Ishq Factors

by Suleikha Snyder

  “Nepal?” Nicky asked, feebly. “Bhutan? Burma? How about Sikkim?”

  Mani swore … colorful, unprintable things about his—their—parents and various farm animals. “You want to find Swargha, go shove yourself ass first into the Mahabharata.”

  Poetry. Pure poetry. It was a wonder Nicky had become a musician while Mani studied engineering. “Are you certain it’s not a club or a hotel somewhere? Something crazy like that?”

  “Nahin, bhaiya, it’s not—wait.” The sound of keys being pounded frantically was like a drumming over the line. “I don’t have a Swargha, but there is a nightclub called ‘Heaven,’ in Mumbai. Adults only. It has a cabaret show. Wow. Shabbash, Nicky … who knew that nightclubs now export strippers to Bangladesh?”

  “Shut up.” There was no point in explaining to Mani that strippers and cabaret dancers were not the same thing. Mani was so socially backward, he wouldn’t recognize a woman in general unless she tripped and fell on top of him. “Give me the address, please.”

  ***

  Her suite was lavish, draped with silk and gold. She slept on a pillow of clouds, under a canopy of sky. The window opened up to a beautiful lake, ringed by evergreen trees. She awoke every morning to bird song, to crickets chirping. This, after all, was Heaven.

  A prison cell had never been more beautiful.

  And she’d known her share of prisons, of punishments.

  One could not be an apsara without knowledge of consequence. Of risk.

  Lord Indra would say that her greatest risk had been falling in love and taking a husband. But she knew better. The precious time spent in Nalakuvara’s arms, like a mortal woman, a wife, was her greatest treasure. Millennia had passed and still it was her sweetest, truest moment. Marred though it was by evil, by darkness, by cruel separation.

  She’d perfumed and brushed out her waist-length hair, adorned herself with slender glass bangles and ankle bells. Her sari was of the sheerest silk, molding to her breasts and her hips. He would be pleased by her efforts. Vastly more important, she would be pleased. For Nalakuvara was her mate, her swami, the one thing in her immortal servitude that was hers alone. She dressed for them both, and undressed for them both as well.

  The forest was quiet, but not lonesome. She’d never feared for her safety in such environs and would not begin now. Animals played in the brush, birds gave warning from the treetops. It was a harmonious day. A joyous hour to be alive.

  All was well … until it was not.

  The shadow that fell across her path was so wide, so long, that the grass itself turned black. “Where are you going, oh, beautiful one, clad as you are in such seductive clothes?”

  In the ancient tongue, the words sounded like poetry. But in ten pairs of eyes there was only lust. Only malice.

  Rambha shivered, though Swargha was never cold. She paced across the marble floor and urged the sinister visions back into the lacquered box in the deepest chamber of her heart. If it was useless to wish for her husband to recall their love, it was futile to remember what had tested their bond before. Tested it, tarnished it … and then strengthened it.

  But some memories never died.

  Neither did some hopes.

  Chapter Six

  Heaven was as far from its name as a big man from Chotu. Cigarette smoke hung in low clouds across the crowded room. Small tables clung together like bunches of dark bananas. The walls were painted gold, and the floors were carpeted in red. A woman stood in the spotlight on a small dais, dancing like someone had loosed a legion of tiny scorpions down her skin-tight hotpants. Her lips shaped the lyrics of an old Lata Mangeshkar song from the sixties. Half-karaoke, half-striptease, and hundred percent horrifying. Traumatized, Nicky swallowed half of his vodka tonic in one gulp and choked.

  When the burn of the liquor in his throat and his eyes faded, he drew a shaky breath.

  A relieved breath.

  It wasn’t her. Rami. The girl from the beach.

  Henna-red hair. Gori-fair skin. Legs that went on for days.

  He came away from the bar, stumbled deeper into the main room. None of them were her, he realized, as he looked around the dimly lit club. Waitresses in short skirts milled about. Women freely sat with their boyfriends or alone at the bar. They were all different shades of pretty, different shades of bold or shy or looking. But none were her.

  There were decorative doors cut into the walls, framed by curtains. One set led to the washrooms. Another to an office. Another was half-obscured by a red velvet hanging, with no one passing near its elusive threshold. Perhaps it hid the stairway to Heaven.

  He laughed silently at his own terrible joke, slowly finishing his drink as he completed his circuit and took a table off to the side of the stage. Madam Hotpants finished her performance—such as it was—and disappeared offstage. What new horror would follow her? He’d come this far, so he knew he had to stay to discover it.

  Mani thought he was totally mad for coming here. For even trying to find her. “Put down the ganja, mere bhai,” he’d advised. “Come back from the clouds to earth.”

  But what if he didn’t belong on the earth?

  The question stopped Nicky as coldly as the vodka had burned.

  An ajib thought, a strange response to his brother’s offhand bakwas.

  He was still too overworked, overtired. Another two weeks in Cox’s Bazar would’ve done wonders. Or, perhaps, sent him further along the path to insanity. Perhaps crazy was inevitable no matter where he was?

  He slumped in the wiry metal chair, sliding his now-empty glass from hand to hand across the tabletop. There was a rhythm in the motion. Maybe a song. But he only heard the faintest strains of possibility. And then it was drowned out by the chords spilling from the sound system. Aerosmith. Nahin, the Stones. A true classic.

  Someone on stage was about to make an introduction. Couldn’t he guess their name?

  He didn’t want to look. But, of course, this close, he had no choice.

  Short-shorts were nothing compared to the man’s outfit. Obscenely tight leather pants encased his legs, which ended in high-heeled, leopard-print boots. His glistening chest was bare, save for a single gold necklace, a wide locket hanging just above his navel. And he wore a top hat. Bhagwan. Sympathy for the Devil had never been so easy: Nicky was very, very sorry for whomever had dressed this performer.

  But the man did not want his pity. Nahin, he stood onstage like he owned it, gripping the microphone stand like a conquerer’s staff. And when his hips moved, Nicky did not think of scorpions. He thought of snakes.

  And then he could not look away. Not him, and not anyone else. They were riveted. One song, and the strange showman had the entire audience in his palm. It was the kind of musical number any director would kill to have in his film. The kind of thing he could never write, no matter how lauded his talents. “I am Inder,” said the devil, taking a long sweeping bow to enthusiastic applause. “Welcome to Swargha. Enjoy yourselves.”

  Nicky could only watch him … and then be watched, as Inder’s eyes cut across him like a lighthouse beam. He could not have translated the communication that passed between them for the world. But, moments later, the club’s star, and perhaps more, was joining Nicky at the small table, sprawling in the spindly chair across from him with the same sinuous grace that had directed his hips on stage.

  “What brings you here?” Inder asked in Hindi. Flawless, formal Hindi.

  Such that Nicky had to run this, too, through a translation. He shrugged to mask his sudden embarrassment. “Why does anyone come to this place, yaar?”

  Dark eyes lit up with amused arrogance. And this time the man spoke in English. “Cheap liquor. Pretty girls. Salvation.”

  Chapter Seven

  The club was open. The door unbolted. The path between worlds thrown wide. Rambha knew better than to step over the threshold, even as the music urged her to guess her lord’s name. Urvashi slipped by in a swish of silks, a smile pulling at her mouth. Menaka, so resolute when
the door was bolted, now gazed wistfully at the beckoning curtain, for all her children teemed with life on the other side. Her blood flowed in the veins of every Indian, every resident of Bharat. She’d spawned a nation by lying with one king. And her people did not know her name.

  Rambha watched Menaka touch the wall with a kind of reverence. Kiss her fingertips and press them against the cool, smooth stones.

  Rambha felt the same pull. The same desire. But it was not the wall she wanted to kiss.

  “He’s there tonight.” One of the gandharvas had whispered the words to her in the great hall as Lord Indra readied for his performance. “Our brother. Your swami. He looks for you in the crowd.”

  The man who called himself Nicky. Once her mate, her Nalakuvara. He’d found her in just a matter of days. It would be the simplest thing to go to him. To step out there once more, into the human world, and beg him to remember her. But it was not her he looked for. Nahin, he sought the fantasy from the beach at Cox’s Bazar. A vision. A dream. Not the reality she’d known before fate tore them from one another’s arms.

  So Rambha moved away from the wooden door and its temptations. From her history and its memories. Nicky could look all he liked. Until he saw her, there was nothing for her but heartbreak and regret.

  The dark lord’s hand clasped round her upper arm, squeezing even as an amiable smile cut across his central face. “Lie with me, fair apsara. I am overcome with desire for you.”

  “No, sir. I cannot.” For she knew who he was. His reputation, and his bloodline, were famous throughout the realms. “Lord Ravana, you are a father-in-law to me. It is a sin to suggest such a thing.”

  “Father-in-law?” He scoffed. “Nymph, you are not married to my son.”

  She raised her folded hands, beseeching him, willing him to listen. “To your nephew, Nalakuvara, son of your brother.”

  But King Ravana was not appeased. His trunk-like chest heaved with laughter. The sounds that spilled from his ten mouths were like thunder. “You are an apsara. Nothing more than a whore. To call rutting with my brother’s son a marriage is the true sin.”

  The grip on her arm tightened. And then, with his other hand, he bound all of her hair and tugged.

  No matter what others believed, it was a marriage between them. Something of value. A past to cherish and a future to fight for.

  No. She could not go to Nicky.

  This time, he would have to come to her.

  ***

  Inder sat with him through two more rounds of drinks. Each held a little less tonic and a little more vodka. Nicky could only guess that was deliberate. As deliberate as the sharpness of the liquor and the dimness of the lights. The alcohol sang in his veins, and his head was already throbbing. Her. He needed to ask about her.

  But it was the man across the table who was asking all the questions. Where were his people from? What did he do for a living? Was he religious?

  “I prayed to Saraswati Ma to pass my B.A. Does that count?” He laughed, slouching in his chair as yet another bizarrely wonderful act took the stage. A male dancer wearing a headdress of elaborately carved Kathakali masks. Ceramic monstrosities glued side by side. Ten of them. Like Ravana, from the Ramayana. “How is that not falling off?” he asked, over whatever the club owner’s next interrogation might be. “Is it not heavy?”

  “Are not all burdens heavy?” Inder shrugged, palms turned up. “Do you know him, Nicky-saab? Is he familiar?”

  He cocked his head. Frowned at the stage. “Ravana and Rama? I know the story. I watched the series on TV as a boy.”

  Inder waved a dismissive hand. It was an elegant hand. No calluses. No ink stains. Like the man had never done a day’s work. “That is not the whole story.” He made a tsking noise. “Every hero has a past. So does every villain.”

  As did every heroine. “I don’t care about Ravana. Chhoro. Leave him.” He forced his drink-addled mind to focus, his thoughts to stay in line and not be led astray by Inder’s circuitous routes. “I am looking for a woman. I think she works here.”

  “Many women work here,” the wily bastard allowed, a mocking smile pulling at his lips. “Many women play here also.”

  Vodka-soaked or no, he still had enough of a temper to growl at Inder. To slap the table in frustration. “Why so much parishaan? Don’t trouble me. Just tell me the truth. Do you know her? Rami?” He sketched a vague shape of her curves in the air, closing his eyes at the memory of her warmth, her eyes, and her kiss.

  Inder’s voice penetrated the lovely image, popped it like a balloon. “You are asking the wrong question. Do you know her? It all rides on the answer.”

  “Nahin, yaar. I want to know her.” He groaned, scrubbing at his face. These people were all crazy. He was surrounded by lunatics. And coming as he did from Mumbai and Bollywood, that was saying something. “She found me. In Bangladesh. And then she was gone.”

  “So? Find another,” Inder suggested, briefly glancing away, to something over Nicky’s shoulder, before skewering him once more. “There are millions of women in the world. Why is this one so special?”

  “I don’t want millions of women. I want this one.” This one is mine. And I am hers. It was irrational to believe that. They’d shared only minutes. But those minutes had burrowed under his skin. They’d felt like lifetimes. He’d relived them on the flight to India. Cherished them in the taxi ride to the club. And now they were driving him, pushing him, making him lean across the table and grasp the collar of Inder’s vest. “Enough! Bas! You know where she is. You would not be playing games with me if you didn’t.”

  Inder tipped back his head, bared the golden column of his throat, and laughed long and loud. “My boy, I don’t need an excuse to play games with anyone,” he assured.

  And then two big, meaty hands closed round Nicky’s shoulders and plucked him from his seat. As easily as if he weighed nothing.

  He had a sense of thick eyebrows, a gleaming gold earring, a bald head. The American advert of Mr. Clean. It was Mr. Clean tossing him like a rag doll … slamming him into the nearest wall so hard that his head snapped back and his ears rang.

  Out of the corner of his stinging eyes, he could see that Kathakali Ravana on the stage had stopped dancing. Someone had turned off the music.

  Because, suddenly, Nicky was the show.

  It was the latest in a long line of ridiculous, random, observations. And the sharpest of pains.

  Chapter Eight

  She was not even in motion, only watching the dancers practice their lewdly modern steps, when she stumbled and doubled over. As though some unseen force had planted a fist in her belly. Agony, sudden and spiking, radiated through her skin and her bones.

  Urvashi paused the music, the bells on her ankles tinkling softly as she threaded through their sister apsaras and made her way to Rambha’s side. “What is it? Are you hurt?”

  No. She knew without a doubt. He was. And her devious, genius lord and master wanted her to feel it. Foolish god. Did he not know she’d always felt her husband’s pain? That thousands of years and millions of miles could not dull the sensation?

  She gathered her skirts in one hand, moving swiftly from the throne room to the column-lined hallway. Her feet fairly slipped across the marble as she approached the open door to the nightclub. The thick velvet curtain fluttered, mocking her. Urging her over the threshold and warning her away all at once. In this, too, was Indra’s touch.

  They were always pawns in a greater game, weren’t they? Subject to the whims of stronger beings. Unable to fight back.

  The rock beneath her back was a feather bed compared to the weight above her.

  Anger surged through her, strength as well. Power she’d wished for all those thousands of years ago. She spilled forth into the noise and glare of the human world … a room as different from Nicky’s beautiful, solitary beach as night from day.

  Spectators blocked her view, giving her only a sense of fist meeting flesh, of gasps and hoarse cries of pain.
>
  If her body was her only asset, her only weapon, then so be it.

  She shoved and hip-checked and struck out with her elbows, until the onlookers parted, showing the vast mountain of the man Indra had hired to guard the club and her far smaller lifemate. Blood was blooming from Nicky’s lip. His dark eyes were out of focus. Paying no heed to the logistics, to the futility of her interruption, she tossed herself between them, into the dance.

  The bouncer’s knuckles glanced across her shoulder, flew just shy of her cheek, and she shifted, spreading herself in front of Nicky like a shield. “Stop!” she cried out, as Nicky’s arm slid round her waist—to save her or to steady himself, she didn’t know. His breath was ragged in her ear. Almost deafening.

  But not so quiet that she did not hear Lord Indra echo her order. “Stop,” he chimed cheerfully, as though they were playing a child’s game of Statue. His trained oaf stepped back immediately. And just as immediately the air around her and Nicky seemed to move again. A blast of cool, a breath of winter.

  “That will be all, Amar,” the lightning lord murmured to his guard, who vanished into the crowd.

  “No. It is not all.” Rambha slipped her hand over Nicky’s, pressing it flat to her belly as she stood straight and firm. She felt him stiffen behind her, plant his feet and his weight, as if they drew bravery from one another, energy from the simple interlacing of their fingers. “What did this man do to offend you, Lord? Why did you order him beaten?”

  Indra’s gaze flicked over the saucer-eyed patrons who had gathered to watch Nicky’s thrashing. One by one they slunk back to their tables or to the bar. Compelled by his power … or perhaps solely by his arrogance. Once only the three of them remained by the wall, he spoke. No, he pronounced.

  “He defied me. He married one of my girls. Gandharvas and apsaras are not meant to wed.”

  Nicky made a sound. Confusion. Protest. But she could not turn to address that now. Not when Indra stared at her with such challenge, such lofty judgment. “And he cursed the demon who terrorized kingdoms in every dimension,” she pointed out. “Were it not for Nalakuvara, would Ravana ever have been weakened enough to be vanquished? Is not the enemy of your enemy your friend?”