Ishq Factors

by Suleikha Snyder

  Indra shrugged, a sleek, slender creature who—in this instant—seemed far more demon himself than demigod. “Not when this ‘friend’ inspires rebellion.”

  Is that what he called her tiny mutiny of a few days prior? Truly? She did not know whether to laugh or sob. “He did not inspire rebellion, my lord. Apsaras are born rebels. We dance when human women are told dancing is sinful. We give and take pleasure when our mortal counterparts are told that pleasure is wrong and creating life is paramount. We tempt and we tease and we torment. You, sir, taught us to do those things to keep the weaknesses of man intact … without offering us any protection in return.”

  It was the longest speech she’d ever given. The fall of her soles, the rhythm of her ankle bells, these were the things that normally spoke for her. Not her words. Not her bitterness. And in the taut silence after, it was Nicky who responded.

  “I … I … I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The words were whispered into her hair, against the back of her head. And then he gently disentangled himself from her, leaning back against the wall for support.

  When she turned to look at him, it was to find his face pale and stark except for the bruises and the haunt of his near-black eyes. “Rami?” he murmured, bewildered. “It is you, na?”

  “Rambha,” she corrected. For what would be the point in obscuring that now, when so much had already been laid out before him? Her heart was heavy in her chest, her stomach churning. But she could sense the mocking weight of Lord Indra’s gaze as well, and it kept her going. “In another world, in another life, you knew me as your wife.”

  He laughed in a short burst of hysteria, wiping the blood from his mouth with his knuckles. “Now I am only more confused. What is this bakwas? Have you pulled me into some scheme?”

  No. It was not bullshit, nor was it some chakkar. Oh, to simply be the wild imaginings of a Bollywood film. To cease existing once the celluloid finished feeding through the reel. “I did not pull you, Nicky Kohli. You came willingly. You came to find me. And so I am found.” She tore the edge of her sari, taking a small piece of the silk and pressing it against his split lower lip. “There are countless doorways between our worlds. You only have to look for them, to knock upon them.”

  He still did not believe her. That he thought he was in a madhouse was plain in the set of his features, in the scorn in his voice. “Aur phir? And then what? Walk through?”

  Stubborn human. Stubborn, lovely human. “Haan. It takes no bravery to leave. It takes everything to return.”

  “Stop speaking in riddles,” he begged, catching her hand in both of his, stopping her ministrations.

  “Stop hearing riddles,” she chided. “Stop seeing illusions. The truth is right in front of you.”

  He looked down at their fingers. Laced once more. Sharing strength. How many times had they secreted away in the gardens of Swargha and walked hand-in-hand? And had he not kissed her palms with sorrow and with reverence after Ravana’s brutish assault? They were one. They’d always been one.

  When he looked up, the only ghost in his eyes was her reflection. And wonder infused his low, melodic voice. “I know you.” Wonder … and familiarity. “I know you.”

  ***

  His mouth still throbbed. His head still felt like he’d slammed into a commuter train. But beneath that, slowly overtaking it, was the strangest sense of … right. Especially once he said the words aloud. Yes. It was truth. He recognized her. Not just from the beach, but from somewhere he didn’t know and had never been.

  The shape of her face was more than familiar. He’d held this heart in his hands. He knew the fall of her thick dark hair. The way her silk sari wrapped around her body—could it be that, once upon a time, he’d helped her put one on? Tied the strings of her backless blouse and kissed his way up her spine?

  How was that possible?

  “He defied me. He married one of my girls.”

  Marriage. To this beautiful woman. Could that be real?

  He dragged his gaze from hers, looked over her head to where Inder waited. With a smile, of course. Did the man—the god?—ever wear a different expression? A sneer, a scowl, an impassive mask? Or was he always a joker?

  “Now you are asking the right questions.” Inder chuckled, gave a slight nod, and disappeared through the red curtains as if he wasn’t leaving chaos in his wake.

  “I … what?” Nicky shook his head, only increasing the ache from his intimate communion with the club’s wall and Amar the bouncer’s fists.

  Had the past few days even been real? Perhaps he’d drowned in the waters off Cox’s Bazar and not even known it. Would he awaken in a Bangladeshi hospital, tasting the ocean on his tongue?

  “Shh.” Rambha’s gentle fingers replaced his own against his temple, rubbing slow concentric circles. “Lord Indra is a master of games. Don’t trouble yourself trying to understand.”

  How could fingers feel like whispers? And whispers sound like kisses? He couldn’t wrap his brain around anything. Anyone. “Then what should I understand?”

  “This.” She smiled against his jaw. And then his lips.

  The kiss was light, just a caress against the bleeding cut.

  He felt it everywhere.

  Her hair spilled across his chest, her tears ran in rivulets down his throat, and she clutched him as if he were the only thing keeping her standing. “My lord … my lord … the demon king … he …”

  “Hush,” he told her, crooning nonsense words against her ear as he closed his eyes and sought the truth of what had befallen her. “Hush, my love. I will see what evil my uncle has done.”

  “Come with me,” she urged. “Come home.”

  He shook off the vision, the memory, and did as she asked. He walked through.

  Chapter Nine

  He gawked at everything beyond the door like a child in a sweet shop, following the tug of her hand even as his feet slowed and stumbled on the slippery marble tiles. She knew what it must look like to new eyes: the grand hall, with its golden columns, and the simple wooden portal from whence they’d come. Two turns would take them to the lightning god’s throne room, where her sisters were surely finishing their run-through of a new routine.

  And there was no noise. The outside world had voices and breaths and lorry horns and barking dogs. Here, there was only the sound they made. A rock song on a mortal’s stereo. Bells. Laughs. Gasps and moans.

  She’d never brought a man to her bed. She’d had them in the gardens, in the woodlands and riverbeds of the human realm, in secret and stolen moments, but her suite was her sanctuary. Hers and hers alone.

  Until now. Until Nicky Kohli.

  “Back there … inside the club … you said I helped defeat Ravana. How? Tell me what this means,” he implored in Hindi. “I don’t understand any of it.”

  “Don’t you read your scriptures?” she chided, tugging him further into the room and then closing the door behind them. “You’ve been born, and died, a thousand times. Over and over. The same soul. My Nalakuvara’s soul.”

  Her husband’s soul in another, younger, beautiful body.

  But his poor face was still ugly with bruises. Her heart thumped with grief and she passed her palm over his eye, wishing away the evidence of Lord Indra’s cruelty.

  The pain, too, must have vanished, for his gaze brightened, and he tentatively touched his cheek, testing it for swelling. “Is this magic?”

  “Nahin, saab. This is illusion—simply maya.” She skated her hand across her torso, making the flesh ripple and turn the iridescent blue of mermaid’s scales. “Men see what they want to see when they look upon an apsara. Men also feel what they want to feel.”

  Here was his last chance to go. His last chance to deny his karma and his dharma. To forget the foolishness of coming to find her and write this all off as a strange dream. All he needed to do was ask her if what he felt was also maya. Had she bespelled him? Was this real? One note of disbelief, of accusation, and he could move away instead o
f forward.

  But he did not ask. He did not doubt. Instead, he reached for her hand and kissed her fingertips. “I didn’t want to feel this. I only knew I had to,” he said against the pad of her thumb. “I had to find you, to fight for you.”

  She stroked his lower lip, recalling the copper taste of his mouth. “I know. And that is how you helped to vanquish the demon king.”

  Some day she would tell him the whole story, but not now. This was not a moment to relive the past, to become mired in the tragedy of that terrible day. Nahin, here and now, she wanted to celebrate that they’d survived, that they’d found their way back to one another at last.

  He shrugged, still so charmingly bewildered and helpless. “I’m just a musician, Rami.”

  “Then make me sing.” She curved into him, taking his free hand and placing it on her hip.

  In this, at least, he showed no hesitation. His fingers sank into her flesh, into the folds of silk at her waist. He pulled gently at her sari, loosening it as he bent to kiss her. She met him halfway, rising up on her toes and meeting his eagerness. Matching it. The sensual thrill arced through her body, far more sure and true than those passionate pulses on his veranda a few days ago. This time she would not back away. This time she would not run. This time, she would claim.

  Their lips clashed like thunderclouds, hot and wet and full. Breathing was beyond her. Thinking was beyond her. Even praying was beyond her. All she could do was take and take and take. She shoved his jacket from his shoulders, tore at the buttons of his shiny purple shirt—he’d dressed like a gandharva without even knowing it; such was the glitter and glitz of the cinema world—and undid the zipper of his tight blue jeans.

  He made a strangled noise, kissing her back with gloriously human enthusiasm, and stripped her of her sari, blouse, and petticoat with champion speed. And then they were both bared to the skin and to the soul, his sharp angles set to her lush curves.

  “Don’t leave me this time,” he whispered as his tongue traced a line from her shoulder to the place where her blood beat wild. “I’ll go mad if you disappear … if I wake up alone … if I find out this was all a fantasy.”

  It was the easiest promise she’d ever made. “Gods willing, I will never leave you again.”

  And then she led him to bed. There, in the tangle of silk sheets, she opened for him the world he couldn’t recall, the things she couldn’t forget. A thousand years with every stroke of his lingam inside her. A circle round the sacred fire with every gasp of his name. She found her faith when she clung to his shoulders. She found her rhythm when she met his deepest thrust.

  Here was who she was. Here was who they were together.

  This was where she belonged.

  With the other half of herself.

  ***

  He’d searched for Swargha, for Heaven. Surely he’d found it tonight.

  It was the pale brown expanse of her back, and the hollow just before the rise of her bum. It was the spot just behind her ear that, when licked, made her shudder with pleasure. It was the valley between her breasts and the taut tips of her dark nipples. It was everything about Rambha, queen of the apsaras, goddess of his dreams … wife of his heart.

  “Do you remember anything new?” she asked him as he played with the silken fan of her hair across the pillow. There were so many curls and kinks, his fingers could be lost for days.

  He furrowed his brow—lines she instantly smoothed with the tip of one finger—and closed his eyes. Almost all of his memories of her were fresh, full of taste and touch and sound and scent. The only thing beyond that was strange. Incongruous. A discordant note that somehow fit the tune nonetheless. “Gendhe ki phool?” he murmured, feeling silly as he did so. “Marigolds?”

  “Yes” Rambha’s smile was full of delight, as though he’d recalled a birthday or an anniversary. She was so totally radiant, and like before, she understood his confusion before he even had to tell her of it. “When the gods grant a favor they say it with flowers,” she explained.

  He had a general idea, if not from anything he’d personally experienced, then at least from TV, of jewelry-bedecked men chanting “So let it be done!” in Hindi and scattering marigolds over people’s heads. “And I gained their favor?”

  Fury coursed through his veins. Rage like he’d never known before. He threw back his head, screaming at the sky until his voice grew hoarse … but not so hoarse that he could not use his anger to call upon Lord Vishnu, Lord Brahma, and the lord of destruction Himself, Shiva. “Oh, Gods. Grant me this wish. I curse Ravana, demon lord of Lanka, with every fiber of my immortal being and every piece of my soul. Should he ever touch another unwilling woman, his ten heads will burst into pieces.”

  Nicky blinked, drew a deep and shaky breath as the memory faded as quickly as it had come upon him. Some day, he would tell Rambha what he’d remembered. But not today. Not now. Now, he only wanted to be with her, to cherish her anew.

  “Dobara. Twice.” As she rose above him, her fist opened, tipping one perfect, orange, blossom onto his bare chest. “You’ve been blessed twice, my husband.”

  No. She wasn’t quite correct. As the celestial music flowed through him, untapped and unbidden and not the least bit unwelcome, Nicky understood the whole truth.

  “I’ve been blessed a million times, my love … and I can’t wait to write every single song.”

  About the Author

  Editor, writer, American desi and lifelong geek Suleikha Snyder is an author of contemporary and erotic romance. A passionate advocate for diversity and inclusivity in publishing, Suleikha is frequently ranting when she should really be adding to her body of work — which includes multiple Bollywood-set romances and several shorts and novellas.

  Suleikha lives in New York City, finding inspiration in genre fiction, daytime and primetime soaps, and anything that involves chocolate or bacon. Visit her online at www.suleikhasnyder.com and follow her on Twitter @suleikhasnyder.

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