A Distant Heart

by Sonali Dev

  “Baby’s not just here to say bye-bye, Bholaji,” Rahul said, his tone weirdly light and excited, as though by running past him she had let something loose inside him too.

  Bhola didn’t look happy, but before he could say more, Rahul dragged Kimi out the gate, letting Bhola’s protestations fall on deaf ears. As they stepped out onto the street, the street took a dive down a slope. She stumbled and clutched Rahul’s hand tighter.

  He stopped and let her steady herself. This was her home—she had lived here all her life, and she had forgotten that stepping out of the gate led to a street that resembled a slide and that it was lined on both sides by stone walls overflowing with bougainvillea.

  She looked around her, taking it all in, and laughter bubbled out of her. It was beautiful, and she would never forget again.

  Rahul let her go and straddled something that looked an awful lot like something the gang in Dhoom had driven. “Is that a motorcycle?” she asked incredulously.

  He beamed—and Rahul never beamed these days. “Let me introduce you. Kimi, this is Tina. Tina, meet Kimi. And she’s a Bullet. She doesn’t like to be called a—” He lowered his voice to a whisper in Kimi’s ear. “Motorcycle.”

  That made her laugh even more, which made him beam even more. He touched Tina almost carefully, as though he were petting a precious but temperamental pet, and handed Kimi a helmet.

  “What about you?” she asked, but she took it and put it on her head.

  “There’s only one and it’s your first time, so you get it.”

  “You’re protecting my virginity, how gallant!” she said, and his beaming smile tipped over into a laugh. “Now I know why they call a condom a helmet.”

  He snapped the clasp under her chin, his fingers against her skin making gooseflesh skitter down her arms. “Your first ride and you’re already making phallic biker jokes. I’m impressed.” Best part was he looked impressed, and she already felt like she was flying on a motorcycle—or rather, on Tina!

  Of course she was wrong. Because flying down the street on Tina was like nothing she could have imagined. For one, they started out on a slope. Which basically meant that no matter how gingerly she placed her hands on his shoulders (she had no idea why she suddenly felt shy straddling the seat behind him), gravity made it impossible not to press down hard on them. And hello-wow! Was this how all shoulders felt beneath your hands? Because omergadabove! His were firm and undulating and filled her hands in a way she felt everywhere.

  Then he started the bike, and as he twisted around those shoulder muscles did even more bulgy business under her palms, sending an unholy buzz zinging through her.

  “Ready?” he asked, and as soon as she nodded, they started moving. Which meant the bike went from a twenty-degree incline to a sixty-degree incline, and every curve of her body went flush with his. The V of her legs clamped around the V of his legs, her nether regions settled into his butt, and her entire front basically splattered against his back like a jacket.

  Her physical being that had orbited him for so long, too afraid to touch, in one instant was transposed on his, like a second skin. And it was so much sensation, despite the sum total of inertia and gravity acting on her near-horizontal body, she wiggled back, using those shoulders of his to find her balance, to reclaim her senses. But all those novels she’d read, all those things that were supposed to warm between your legs and tingle across your breasts, they weren’t an exaggeration. She was feeling every one of those things pulsing inside her.

  What a stroke of luck that he couldn’t see her face, that they couldn’t talk, that she didn’t have to let him go.

  Within minutes the steep slope was gone and the street flattened out. Reluctantly, she put just a hair of distance between them. Thankfully, momentum didn’t make it easy to pull away. When she could think again over all those buzzing body parts, she realized that the ocean was at most a minute from her home and it had been more than a few minutes. They weren’t headed for the Carter Road beach.

  She leaned into him again. Doing it consciously was even better than being accidentally slammed into him (which, she wouldn’t lie, was rather amazing too). Those beating parts warmed again, but this time they didn’t embarrass her. He slowed, and she automatically reached up and shouted into his ear, “I thought we were going to the beach.”

  She had no idea how he heard her but he did. Because he leaned back into her and said, “We are.”

  She felt something then, something she had only ever felt with Rahul. It had taken her all these years to be able to name it. It was trust. For whatever reason, she had never once in her life doubted that she would get what she needed from him. Not always what she wanted, but what she really needed. It was why she was able to tell him to leave, to never darken her door again. It was why she could push him away and pull him to her whenever the fancy struck, because she trusted that he would always come back, and as long as he was there, everything always turned out okay.

  She settled into him. Feeling not just warm between her legs but warm in her heart. Feeling oddly powerful with the purring bike beneath her. Feeling those shoulders and absorbing every dip and flex that commanded motion and surrendered to it. Somehow it all gathered together inside her like a force, like harmony, like movement that took her out of herself and placed her into herself all at once. She could ride like this for hours, being speed, being an amalgam of particles flying in the wind. Flying with a force that righted everything as though it had never been wrong.

  “Where are we?” she asked, when they slowed to a stop after what had to have been an hour but felt like a heartbeat.

  “You feeling okay?” he asked, twisting around.

  She nodded and let him examine her with eyes she couldn’t see because of the reflective Ray-Bans she had given him for his twenty-first birthday. She had sent them to him from London, which was probably why he had accepted them, because it was too much of a bother to send them back. The fact that he actually wore them made her already too-full heart wobble like a water-filled balloon. She struggled between removing them so she could see his eyes and leaving them on his face because she loved that he was wearing them so much.

  His thick hair was slicked back from the ride, making him look like a cross between a film star on the red carpet and a mobster out on a hit. But he was wearing his uniform with golden stars shining on his epaulets. It was the oddest combination and it reflected everything she was feeling perfectly.

  As they made their way down the lane toward the beach, he reached into his pocket and pulled out something. Even without seeing his eyes her heart sped up. It was a face mask. One of those white fabric ones that hooked over your ears.

  Wordlessly, she took it from him, realizing suddenly that she was out in the open with people. It was terrifying, but she only let it be for a moment. Her body was supposedly doing its job with this new drug, so Rahul was right, she had to trust it.

  She tucked the mask into the pocket of her jeans. “Do you carry it around just in case you run into a sick girl?”

  “I carry it around in case my friend needs it.” He took her hand as they came upon the ocean, which was in full-frothing churn. There was barely a soul around. How far out had he driven? The tide was coming in. She knew it well. She had watched it from her window almost every day of her life. Up close the swelling was different. More violent yet still somehow smaller in scale.

  They walked, her ponytail flapping in the wind and slapping her cheeks. They talked, their words soaking up the sunshine and dancing in the ocean breeze.

  He told her about the cases he was working on.

  He was beautiful when he talked about his work. His eyes got a little darker, his mouth just a little more animated, the timbre of his voice just a little deeper. She was entirely lost in him when suddenly he stopped and pointed at the ocean. She turned away from him and faced it. The sky and sea had gone a brilliant pink, like the bougainvillea that spilled from the walls around her home seen through the yello
w lenses of her childhood sunglasses. A sunrise and a sunset were the only time you could stare the sun in the face as though it were nothing more powerful than a vibrantly painted ball.

  It was impossible to look away. They stood there rooted, fingers interlaced, as it descended before their eyes from its brilliant perch and sank smoothly into the fast-darkening water.

  “Thanks,” she said when only an orange cap remained at the edge of a pink tinged ocean.

  “For?”

  “For forcing me to come out.”

  He didn’t answer, just sank down into the sand taking her with him.

  After they had stared at the darkening waves for a while longer, he removed the Ray-Bans and turned to her again. “I’m sorry.”

  “For?”

  “For what I said about you not leaving home being cowardly. That’s not true.”

  “It was true. I’m glad you shook me out of my cowardice.” And then quickly, before she lost her nerve, “I got into a university in America.”

  His entire body went still. “America?”

  “I’ve always wanted to be a journalist, remember?” She wrapped her arms around her knees and pressed her cheek against them, watching him.

  His eyes crinkled with amusement.

  “What?” she asked.

  “So you went straight from not wanting to come to the beach with me to applying to a college in America?”

  “The point is that I did come to the beach with you. And now you have to go with me to Columbia.” But she was smiling, so he knew she wasn’t serious. He wouldn’t leave his job if someone held a gun to his head. Well, someone did all the time and still he didn’t. “And if you can’t, will you at least help me talk to Papa?”

  Rahul laughed. “Why would he listen to me?”

  “Because, haven’t you noticed, he listens to you about me. You’re the only one he listens to, because he knows.”

  He didn’t ask what it was exactly that Papa knew. It was the thing she wasn’t allowed to mention no matter how much the setting sun made her want to mention it. Because she knew he wasn’t ready to admit he felt that way too. But it kept growing bigger and bigger inside her and harder and harder to hold in.

  “I don’t think he’ll let you go—your mother most certainly won’t. But I’ll try to convince him only on one condition—you have to come back.”

  It wasn’t an admission exactly, but she would take it.

  She sat up. “Of course I’ll come back. You’re here, Rahul.” She leaned in and gave him a kiss on his cheek.

  He didn’t stiffen, so she put her head on his shoulder and he wrapped his arm around her. Naturally, it wasn’t to hold on to her, it was to pull her away. “Come on, college girl, time to get home before they send out a search party.”

  But when she didn’t move he stayed there with his arm around her, watching the waves until she was ready to go back.

  27

  Kirit

  Present day

  Kirit had spent half the day fielding questions from the press about Asif Khan’s escape. How had the press even found out? When Kirit discovered who had leaked the story, he was going to make sure that the person never worked again.

  As usual Rahul was taking his duty seriously. So much so that he wouldn’t tell Kirit where he was and Kirit hated that he had to put his trust in Rahul so completely when he no longer had any control over his actions. But it was his only choice right now and so he refused to waste anger on it.

  There was too much to be managed. The press was demanding someone’s head on a stake. Given how high profile the Asif Khan capture had been a few months ago, the public would only be soothed by sound bites from their “Hero Cop.” Especially since the villain he had defeated had not only risen from a coma but also had already been responsible for killing three innocent people.

  Thanks to the media, gory pictures of the Colaba Killings, as they had already nicknamed the tragedy, had been witnessed by every child in Mumbai. No wonder it had become so hard to make a hit movie these days. Who cared about fictional drama and mayhem when real life in all its deranged glory played perpetually on TV screens.

  The car ground to a halt as soon as they turned into the steep lane that led up to his home. The driver turned around and looked at him for instructions. Press vans lined the road and the crush of bodies mobbing his gate made it impossible to get near it. What more did they want? He’d recorded his statement and had it distributed to all the major TV channels.

  “Sit on the horn,” he told the driver, and the driver went for it. Even so, the hundred-foot distance took them half an hour.

  As soon as Kirit walked into his empty house, his peon took his briefcase from him and his cook handed him a cup of tea. And then all the servants discreetly disappeared. He walked through the house. Not a sound. He had never thought he’d miss the tinkling of the prayer bells. He peeped into Kimi’s room on his way to his office. It was bright now. She had painted the entire room a turquoise blue and had the wall between the sitting room and the bed area removed. It was one big room now with bright yellow and black furniture with a million cushions in every shade of yellow strewn across the couch and bed. “No white and no plastic.” Those had been her instructions to the designer. She had even covered the white marble floor with a black rug with huge turquoise-and-yellow flowers she called “daisies on steroids.”

  He smiled for the first time that day. His Kimaya had always known exactly what she wanted.

  He took himself to his study, locked himself in, and dialed.

  “Fame’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it, Karan Kumar?” Asif Khan said by way of greeting. “When was the last time you were mobbed by the press outside your house?”

  “You killed three innocent people, you bastard,” Kirit said into the phone, turning on the three TVs in the room like an idiot-box-addicted child.

  Even as he said it he knew how idiotic he was being. Asif was a gangster who killed just to spread terror and to get thrills out of it. The lives of three people meant nothing in his deranged head.

  “You are hilarious, Kirit!” Asif said predictably breaking into villainous laughter so stereotypical it couldn’t possibly be real life. “I’m going to miss you so much. I mean, you had an innocent person killed to get your precious daughter a heart and now you’re pretending to have the sobs for some dead people on the road?”

  That laughter was sick. Like a really bad film. Like the most horrible nightmare. Kirit didn’t have nightmares. Kirit slept soundly every night. Jennifer Joshi’s death was not on his hands. It was on this bastard’s hands alone. Kirit’s conscience was clear.

  “Come now, admit it. You danced, didn’t you? When you found out that dead woman was not your daughter? You can tell me. We’re practically friends now, we understand each other so well. You got a boner, didn’t you, when you realized she was someone else’s dead daughter. Tell me, which temple did you go to and feed beggars?”

  He couldn’t let him get to him this way. He was Kirit Patil. The longest-serving chief minister of the richest state in India. Calm, he was always calm and in control. That’s why people elected him. Because this kind of shit that intimidated other politicians didn’t touch him.

  On all three TV screens uniformed policemen pulled a girl’s body on a stretcher out of an ambulance. Kirit knew the girl on the stretcher wasn’t Kimi. But he couldn’t stop seeing her face on the girl’s corpse.

  “What, no words from the glib minister today? Maybe I need to call Nikita Sinha. Does she know it was you who sent her to America to cheat the good doctor? No, of course she doesn’t. If she did, the police would know too. Oh, wait. Maybe that’s the way to go. I’ll tell Nikita Sinha and Jen Joshi’s husband who did that to them. They’ll report it. And then not only will the public know, your daughter will know too. Because all I want is for her to know. Actually, all I want is for her to be dead. But only after she knows how her daddy cut out someone’s heart for her.”

  Kirit refused to r
eact. He turned off the television sets and tossed the remote control across the table. He wasn’t the one who had cut out Jennifer Joshi’s heart. Asif Khan had done that.

  “Okay, enough silent games, Kirit. I know you’re listening. I can hear your breathing. It stinks of guilt. Be a man and at least own what you did. Stop whimpering. It’s making me sick. Tell me where your daughter is and maybe I won’t kill her. Mother promise.” His uncouth voice scraped against Kirit’s spine, and he’d had enough.

  “First, you’re the one whimpering and making me sick. And second, I’ll find you before you find her. And that’s the real promise. Not one of your empty threats.”

  He shouldn’t have let his anger show because the bastard just sounded more amused. “I’m curious—how did you pull off that entire thing with Nikita Sinha without her knowing it was you?”

  “Because I use my brain.”

  “Right. Your grand brain. But it doesn’t compensate for brawn, does it? When you can’t even control a tiny woman enough to stop her from double crossing you. I’ve heard your wife doesn’t even want you anymore. She doesn’t think your brain isn’t big enough, does she?”

  “Don’t you get tired of your own filth, Asif? It’s got to be tiring to be you.”

  “Not really. It’s great to be king.”

  This time Kirit laughed.

  “Laugh at this, chutiya: How’s your day dealing with the presswa-las been?”

  Of course. Asif was the one who had leaked the news of his own escape to the press to make life miserable for Kirit. This meant he was desperate and entirely unhinged. Not a great combination.

  “You’re on TV right now, by the way. You’re so boring on camera. Are you sure you were a superstar? You look like someone’s old tired grandfather. No wonder the press is calling for that Hero Cop of theirs. Now, he’s one-hundred-percent superstar hot. Where is he anyway?”

  Something must have changed in Kirit’s silence because Asif’s tone got all alert. “I was going to wait until I found your princess and use her to bring the cop to me. Since he seems to enjoy rescuing distressed damsels. But maybe I’ll get him out of the way first.”