring her dinner—just one small example. But then she thinks, Dolly’s not an ordinary person. She’s a star. Stars are used to getting their way, and what’s more, this is a stressed-out star who has just lost her passport.
“We should have ordered more food,” Maddie whispers.
“Oh.” At once Dini’s petty, ungenerous thoughts subside. Maddie’s right. Dini realizes something else. They ordered for Dolly and for themselves. They forgot all about Dad and Chickoo Uncle.
“We can help you unpack,” she says, trying to be a better person. They’re done eating, and the empty tray has been set outside the door. “You know—if you don’t mind.”
“You’re too sweet, you lovely girls,” Dolly says, getting up and shaking out the folds of her scarf. “Come. I’ll show you the new jewels I got for the grand opening. Chickoo, where’s that suitcase?”
Chickoo Uncle finds the suitcase, which cheers Dolly up a bit. She pulls out a silver necklace with red-and-green stripy decorations and lets the girls try it on.
“Wowie, wowie!” whispers Maddie in awe.
Dini’s speechless, which doesn’t happen often. Dolly. Is letting them. Try. Her jewelry. On. How surreal is that? The necklace and a pair of silver ankle bracelets go chan-chan-chan as if they were singing.
Dolly flings a few boxes of bangles around in the effort to find matching ones.
Maddie says, “That looks like Christmas,” which makes Dolly smile. That’s good, Dini thinks. Dolly smiling is better than Dolly distraught and dismayed.
Putting away is almost as surreal. It takes a while, for one thing. It isn’t only that Dolly has a whole suitcase full of jewelry and another full of scarves and another full of shoes and so on. It’s more that Dolly can’t seem to actually put anything away. She can take out, model, comment on, and share just fine.
And she can tell stories. The one about the Christmasy necklace sweeps Dini and Maddie away. It’s about rich and poor, wrong and right, and Dolly, naturally. Dolly opening her heart and her purse, refusing to let the rich guy cheat the poor one, being strong, fixing everything. Making the good guy feel good and the bad guy feel ashamed. And, naturally, dancing along with her adoring fans.
“Yes!” Dini and Maddie say together. Dolly in real life is like Dolly in the fillums, brave and kind, and all about fairness. What’s a little thank-you here and there compared with that?
It would be wonderful if Dolly could be happy as well, but after telling this moving story, she sighs a deep sigh. As the girls put everything away in the silently gliding drawers and the sliding-door cabinets, Dolly returns to being despairing and dejected.
Dad announces,
“Time to pack it up, girls. Let’s hit the trail.”
“Why? No!” Dini has naturally assumed that she and Maddie can stay at this hotel—not forever, of course, but for now. She tries begging. “Just tonight? Why not? Oh please!”
“We can help out!” Maddie chimes in. “We’re superefficient.”
“We can sleep in the other room. We’ll be really quiet.”
It is no use.
“Nope,” says Dad. “Saddle up, Dini. Back to the ranch.”
That night, back at Maddie’s, Dini’s eyes will not stay shut. Her mind will not clear itself of all the thoughts juggling and jostling for room. Oh, she thought she’d beaten this jet lag thing. Will it ever go away? She thinks maybe she will never sleep again. She imagines herself getting more and more tired from not sleeping, until she is just a lump, unable to move or think or do anything at all. And then how is she going to track down elephants and passports and stuff?
Chapter Eighteen
A Few Questions
OLLIE ONLY MEANT TO ASK a few questions. He was curious about the missing passport belonging to the famous movie star, so he did a little searching on the Internet. What he found nearly made him splutter his tea up all over the keyboard.
Someone’s selling Dolly’s passport on some kind of movie website! It looks like they’re auctioning it. There are way too many ads and pop-ups on the page, not to mention some language Ollie can’t read, all mixed up with English text. He soon quits in bewilderment. He puts a question out on Twitter, where he sometimes follows topics like Marathon Chef and Dueling Toasters. He asks:
Fromageur Ollie @Fromageur
20m
Is Dolly Singh famous? #Bollyinfo
A simple yes or no would be enough, but that is not to be. An answer appears soon after.
LuvDolly @finefan
14m
@Fromageur are you crazy? She’s the famousest. Why? #Bollyinfo
Ollie replies:
Fromageur Ollie @Fromageur
12m
Just asking, @finefan. So if you sold her stuff online, it could be pricey? #Bollyinfo
That really makes them go ape. Ollie wants to duck under the volley of responses.
FilmiKumpnee @fan2fan
9m
Jewels? Clothes? Selling? Buying? Big auction planned. #Bollyinfo
Starstruck @overthemoon
8m
Dolly swag? I have green beads if you want to trade. #Bollyinfo
FilmiKumpnee @fan2fan
6m
Buying/selling Dolly items see filmikumpnee.com.in for updates on this story. #Bollyinfo
Then they begin shooting questions at him, like this one:
LuvDolly @finefan
5m
What do you have, @Fromageur? How much? #Bollyinfo
And dozens more, demanding to know what he’s selling, promising him the moon if he sells his Dolly Singh swag. They are a tide, sweeping Ollie away. See him gulp at his computer screen. He tweets back, “No!” and “Just asking” and “Okay, it’s her passport, but I don’t have it.” This is how rumors begin. Now they all think he’s fencing stolen property.
For one minute he wishes he had found the passport. He could have sold it on the Internet. He could have made enough money to go back to culinary school, to do that extra year specializing in cheese. Then he could go work for that cheese buyer he longs to apprentice with.
The buyer has promised to teach Ollie everything he knows before he retires. After that Ollie could take on running the elderly cheese genius’s business. In time it could become his. The Ollie and Alana Cheese Wheel? It’s such a vivid daydream it makes his mouth water. But then he tells himself it’s all folly. Nonsense. The truth is, he is ashamed of himself for entertaining, even for a minute, the idea of stolen swag.
Chapter Nineteen
Elephant-Proof
SITTING DOWN IS NOT A dramatic act. People sit all the time, to a meal, or to work at a desk. If they’re young, they sit in school, whether or not they want to. They sit on buses, and if they’re lucky enough to find a seat, they sit in trains along the many-colored lines of the Washington, D.C., Metrorail system. They sit because they’ve been on their feet all day and need a break.
There are hundreds of reasons why a person might sit down. Not one of them is as devastating as the reason the elephant keeper at the National Zoo, Kris Vincenti, sits down on a stone ledge on this beautiful spring day.
One of her elephants is missing.
The door to the yard, which should have been locked at night, is ajar. The rest of the herd huddles inside, where they are supposed to be. But Mini—that clever and devious young pachyderm—is not there.
Kris gets up from the ledge and runs out into the yard, looking for evidence. In the dirt are the rounded prints of a young elephant tracing a meandering route around the yard and behind a pile of rocks. I counted the elephants at the end of the day, Kris thinks in a panic. How on earth did she get out? And what’s this? She picks up a paper bag. An empty lunch bag. She peers at the peanut shell within. She calls her supervisor to break the bad news.
He groans. “Did you check the doors?”
“Of course I did,” Kris says. “Before I left. They were fine.”
Unspoken visions of the headlines to come float in silence over the phone connection.
“I’ll have to inform the city,” her boss says.
“Oh, no! You don’t want the police after her.” With sirens and flashing lights. Kris’s heart turns over at the thought.
“Well,” he says, “I’ll bet you one elephant to twenty golden lion tamarins that within the hour every panicky citizen in the District will be calling Animal Control!”
Kris swallows. He’s right. People are not used to friendly young elephants rampaging around in their neighborhoods, even if they are only rampaging gently like Mini.
“Look,” she says. “She’s not a raccoon in a Dumpster or a squirrel stuck in a chimney. How will they know what to do when they find her?”
He sighs. “What do you propose? You know I’m going to call Emergency Services right away. I have to. We have to think about the people of this city.”
Kris does not want to think about any people. She is thinking of poor, darling Mini, alone and hungry in the urban wilderness. “I’m going out to look for her,” she says, and hangs up.
From the hook on her office wall she grabs the keys to the zoo’s truck. She’ll need to hitch the trailer on, the special one designed to transport large mammals. As she closes the door behind her, her computer utters a friendly ping, announcing incoming e-mail messages, a ping that Kris does not hear.
Chapter Twenty
Tied into Knots
MEANWHILE, FAR AWAY IN THE city of Mumbai, which all the filmi people prefer to call Bombay, in the offices of the famous Starlite Studios, Mr. Soli Dustup (manager, owner, artistic director) is tying himself into knots. Not literally, of course. His delicate constitution could not stand such acrobatics. No, it’s his sensitive soul that is twisting and contorting in this way.
Soli has a phone call to return, and he is not looking forward to it. How many times already has he reached for the landline receiver, only to pull back in distress? More times than he can count, and it is only nine in the morning.
“Soli, darling, please ring me at once,” says the message, in that voice adored by millions. It sounds a bit quivery. “At once, okay? It’s urgent. I don’t know how, but someone—well, I don’t know if that’s true. On the way from the airport—it must have happened on the way from the airport. Or maybe at the airport. Hai, Soli, I’m so afraid, you know, about the opening and all, so I wanted to let you know. Oh, gussa nahin karo, Soli! I’ve lost—”
Why is she wasting valuable time begging him not to be angry? Now, due to her habit of talking in vaguely trailing sentences, she has run out of time, so her message has been cut off.
It is a classic Dolly cliff-hanger moment.
Urgent? Afraid? Why
could she not come to the point? He should call her at once.
And yet, and yet . . . Soli Dustup has been in the movie business long enough that he has developed a pretty reliable mental trouble-meter. He has learned to respect the sensors of this trouble-meter, and right now they are shrieking at high alert. He has a nasty feeling that if he returns that phone call, his present peaceful existence, full of creative projects, artistic endeavors, and lots of rupees from box-office sales, is going to be rudely disrupted.
Much as he adores Dolly, Soli knows that she can scramble, tangle, disrupt, and disarray like nobody else. Her scrambling-tangling talents are quite on par with her superb acting.
He pops a couple of antacids from the sizable jar on his desk and chews them moodily as he speed-dials Dolly’s number. “Dolly, darling?” he says in as calming a voice as he can muster.
A flood of words comes pouring into his ear. Soli reels. Autographs, and suitcases. Fans—ceiling or the adoring kind? He can’t tell. Some sort of carpet, and Customs officials.
“Soli, are you there?” Dolly says, her voice rising to a glass-shattering pitch. Soli shifts the phone away from his ear while tipping out more digestive pills. He ends up spilling the lot all over his desk.
“No, no, Dolly, love, I wasn’t cursing at you,” he has to explain. “You lost what? I can’t hear you properly. You’re in trouble? Customs? You haven’t broken any laws?”
The line goes dead.
Soli can feel his insides churning in a most unpleasant manner. He has heard that Americans do not take kindly to people coming from here and there and breaking their laws, and who can blame them?
He shouldn’t have let her go on this jaunt. He thought Chickoo could keep an eye on her, but Dolly can make trouble the way other people make cups of tea. Last time Soli let her out of his sight, she threw a diamond ring down a mountainside, nearly wrecking her movie career.
The Problem with Being Slightly Heroic Page 4