“Seems like forever and not long enough all at once.” He could not stop gazing at her. It was as if he’d never seen a woman before. Angelina, Aishwarya … none could compare to this vision. “And you? Are you staying at one of the hotels?”
She moved past him, a sway to her hips, ignoring the question. He turned and followed … honestly, what else could he do? It was hypnotic, that sway, like someone was rocking a pocket watch on a chain before his increasingly glazed eyes. Perhaps he was hallucinating—all work and no sleep made Jack a lunatic boy—but it was a damn nicer vision than empty pages, na?
Nicky dogged her heels, mindless of sand squishing between his toes. “Are you Bengali? Do you live here? Where did you come from?” He spoke to the smooth expanse of her back, the delicious curve of her ass, but she gave him no answers. He paced her right up to the steps of his veranda … where, at last, she turned to gaze at him once more.
Again, it felt like she knew him. That was a ridiculous notion. Surely he wouldn’t forget someone so lovely … even surrounded by as many beautiful Bombay babes as he usually was.
“Who are you?” she asked. What should have been his question to pose—after all, she was on his beach, on his deck, verging on entering his bungalow—was instead hers. “Tell me. Who are you?”
“Nicky. Nicky Kohli. Are you going to invite me into my own place, too?”
His answer seemed to amuse and sadden her at the same time. It was crazy that he knew what her sadness looked like—the slight downturn of her mouth, the shimmer in her eyes.
“Who are you?” he demanded, a gnawing in his gut telling him he should already know that, too.
She leaned against the stone railing, her arms spread across the top. She’d donned his chappals, and they looked huge on her dainty feet—like she was a child playing with her dadaji’s slippers. “Your muse?” she suggested with a cryptic smile. “Don’t all writers have muses?”
“H-how do you know I am a writer?” Ice joined the rats in the pit of his stomach, making for a nasty cocktail of anxiety. Had someone sent her here as a joke? Worse, as a gift? Was one of his rivals having him on? Vishal? Shankar? Himmesh?
“Ink stains on your fingers.” Now she came away from her casual posing, taking one of his hands in both of hers. It was like being touched by lightning. Bijli. Perhaps that was her name. “And, here, there are calluses from where you’ve held a pen too tightly.” Her thumb flicked over one such bump, and Nicky shuddered as though she’d stroked the head of his cock. “Bechara,” she crooned, sympathetically. “Kitna akela.” Poor fellow. So alone.
Her hands were bewitching him. Surely. He wanted to wrench away as much as he wanted to stay within their grasp. He really was a poor bastard. “Please. Mujhe batao. Tell me. Who are you really?”
She took pity on him then, calling a time-out on whatever game she’d been playing since she rose from the sea. “Rami. Until it matters, you can call me Rami.”
Until it matters? What did that even mean? But she didn’t give him anything more substantial. Just that mysterious face, her heavenly body, and ‘Rami.’ Nicky rolled the syllables around on his tongue. They didn’t feel quite right. As if he’d again loosed lines of ants across the staff. “Why are you here? Or is that another answer I can’t have?”
She brought their joined hands to her chest, where her bodice was damp and her blouse nonexistent. With her guidance, his knuckles brushed the heavy underside of her breast, their skin separated by only a thin layer of colorful cotton as he traced the generous slope. “You can have whatever you wish, saab.”
Nicky nearly bit through his tongue trying to suppress the guttural sound that such an offer evoked. He hadn’t been so blatantly propositioned since he’d gone club hopping in Delhi with Avinash Kumar … and that had been by Avi himself! “What if I want you?” He couldn’t help himself. He was only a man, after all. Not a god, not a deva. “Are you going to give me that? How far are you willing to take this, madam?”
She arched up on her toes and took enough cruel care to whisper against his cheek. “As far as you need to go.” Her breath fanned his jaw and his lips like fire.
This wasn’t why he’d come to Cox’s Bazar. Women had not been on the slate. Just rest and relaxation and a few hit songs. But this … this was music of a different kind. It was in his soul. In his blood.
“This is mad. This is totally mad.”
The kind of spicy, dangerous beat that only belonged between two people dancing in the rain. His fingers flexed, grazing her taut nipple even as they ached for his pen so he could somehow set down the rhythm. And his mouth wanted to put a melody to it, to hum a wordless tune, but it also wanted to close the tiny space between it and her lips.
It was that impulse that Nicky succumbed to.
She curled her free hand into the loops of his jeans, kissing him back with a ferocity that startled him. Lightning again. This time, it coursed all the way through him. She tasted like honey. No, like amrita. It was a silly comparison since he’d never tasted the nectar of the gods. But he imagined it was flavored in drops of gold and sugar and fire. He would happily drink nothing but this forever.
“Haan,” she whispered, encouragingly, as if she knew the path of his thoughts, his desire.
Haan. Yes. One syllable that held so much meaning. He could build an entire album around the word.
This was craziness. This couldn’t be real. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep at the table with his papers scattered about him, and this was all a dream born from a fevered mind.
“I am not a dream,” Rami assured him, the beat of her heart beneath his palm strongly echoing the claim. “This is happening. We are together.”
But why? How? “Yeh kya hain? What kind of woman just shows up and throws herself on a guy?” he asked, bewildered.
“One who was made for just that purpose.” At last, here was a glimpse behind the lush fronds of mystery, and it was a stark, bitter sight. She began to pull away, and he caught her fast, linking his fingers around her wrists.
“You’re a prostitute?” The word was so much more proper in English, didn’t sound quite as low, and the conclusion didn’t horrify him so much as it puzzled him. Like so many other things about this encounter, it was an ill fit.
Her mouth tightened, and her gaze shuttered as it focused on the open collar of his kurta. “I have prostituted myself on many occasions, to suit the purposes of powerful men,” she said, carefully. “But I have never once enjoyed it.”
Nicky cupped her chin, tilting her luminous gaze back up to his. “Is that what you’re doing now? Did someone send you here?”
With that question, her smile was once more at full power, as if she knew a secret but wouldn’t share. “Nahin, saab. This … this is all mine.” Her hands moved up, under his kurta, skating across the surface of his chest as if she had a right to stake such a claim. “You are all mine.”
He believed her. It wasn’t sensible. It wasn’t rational. It was bilkul paagal. Totally fucking mad. But he believed her. Nicky closed the distance between them—as small as it was—and kissed her again. He was the fierce one this time, as if he could determine the truth of her with his lips and his tongue. He took his fill. With his kiss, with his hands. He engulfed and explored and shook with wonder. Rami’s body felt increasingly familiar. As though he’d scaled the peaks of her breasts and laid siege to the valley between her thighs before. It was a sensation that scared and exhilarated him all at once. “Who are you?”
“Yours,” she said, with something like desperation. Her touch repeated the assertion, traveling from his chest to his navel to the fine trail of hair that led below his belt. “Now ask yourself the same question, saab. Please. Who are you?”
Chapter Three
His dark eyes were as smooth and as blank as stones polished by the sea. As though she’d asked a boon of him that he could not possibly give. Her heart ached from loss almost as much as her skin burned with need. Perhaps his soul knew her, but his consc
ious mind did not. Nalakuvara, I’m yours, I am your wife, she wanted to cry out. But it would fall on deaf, disbelieving ears. From the moment she’d stepped forth from the water, he’d been entranced—easily, for men were simple prey—but there was only confusion in his eyes and a recklessness to the way he kissed and touched her.
The gods always delivered blessings with strings attached. Indra’s show of grace had been a trick wrapped in silk. In her misery, and then in her sudden joy, she had not anticipated having to fight for her long-coveted reunion.
But, oh, it was bliss just the same.
He was beautiful, this Nicky Kohli. All riotous hair and exhaustion-ringed eyes and the lean, poet’s body that had drawn her gaze a millennia ago. In the corded strength of his arms, the taut board of his chest, she recognized the fierceness of the man who had cursed King Ravana, his own uncle, for the sin of assaulting her. If only he would recall what his muscles and sinew already knew.
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
There was anguish and lust mixed in equal parts in the accented notes of his voice. She could hear Mumbai, London, Amrika … and, yes, Swargha, in those precious syllables. It was like Kishore Kumar and Mick Jagger and Springsteen tossed together. And it made her want to dance. For the first time in centuries, her feet pulsed with rhythm of their own accord rather than beats forced by a demigod’s whims.
“You do know. Deep inside, you know.” She drew him into the circle of her arms once more. They moved deeper into the veranda and he backed her over the threshold, inside his private hideaway, as though he could sense that they were partners in this ancient waltz. It fostered a flicker of hope within her, gave life to a flame. Had Savitri not challenged Yama himself for her own husband’s soul? This was but a fraction of such a trial. She didn’t have to venture to the realm of the dead; she just needed to awaken what had long been asleep. She was Rambha, most famous of apsaras—such a task was well within her grasp.
Also in her grasp was her husband … and she held him tight, returning each of his kisses with fervor, guiding his hands to the folds of her sari so he could rid her of the hindrance. All too soon she stood before him completely bare. Poets older and wiser than young Nicky Kohli had composed tributes to her form. She knew what a sight she was to behold.
He laughed, shakily, rubbing at his stubble-roughened jaw with the back of his fist. “You know … I’m still not certain this isn’t a dream.”
She kissed his knuckles, his jaw, the corner of his mouth. “Then why aren’t we in your bed?”
Nicky disrobed with less grace, more efficiency … like the eager playboy Nalakuvara had once been. Any questions that might have lingered inside him weren’t reflected in the rapid rise and fall of his chest, or in how his lingam throbbed when she took him in hand. Would he remember her after they made love? Would she simply wake beside a stranger with a hauntingly familiar face? This was the answer she sought. She had taken many a gamble with her charms, but never one that mattered so much.
It was this thought that froze her when Nicky took her by the hand to lead her to his bedchamber. Everything was riding on this moment. The currency that was her body had never been as valuable as it was in this instant. She was not whoring herself for a celestial agenda. She was giving herself as a woman, a wife.
Of course he sensed her hesitance. “What is it, what’s wrong?”
“Everything and nothing, saab.” How easy it was to call him “sir,” “sahib,” with the deference of a stranger when all she wanted to do was call him her heart.
Nicky stroked wayward strands of her hair back from her face, cupping her cheeks with his palms. His skin was already scented with the essence of the heavens. Lotus blossoms and honeyed nectar.
“You don’t have to do this,” he assured, even though their bodies were begging them to go on. “I don’t have to do this. I don’t think I ever have done this. It’s completely mad.”
It was mad, yes. But not nearly as mad as her wish that he simply remember everything his mortal life had forgotten … that he pull forth from his soul thousand-year-old memories of a marriage Nicky Kohli had never entered into.
Her lord Indra had not blessed her by sending her to earth. He’d punished her anew. Rambha’s feet, her traitorous feet, propelled her backward. She gathered up her sari, winding the cloth round herself in hasty motions as she murmured, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Rami, wait!”
But she was already well out of the reach of his tender grasp.
“Don’t leave,” he cried, fumbling for his clothes, and then giving up—following her out onto the veranda as bare as the day he was born. Beautiful and young and so very mortal. “At least tell me where I can find you.”
She turned to take one last look at him—a look that would have to sustain her for the next thousand years, or however long it took for the gods to favor him with a pardon. All she could give him in return was a word that would do him no good: “Swargha.”
When she fled across the beach, she left no footsteps behind on the sand.
Just a trail of regrets.
Chapter Four
After sixteen straight hours of sleep, Nicky felt like a new man. One who had woken from the strangest—and arguably the most chaste—of erotic dreams. His limbs felt alive, his mind alert.
Best of all, there was music. Constant music. He hummed as he brushed his teeth, sang snatches of lyrics as he pulled mugs full of water from the barrels and sluiced them over his thirsting body. It was only when he emerged from his room in shorts and a shirt, still toweling his hair, and saw his clothes from the night before strewn about the floor that he stopped still. The music faded to a dull buzzing.
Hai Bhagwan. God help him. It hadn’t been a dream. He hadn’t imagined a lick of it. The women on the beach, her seduction, her abrupt disappearance … it had happened. And then it had driven him, naked, weary and confused, to the sanctuary beneath his mosquito netting. He’d shut down the moment his head hit the pillow, but not before Rami, the mysterious beauty, had opened him wide.
The damp from his bath turned to ice crystals on his skin, while another part of him grew hot and hard at the memory.
A quick glance outside revealed that the light morning rain had washed away any footprints … if they had been there at all. No, she was real. Her wild green eyes, the familiarity with which she’d spoken, as if begging him to know her … it was no dream. Nicky sank into his desk chair, scrambling for a pen. He hurriedly jotted down everything he could remember: her beauty, the way she called him “saab,” and the last thing she’d said. Swargha. The heavens. What a ridiculous address. But if it was where he could find her, he’d knock on the gates.
***
The throne room was dark. She stepped around the prone forms of revelers who’d overdosed on nectar and ecstasy. The pleasure dome of Kubla Khan was nothing compared to the delights offered in Indra’s palace. Few could stomach the constant festivities at Amaravati, which could go on for days, and chose to spend their time on this plane in the gardens, or the more distant, peaceful reaches, instead. Burning Man and Navaratri combined in this hall, paganism and free love entwined with prayer and myth.
For Rambha, there was yet one more element: penitence. She’d asked a boon of her lord and then squandered it. He would not be quick to forgive. No, depending on Indra’s mood, she could very well find herself disturbing the peace of yet another yogi, and risking another curse being heaped on her luckless head. She would’ve gladly borne a thousand curses if there had only been the slightest hope that Nalakuvara would remember her. But the boy who wore his face, Nicky, had not known anything but his human desire. Human desire was often an apsara’s greatest weapon. But there, on the beach, it had been her undoing.
Now, she crept down the grand corridor to the palace apartments, praying that mere hours away had not been long enough for her rooms to be given to a newly favored dancer. Such were the lightning lord’s whims and mercies … and he h
ad so many.
Faint strains of shenai and bass, a lewd parody of wedding pomp, bled from the other side of the long marble wall. An old wooden gate, fitted into the design long ago, was locked, a thick bar thrown across the span, allowing no further intrusion for the night. Or any escape to the world beyond. The door was a tease. A shortcut to Earth that few were allowed to use.
Not that many even considered it. Urvashi and Menaka had laughed, on so many occasions, when she expressed a desire to look, to experience what lay on the other side.
“What is there for you, sister?”
“We have everything we could possibly desire right here.”
The realm of the gods was beautiful, a paradise no mortal could even dare comprehend. From the snow-capped mountains of Kailasa to the abode of Lord Vishnu to here, Swargha, the playground of minor lords and muses. But paradise was its own trap. For how could you know true joy without true suffering? How could you appreciate the gifts of the gods without having existed without them?
Rambha knew what it was to be denied entrance to the heavens, to live thousands of years as rock, conscious but unable to move. And she knew what it was to be stuck in here as well. Any place could become a hell if you were separated from the one you loved.
She was tired of it, of course. Who would not be?
But it was all she had.
All she would ever have.
Chapter Five
Nicky paced back and forth, ringing his brother’s mobile for the fourth time. How long could an Internet search possibly take? Particularly when Mani’s whole flat was wired like a government think tank. It wasn’t like he was stranded in Cox’s Bazar where the telephone lines barely worked.
Just then, Mani’s voice exploded from the speaker with a burst of static. “Man, I’m sorry, yaar. There’s no listing for Swargha anywhere. Not in B’desh, not India, and definitely not Pakistan.”
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