Spice and Secrets

by Suleikha Snyder

  He looked terrible. Hair askew as though he’d raked his fingers through it. Eyes bloodshot and unfocused. Shirt unbuttoned, revealing his suntanned English chest. He looked downright unhinged—and unbearably handsome. “Sunita? What are you doing here?”

  Rather than answer that question she asked one of her own. “Davey…are you okay? Kya hua? What is wrong?”

  “It’s not me,” he said absently, very nearly looking through her instead of directly at her. “It’s George.”

  George. The mysterious, maddening George of whom he’d refused to speak. Her heart seized, and jealousy threaded through her like she was the eye of a needle. Somehow, she drew it tight and knotted it. Shaw was in distress. His taklif, his parishaan, mattered more than her insecurity.

  “George?” she repeated, backing him into the flat, taking his cold hands into hers as the door drifted shut. “What is happening to George, Davey? Tell me.”

  “She’s in labor.” Davey’s response couldn’t have surprised her more if he’d said, “George is a winged serpent attacking Tokyo.”

  She? George was a woman? Her shock flared bright before she tucked it aside, making soothing noises and prompting him with leading questions. “She’s in labor? When did it start?” Her interviewing skills had never been used with such gentle precision. “Where is she? London main?”

  Slowly, a trickle of words became a flood. Georgie, Georgina, was his dearest friend, an “insufferable brat of a girl”, and she’d spent the last few months of her pregnancy assigned to strict bedrest. “The baby’s coming, Sunita, and Tegan said something was wrong. They were taking Georgie into surgery…but they wouldn’t tell Tegan too much more. Partners aren’t wives, and all that rot.” Again and again his hands gripped his hair, his skull—his strong, capable fingers at a loss. “Georgie needs me. She’s a mess without me, you know? I…I ought to go, oughtn’t I?” he murmured, staring vacantly toward the open laptop on the end table. “I was searching flights when you knocked.”

  She grasped his chin, forcing his gaze back to her, catching and holding those beautiful blue eyes. “No, you ought not go,” she stressed. “You’d be in midair if and when word came from London, na? Just sit here. Hum saath saath intezar karega. We will wait together.”

  “You’d do that? For me?” Shaw’s senses were returning to him, a clarity filtering into his expression and a tightness coming to the fingers that had grasped her shoulders for anchoring. “Even though you don’t trust me?”

  I am afraid. I don’t trust. I don’t take chances. Hadn’t she told Priya all those things? And were they not true? Sunny shook her head. “It’s not you I don’t trust, Davey. Main darpok hoon. I’m a coward,” she confessed.

  “That’s ridiculous.” Shaw’s eyebrows arched in that way that maddened and aroused her in turns. “You’re the bravest woman I know. Sunita, you’ve got balls of solid steel.”

  “No, I don’t.” She sighed and laughed at all once, leaning her forehead against his and breathing him in. “You know I was alone in the operation theater when I labored with Jai? I cried the whole time. I begged. The nurses wouldn’t give me anything for the pain, because I was young and strong…and because they thought I was a junkie. Because Sam was in a bathroom down the hall, reeking of ganja and cutting lines of cocaine on the sink.” She hadn’t thought about it in years, choosing to focus only on the end result…holding Jai in her arms and laughing at his little monkey face, all of the agony forgotten. “I can’t remember ever being so scared. But last week? When you left me? I almost felt it again. Nahin, Shaw, I’m not brave at all.”

  “Bollocks.” His lips brushed against her cheek, her chin, her jaw. Not so much kisses as they were tiny forgivenesses. “You’re strong, Sunny. You’re being strong for me right now…and I thank you for it.”

  “Don’t thank me yet, Davey.” She pulled back just enough so that she could take his hand and hold it tight. “We’ve got some time, na? Hours? You might still hate me in the end.”

  He curled his fingers around hers, his grip warm and solid. Real. Like he had no plans to let her go. “Doubtful, Rani Sahiba.” He chuckled wryly. “Because I didn’t even hate you in the beginning.”

  You could’ve knocked Davey over with the proverbial feather when Sunita showed up on his doorstep. It was the last thing he’d expected…and the very first thing he needed. So, now, he clung to her like a buoy in a storm-tossed sea, holding her hands in a death grip and prompting her for more vaguely appalling stories of her youthful courage. Holding her served two purposes: keeping him from frantically dialing Tegan on his mobile…and preventing him from tearing off to punch Sam Khanna in the mouth. To think, he’d actually given the man the benefit of the doubt. Sunny’s matter-of-fact recounting of his abominable behavior certainly put a different, much more grim, cast on what their lives together had truly been like.

  “You are the one who advised me to put my anger to rest, Shaw-saab. And now you want to thrash him?” Her laugh…God, how he’d missed it. Just as he’d missed her hair falling around him in a tangled cloud and her lipstick staining his collar as she pressed her lips to his throat. “You can’t fight the world,” she sighed.

  “Can’t I?” Sheer terror was something he couldn’t spar with. Knowing George was across the ocean…helpless, scared for her life and her baby’s life…no amount of fisticuffs would change any of it. But he could certainly throttle Sam for his lack of honor…and war with Sunny for her heart. “Why’d you come round, Rani Sahiba? Why are you here?”

  “Because Jai-ne zabardast kiya. He blackmailed me.” He felt the upturn of her lips against his skin, and her voice was filled with a combination of pride and exasperation. “He told me to come say sorry or he would move out. My son…the extortionist.”

  “Sounds like my kind of fellow.” He suspected George’s little one—a girl, she and Tegan had told him a few weeks back—would be equally precocious once she made her highly anticipated debut. A drama queen already, that one. Just like her mum. “How do you do it?” he marveled softly. “All of you. Bringing children into the world and turning them into functional little humans? It’s a bloody miracle…and, honestly, Sunita, I don’t blame you for not wanting Jai anywhere near me. You were just doing what any good mother would do. He deserves to be cared for and protected, and you really don’t know me at all. Not yet.”

  “Nahin, Davey…you mistook me. I mistook me,” she admitted. “Jai doesn’t need protecting from you. I know enough to know that you are a good man. The best man. I was only protecting myself. Because introducing my son to you would make our affair too serious.” He knew words like affair and proposal had different meanings in India than they did in the rest of the world…but that didn’t make the term sting any less. As if she sensed that, she stroked the side of his fist with her thumb. “I have not been serious with a man in fourteen years, Shaw. It can’t change in five minutes, na? But that doesn’t mean I won’t change. Samjhe?”

  Yes. He did understand. Perhaps even more clearly than Sunita herself did. And—and his introspection was cut short by the buzzing of his mobile. It vibrated like a livewire on the glass-topped coffee table. His phone had become his enemy these past few days, and it had never inspired more dread than in this moment. Rose had rung mere hours ago. Surely that wasn’t enough time for a proper surgery…which meant it had gone wrong, which meant—

  “It’s okay. Pick it up.” He didn’t realize he was still gawking until Sunny patted his arm. “Answer it,” she urged. When he was slow to follow, she summarily plucked the mobile from the table and handed it to him. “You need to know, Davey, not to wonder.”

  The minute the line engaged, all he heard was tears. Steady, perpetually composed Tegan in uncharacteristic hysterics. The cell almost fell from his nerveless fingers, but somehow he held on. “For God’s sake, Teags. What is it? Is she all right?” The connection was terrible. Static-laden. He could barely make her out. “Speak up!”

  She said something about the
operation. Pain. Blood. Some stupid sod of a male nurse not letting her in the room at first. And then “Davin…Davin, she’s fine,” finally burst out amidst the cacophony. “They’re both fine and beautiful and alive.”

  Thank bloody God. Yes. That was all he heard. All he needed to. The breath he’d been holding released itself in a not entirely unexpected, but rather unmanly, flood of tears. “Christ. Oh, Christ.” He wasn’t a particularly religious sort, but suddenly he and Him were on intimate terms. “Jesus. God.”

  “Jai Sri Krishna,” Sunita added, eyes bright with emotion. She pried the cellular from his hand, murmured well wishes and a goodbye to Tegan and put it aside, all while he was still flailing about in relief-ridden epiphany…and then she took him in her arms and held him close.

  Her embrace was both the storm and the respite from it. It was what he’d adored about her from the outset: her passion. And he clung to her with a tenacity that surprised him only because he’d been fool enough, once before, to let her go. George and her baby were alive…and, by God, so was he. He wouldn’t waste another moment on principles that wouldn’t hold his hand or kiss his brow.

  “Sunita,” he sighed, turning the few, precious millimeters to her lips and then taking them in a fierce kiss. “Darling, I love you,” he whispered against her mouth. “I fell in love with you the day we met.”

  “I know, you angrezi ulloo. That is why I’m here.” She kissed him back. Over and over and over, until the damp of catharsis evaporated in the scorching Mumbai heat…and then she burned him in the most beautiful of ways, climbing into his lap, bracketing him between her glorious thighs and enclosing them both in the curtain of her untamed hair. “I love you, too,” she said, as though it were a given.

  Perhaps it was. The first thing she’d freely given in years. It wasn’t trust—not quite yet—but it would more than suffice in the meantime. It was hope.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  He’d lost count of how many times he’d called Priya. On and on the mobile seemed to ring, and with each unanswered call, each ignored message, his feelings of betrayal turned increasingly into feelings of helplessness. Him. Rahul fucking Anand. Purveyor of critically acclaimed hit films. He couldn’t produce results in his own life. He couldn’t cast himself in the role of lover, of father. How was that fair?

  He blamed Priya for the first twenty-four hours after the taping, raging at her and calling her all sorts of unsavory names. After the night he’d found her dumping drinks on Nina, he’d been reduced to trading woes with Shaw over a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue and trying in vain not to cry like a character in a melodrama. Even when he was back in his ungodly bungalow, alone and sober, the sense of failure, of misery, followed him like a cloud. Further compounding his situation, Shaw rang to let him know that he and Sunny had patched up…and that the re-shoot for his episode of Sunny Days would be delayed.

  “Why can’t Pree do the taping next week?” He frowned at his mobile as if it, not Davey, was the source of consternation.

  “She’s leaving the city, mate.” What? At his sharp intake of breath, Shaw cursed, the words loud and emphatic over the phone line. “I’m sorry. I thought you knew. She’s off to Calcutta until she has to report on-set for Khoon.”

  No, he hadn’t known. Pile that on the ever-increasing heap of shit no one thought he ought to be made aware of. “When?” He managed to grind out the words with a mortar and pestle. “Do you know when she’s leaving?”

  There was a rustling. And then Shaw calling the question across the room, complete with bedroom voice and endearments. Oh, beautiful. Rahul sincerely hoped he wasn’t having a conversation with a naked man. After a moment, the man in question returned to the call. Apologetic. Ideally wearing trousers. “I’m afraid the flight’s tonight,” he sighed. “I’m sorry. This whole thing’s just been a right mess, hasn’t it?”

  “No. Because it’s not over.” Rahul hung up without further ado—presumably Shaw wouldn’t feel too slighted; particularly if he was as naked as a newborn and in the proximity of his lady—and immediately hit the first number on his speed dial. The only number that had ever mattered to him. Please answer this time. He had never been a seer or a sage, but suddenly, he prayed for his mental powers to spider out from the cellular network to her beautiful brain. Pick up, Pree. And, for God’s sake, don’t leave me again.

  After what seemed an eon, when he expected her voicemail to click on, his prayer was fulfilled. The first half, at any rate. “Rahul?” No “hi”. No “hello”. Just his name. In exactly the sigh she’d caressed him with in the erotic darkness of his bedroom.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Desperation and vehemence combined for a question far ruder than he’d intended.

  “Kolkata.” There was no such emotion in her reply. This was the ice maiden she’d shown him in Premnagar. Encased in the rustling and jostling of someone on the move. “I have to clean up a mess. Shonali will have questions, and Baba owes me so many answers.”

  Shona. Just thinking of her was like incurring a hundred scrapes and having each kissed into healing. “Aur main?” He could scarcely breathe. “Aren’t I owed those answers, too, Priya? And your time, at least?”

  “I gave you too much already, Rahul.” She would not bend for him; she would not break. “That was my biggest mistake…and my biggest blessing. But I have to live with it. Even if it becomes a court case. What’s done is done, na?”

  “You don’t have to live with it alone, Priya. Not anymore.” If he was begging, so be it. Pride served no one in the eleventh hour, na? “You don’t have to fear me, to mistrust me. If this goes to the courts, it will not be because I pushed it there. I don’t want to take anything from you, Pree. I just want to give. Let me fix this. Let me marry you. Let me be Shona’s papa.”

  “Let you? Oh, God. I wish I could let you do a thousand things.” She made a strangled noise that cut at him like a blade. Half laugh, half cry. Priya’s sounds of grief said in syllables what so many others took entire speeches to impart. “Itne asaan nahin, Rahul Anand. It’s not so easy as that. It’s not in my power, and it’s not in yours. Your magic phone calls cannot solve this. Life is not a film. You can’t direct or write your happy ending. You cannot produce a superhit. Not this time.”

  The line went dead, leaving him with silence…and something far more powerful. Resolve.

  You can’t direct or write your happy ending?

  Bullshit.

  She left for the airport with just her handbag and one rolling case, stifling the impulse to pack up her entire life and put the whole of Bombay in the hired car’s rearview mirror. She would be back. This wasn’t forever. Her dreams weren’t over. She was going to something, not running away, and very soon she would be holding Shona tight in her arms.

  These were the things Priya told herself as the driver pulled into the throng of evening traffic. Auto horns blared merrily, and the few bicycle rickshaws interspersed with the cars seemed to be made entirely of bells. Mumbai was always in motion. Though the distance was barely a blink, she’d given herself an extra hour to make the trip from her flat to the domestic terminal in Santacruz…and to think over her regrets.

  Rahul was not among them. To regret him was to regret Shona, and that was unthinkable. But as she gazed out the window at the hustle and bustle, she wanted to erase a dozen smaller things. Those stupid, frantic moments of weakness in Bihar. Staying involved in Khoon even after Rahul stole the film. Every lie of omission. Every unanswered call. Let me marry you. Let me be Shona’s papa.

  She shuddered, fingers instinctively closing around the mobile phone peeking out of the top of her bag. Rahul thought it was all so simple, so easy. That he could swoop in and rewrite her life just like he’d rewritten the Khoon dialogues…adding himself into all the family photos, making up for every birthday he wasn’t there to celebrate and pretending that a gulf of years hadn’t turned them into two completely different people. Oh, how she wished that was possible. She desperately wan
ted to believe it all could be fixed with a snap of fingers.

  But how could she again reach for Rahul and accept his brazen promises, when she’d spent half her life struggling to think only of others? How could she again indulge herself when her weakness, her kamzori, had only caused her family pain? She was no longer the silly girl who’d first learned of love and making love in the shelter of Rahul’s arms. She was a woman grown, and the memories of the few joyous nights they’d spent together in Mumbai would have to be enough to sustain her. She could not dare hope for more, even if her soul shouted out for it.

  After all, she was an item girl now, not a heroine. Item girls never had their own story, their own happily ever after. In every film, they only had one hit song.

  “Madam, airline?” The driver craned his neck to look at her, all the while forging forward in the unsteady sea of vehicles. He didn’t really need to know what she was flying. Departures was departures, na? But perhaps he thought she was famous and wanted the excuse to try and place her face.

  “JetLite,” she said, thanking her stars that none of her new films were ready to be played in the cinema halls. For just a few months more, the general public would not be able to pick her out of a crowd. She was a one-film wonder, and that one film had been in another lifetime, a different skin.

  The remainder of the drive passed in a blur, and soon she was making her way into Terminal One. Brightly lit, metallic and shining, it saw thousands of travelers each day. Security was strict, allowing only ticketed passengers beyond the door…not that it stopped films from crafting those crazy, romantic scenes of the hero running through stalled rush-hour traffic, hopping over parked cars and stealing a motorcycle in order to get to the airport and proclaim his love.

  In reality, the hero would be stopped, all those paagal efforts for naught. He’d get arrested for his trouble, maybe even shot on sight. The hero…her hero, her traitorous heart corrected. Rahul could not come for her, jumping over barriers and pounding on glass and melodramatically shouting her name as she passed through the metal detectors. She’d imagined the scenario so many times when she first left Bombay, glancing back over her shoulder, praying that he would stop her…hoping he might make some big, grand gesture that proved he would love her and their baby long after the credits rolled. How naïve she’d been to think that life really worked in such ways, how stupid and easily led. Because even when heroes did come for you, happiness could not always follow. The woman leaving tonight had learned her lesson; she was not so full of illusions or so full of hope.