by Sonia Singh
Munnu stomped in, grabbed the plate and stomped back out.
“I don’t like him, Mama,” Randy fussed. “Munnu has a very bad attitude.”
“Mr. Kapoor—” the screenwriter began with a beseeching look.
“Why are you still here?” Randy demanded.
Randy’s mother stroked her son’s arm soothingly, while shooting the screenwriter a dirty look. “You’re aggravating my son during his dinner hour. It will give him indigestion.” She turned back to Randy. “Don’t worry about anything, my sweet. You’re a growing boy. I’ll tell Munnu to add another serving to your plate.”
The fact was, Randy was a thirty-year-old man and had consumed half a pizza prior to dinner. In the last year, his waist size had expanded to a forty-two.
The screenwriter softly cleared his throat after Mrs. Kapoor had left the room. “But your father loved the script. He approved it. He thought the romance between the tour guide and the girl—”
“Daddy is not the director. I am,” Randy informed him. “Your script was all about feelings and relationships. Boring. No fight scenes. No action. No explosions or skimpy costumes.”
Munnu placed a plate laden with food in front of Randy.
“Munnu,” Randy said, “show the man out.”
Munnu dragged his feet over to the screenwriter and began urging him towards the door.
Happily, Randy dug into his food. He would write the script himself. How hard could it be?
A moment later his scream echoed throughout the house.
Mrs. Kapoor came running into the room, her massive bosom heaving underneath her sari blouse. “What is it, my sweet? What’s wrong?”
“My food is too hot,” Randy cried.
The driver quickly opened the back door of the green BMW. Randy slid into the leather seat and lit a cigarette. “Take me to Rain,” he ordered the driver.
Rain was one of the hottest nightclubs in the city. Randy had just left a private party but wasn’t in the mood to go home just yet.
The driver gazed at him in the rearview mirror. “But sahib, it’s almost three A.M. Couldn’t we head to the airport?”
Randy flicked the ash out the window and frowned. “Airport? Why would we go there?”
“Earlier you told me a woman would be arriving—”
“Stop making up stories,” Randy said crossly through a haze of smoke. “Just drive.”
There was more drinking to be done.
Chapter 9
Four A.M. outside Bombay’s Sahar Airport.
The humidity was so thick you could hack it to pieces with a machete. Raveena waited for the promised car and driver to take her to the hotel.
And waited.
And waited some more.
And—just because it was so much fun—she kept on waiting.
It was twenty-three hours later, her eyes were gritty with lack of sleep, her stomach sour with airplane food, and her back hurt from the stiff seat—the middle seat, mind you—in a five-seat row.
Immediately after takeoff from LAX, the cute guy to her left had given her a cursory look, then turned to the petite blonde next to him and began chatting. Halfway into the flight they were making out like horny men in a Turkish prison. Raveena’s polite “excuse me” was ignored.
The woman to her right had immediately taken half a bottle of sleeping pills, followed by a double whiskey chaser, and conked out. This meant Raveena had to climb over her and the equally zonked Chinese gentleman in the aisle seat whenever she wanted to use the restroom.
Without a doubt, the airplane lavatory probably reeked worse than one of the port-a-potties at Woodstock 2, and Raveena thought of just holding it until the layover.
But her bladder had a mind of its own.
To make matters worse, during the four-hour layover in Singapore, she’d been cornered by a group of teenage Asian girls with matching backpacks shouting “Vagitsu! Vagitsu!” Disheveled as Raveena was, she’d agreed to pose in photographs and sign autographs.
“Ow!”
Raveena screeched as an Indian woman trod heavily on her foot.
The woman was unapologetic.
With her two enormously heavy suitcases beside her—honestly, it was as though she’d packed a sumo wrestler in each of them—her carry-on bag slowly cutting off the circulation of blood to her shoulder, her purse clutched to her chest in a death grip—Auntie Kiran had said India was filled with thieves and rapists—Raveena was jostled and pushed by the flood of humanity exiting Arrivals.
The buzzing sodium lights outside the airport bathed her skin in a strange orange hue and irritated her eyes. Beggars of all shapes and sizes, some with missing limbs, some with extra limbs—one man kept showing Raveena the third nostril on his nose—clamored for attention, their hands outstretched, their voices pleading. Hawkers battled with the beggars, waving worn and used-looking maps of Bombay, suspicious-looking bottled water and dented Bollywood film magazines.
The noise was intense and grating. She’d never experienced anything like it.
Taxi drivers cued up at the curb, competing with each other for passengers. Several of them kept opening their doors and trying to tempt her in.
And then there were the loafers. Auntie Kiran had warned Raveena about them.
The loafers were men who didn’t seem to have any purpose but to lean against the wall and stare at each and every woman who crossed their field of vision. Since Raveena was the only unaccompanied female standing there, she was the sole object of their gaze.
Dressed in threadbare cotton clothing, they stared at her with bloodshot eyes, their feet bare, black hair oily. A few of them made smooching noises, which she wisely did not return.
And Raveena kept on waiting.
She had the fax from Griffin, which listed the name of the hotel, as well as Randy Kapoor’s number, but she didn’t have a cell phone on her, and the pay phones were on the opposite end of the crowded walkway. No way would she be able to lug her suitcases that far, and no way in hell was she leaving them unattended. The coolie who had carried her bags outside had long since disappeared into the night.
Besides, she’d passed by several pay phones after emerging from customs and they looked more complicated than The Da Vinci Code.
And she didn’t have any Indian coins.
As five a.m. approached, having grown weary of the beggars, hawkers and loafers around her, Raveena finally grabbed a tall, gray-haired Indian gentleman who had just finished making a call on his cell phone. “Please, can you dial a number for me? My ride hasn’t shown up.”
He nodded and dialed the number she gave him. After a moment he handed it over. “It’s ringing.”
Raveena pressed the receiver to her ear as the phone rang and rang. Finally a sleepy and sullen male voice answered rudely in Hindi. “What.”
She asked for Randy Kapoor.
The voice grew even more sullen. “Who?”
“Randy Kapoor.”
“Kapoor sahib isn’t here.”
Damn. “Where is he? He was supposed to send the driver. I’m at the airport.”
The man, whom she cleverly deduced to be the servant, repeated himself. “Kapoor Sahib isn’t here.”
She tried again. “Can you give me his cell number?”
The servant said something distinctly rude and untranslatable before hanging up.
“He’s not there,” Raveena said as she handed the phone back. Her mouth was suddenly dry and her palms sweaty. She was entering panic mode.
“Do you have his address?”
She dug the fax out of her bag and showed it to him. “No, but I have the hotel name.”
The gentleman nodded and gestured for one of the taxi drivers to come over. In rapid Hindi he gave the man the hotel address and issued a stern warning to see Raveena there safely and promptly. The man nodded and went to pick up the suitcases.
Raveena turned to the gentleman, the sheer feeling of gratefulness nearly overwhelming her. “I can’t thank you e
nough.”
Her guardian angel smiled. “I have a daughter your age. I hope someone would do the same for her if she were stranded in a foreign city.”
The taxi driver started the car; the gentleman held open the door and Raveena slid into the backseat.
Feeling like Blanche Dubois, she waved to her kind stranger as the car pulled away from the curb and plunged into the darkened bumpy streets of Bombay.
Twenty minutes later they pulled up in front of a sagging two-story building right on Juhu beach. A tarnished and rusted sign read:
Officer’s Club
The taxi driver jumped out and began removing the suitcases from the car and dragging them to the entrance. Raveena stared at the forlorn empty drive covered with weeds. The windows on either side of the main door were cracked.
Maybe she was being a snob, but in her opinion, five-star accommodations did not mean a decrepit old building that had obviously seen its heyday during the British Empire.
Stunned, she stepped out and faced the driver. “My hotel?”
He smiled and nodded. “Yes, madam.”
Still in a daze, she paid him, walked up to the Officer’s Club door and opened it. A middle-aged man was asleep at the front desk.
“Excuse me,” Raveena said loudly.
The night porter opened his eyes, blinked and rubbed his face.
“Do you have a reservation for Raveena Rai?”
He came over and handed her a large brass key, with a tag attached. “Room fifteen,” he said. And then pointed at the stairs. “Up.”
After that he went back to the front desk and was soon snoring away.
She stood there for a moment in the hall, as if in a trance.
Then she went back for her suitcases and managed to push them both inside, and then, alternately pushing and pulling one, struggled to get them upstairs.
Finally, soaked in sweat and nearly falling with exhaustion, she unlocked the door to number fifteen and stepped inside.
One small room. One thin cot. One solitary bulb in the ceiling.
She opened the bathroom door. A cracked, rusting porcelain toilet. The showerhead hung from the middle of the ceiling. There was a small drain in the floor.
The Ritz it wasn’t.
Raveena closed and locked the room door, stumbled over to the cot and threw herself across it.
And there, in her small smelly quarters, mosquitoes hovering in wait, she cried herself to sleep.
Chapter 10
“I don’t want to do this film,” Siddharth said, his voice flat.
His manager, Javed Khan, sighed. “I agree with you, Sid. Randy Kapoor is a bastard of the first degree, and I wouldn’t trust him alone in a room with a female goat, but Daddy asked for you personally.”
“Daddy?” Siddharth could feel his resistance crumbling and cursed his luck at being born in July. He was a Cancer, which meant he was moody, sensitive and often wracked by guilt.
Damn those astrologers, they really got it right sometimes.
The last thing he wanted to do was work with a chutia like Randy Kapoor, but Randy’s father and Daddy had been good friends. If he said no, every time he passed by his father’s picture, framed by a garland of marigolds, he would feel guilty.
Then again, one romantic role was the same as another. The familiar feeling of boredom began creeping up on him. He sighed and slumped in his chair. “Who’s the actress?”
His manager smiled approvingly and slid over a slim portfolio case. “She’s Indian, American born, from Los Angeles. Randy spied her in a commercial in Singapore.”
Siddharth opened the portfolio and stared at the glossy eight-by-elevens.
The woman was beautiful; no doubt about that.
Her long black hair hung to the middle of her back. She had a sensuous quality, evident in her deep brown eyes and the slight curl of her full lips.
He noticed something in the last photo. “She has big feet.”
Javed looked over. “She does, doesn’t she? Her shoe size must be close to mine.”
Siddharth shut the portfolio and sat back. “I’ve already committed to Love in the Himalayas. What about that?”
“No problem,” Javed said. “I’ve looked at the dates. They won’t overlap with Randy Kapoor’s film.”
Siddharth stood up, wearing a distinctly grumpy expression. “Fine. But I’m only doing this because Daddy asked.”
His manager nodded. “I know, Sid.” He reached for the phone and began dialing. “Will I see you tonight at the premiere for Love along the Ganges?”
Siddharth paused, his hand on the door. “Damn. I’d forgotten about that.”
Emitting a string of Hindi obscenities that caused Javed to smile, Siddharth slipped on a pair of Revo sunglasses and was out the door.
Chapter 11
The heat was so intense Raveena could practically hear the oil on her T-zone sizzling.
She was attempting to place an international call to Griffin back in Los Angeles. She had some specific words to say about Randy Kapoor.
That morning, a different—but equally sleepy—porter had been behind the front desk when she came downstairs. She’d barely slept five hours.
The porter had made no mention of the mosquito bites disfiguring her face, or how her eyes were swollen from crying.
When she’d asked about calling America—there was no telephone in her room—the porter pointed out the door, “Left, madam.”
The sun beating down fiercely, she’d walked past carts selling coconut water, vendors frying up chickpeas and serving them in newspapers, and beggar women with naked children clinging to the skirts of their saris.
And the noise:
Horns blaring from cars and taxis, the roadrunner-like “beep, beep” from the black and yellow motorcycle rickshaws, known as auto-rickshaws, that buzzed down the street like angry hornets, the blasting of Bollywood hits from every stand, the barking of stray dogs as they chased one another alongside the road.
And the people:
Men and women on bicycles, on foot, in cars, in auto-rickshaws, in double-decker buses that looked as though they would topple over at any second with the number of people hanging out of windows and clinging onto the sides.
And everywhere she looked there were billboards advertising Coca-Cola, Pepsi, McDonalds, Omega Watches, MTV Asia, Sony electronics, the latest film release…a veritable attack of information.
Next to Bombay, Los Angeles suddenly seemed like a quaint New England village.
As a child, Raveena had accompanied her parents on several visits to India to see grandparents and various relatives. They’d arrive in New Delhi, be whisked off to the train station and travel first class to the northern town of Amritsar where both her parents had grown up.
But Bombay—
Bombay was something else.
What on earth had made her think she could handle it?
With the telephone stand’s operator helping, she dialed the country code, then the area code and finally the number of Griffin’s cell phone.
Groggily guessing, she figured it to be around nine-thirty in the evening in LA.
The phone continued to ring. If she got Griffin’s voice mail she would become hysterical.
Raveena gave herself permission.
Fortunately for the telephone operator and anyone within screaming distance, Griffin answered.
“Hello?” he said.
“Griffin! This is Raveena!” she shouted.
“Raveena,” he said in a casual voice. “How are you, doll? Did you make it all right? Can I put you on hold? I’ve got another call coming in.”
She gritted her teeth. “Griffin I’m calling from thirteen thousand miles away. I know because I counted the fucking miles while on the plane. And if you dare put me on hold I will tell everyone about your butt implants.”
That got his attention.
“Raveena, wow, you sound upset. What’s up, babe?”
“That bastard Randy Kapoor flew m
e coach to India. There was no driver to meet me when I landed at four in the morning. And the five-star hotel? It’s some sort of run-down military club. The toilet doesn’t work. The shower is a drain in the middle of the floor. The bed has probably ruined my posture permanently, and I’ve got mosquitoes binging and purging on my face. You have to do something!”
She could practically hear Griffin rubbing his chin. “Hmm. Well that’s not what Randy promised at all. I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding, doll. Call me back in an hour.”
And then he hung up.
Raveena knew there was no misunderstanding. She’d seen the same type of behavior in some of her Indian relatives, especially in the wealthier ones.
Randy Kapoor was a cheap asshole.
For a while, she waited outside the telephone stand. She was drenched in so much sweat she could have started a salt factory then and there. She hadn’t eaten anything, her stomach was upset, and she wasn’t a big fan of coconut water or fried chickpeas.
The loafers loafing about stared, and she stared back at them angrily. Auntie Kiran had told her to ignore them, but she was in no mood to be docile. If even one of them dared make a smooching noise…
Finally, she became so thirsty she decided to walk down to a small roadside stand and buy a soda. They were out of Coke and Pepsi but an Indian cola called Thums Up was in stock. It was cold, and that was all she cared about. After a few tentative sips she found herself liking it. It was on the sweeter side like Pepsi but had sort of a spicy aftertaste.
Raveena blessed her mother for having the foresight to give her a bundle of rupees left over from numerous trips to India. She was in no mood to search for an Indian ATM.
Finishing her drink, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and returned the empty glass bottle to the clerk. She then emitted a very unladylike belch. No one paid any mind, and her stomach instantly felt better.
Raveena was about to walk away when she noticed a boy and girl sitting next to each other in the shade. Their dusty faces and bare feet betrayed their economic status.
She bought them each a Thums Up and two bags of masala-flavored Ruffles potato chips. In return, the kids rewarded her with big smiles, their teeth surprisingly white and perfect.