In high school, she knew she didn’t need to try her best. Her straight-A’s and Harvard admission wouldn’t matter when she was flown back to her small village in India to marry her mystery man. Still, her parents would not be proud at even the notion of Shya scoring anything less than straight-A’s.
And so, Shya didn’t try. Not for all four years of high school, not even once. By the end of it, her GPA was barely over two-point-oh, and she somehow, miraculously, gained admission to a college in her city where she’d be studying theatre—specifically, theatrical swordplay. Needless to say, her parents weren’t happy. She wasn’t like her father, who pursued knowledge above all, or like her mother, who endeavoured to care for her family. What Shya did know, however, was how to slice internal organs with the use of a two-ring rapier. And in her free time, she painted.
Over dinner, Shya clasped her hands and shut her eyes as her father said their prayers, ate her mother’s savoury, ethnic cooking, and spoke to the both of them in a strange mix of Bengali—her father’s mother tongue—and Hindi—her mother’s. She couldn’t help but feel that while she upheld these traditions, her heritage, she deserved her freedom. She didn’t deserve to be chained to a man she had never met. She wanted streaks in her hair, rebellion in her heart, and her heart on her sleeve. She didn’t understand why her parents kept pushing their scare tactic. America was home to her. She had grown up here, she spoke its language, had the accent, knew its people.
She could tell things were about to change, though. Her parents were sneaking glances over the table, conversation was stilted, and nobody said a word when she shifted her food around on her plate. Usually, with those actions came a swift and harsh “Don’t play with your food!”
Her suspicions were proven true as she helped her mother load the dishwasher.
As Shya was about to slide a plate into its slot, her mother spoke up: “We want you to go back to Amalpur.”
TWO
“We’ve already bought a ticket,” Shya’s mother continued.
Shya wished that the mention of her hometown released a wave of nostalgic butterflies in her stomach. But all it did was trigger dread. She knew when she moved to America that the next time she went back, it would be the last time she ever left.
Shya shook her head. “You should have asked,” she said.
“Would you have agreed to go if we had asked?” her mother asked gently.
Usually, the sound of Hindi was a soothing reminder of who she was, but right then, it was simply a reminder that this was it. Her future husband was awaiting her.
She shook her head again. “No.”
* * *
Three months later, after college had been interrupted by the summer (though she Shya never expected to return and finish her degree since the trip was one way; what a huge amount of money wasted) and she had packed her things, Shya boarded her flight.
It was a long way. Her first flight would be landing in Paris. She wished she’d have time to explore the city before getting on her connecting flight, but alas, her layover was barely three hours long, not nearly long enough to leave the airport, wander, then come back.
Shya leaned back into her seat as the plane took off. She was somewhere in the middle of the cabin. She had gotten a window seat, fortunately, and the woman beside her sat prim and calm, not spreading her legs wide as a man had done on the last flight she had taken (to New York City).
A blonde flight attendant with a Scouse accent came down the aisle with a trolley of drinks. Shya had half a mind to ask for alcohol—after all, it was an Air France flight, and though she was twenty, a year under the American drinking age, she was two years over the French one. The airline was registered in France, so they couldn’t refuse to serve her. But when the flight attendant asked for her drink preference across the woman next to her, Shya simply asked for a Coke.
She sipped it slowly, half the cup still there by the time another flight attendant came by with their meals.
For the most part of her layover, Shya simply sat at her gate with her head pressed to a window. She couldn’t see the city from where she sat. In fact, she couldn’t see much more than Charles de Gaulle’s vast arsenal of parked planes and landing strips.
With a bored sigh, Shya pulled her sketchbook from her carry-on.
The man-beast from her dreams haunted not only her paintings but her drawings, too. Pages upon pages were filled with sketches of him, some coloured, some not, some pencil, some black, smudgy charcoal.
She had kept a pack of art pencils in the bag with her.
For the remaining hour until her flight, Shya sat with her back to the window, her knees drawn up, acting as a makeshift easel on which her sketchbook rested. She drew the man, and despite the lack of colour, her proficient shading reflected the depth of his eyes, the sheen of his hair.
On the flight, Shya didn’t bother with a movie. She simply continued to draw, one page after the next, the face of the same man. Her hand was almost black by the time she landed in West Bengal.
The patrons disembarked, the flight attendants giving Shya a friendly farewell as she dragged her carry-on behind her and clutched the book to her chest. She smiled back, but it was tight and weak. The fact that she was back in India, a country she didn’t remember, was testament to how fruitless her rebellion against her arranged marriage had been. Despite all her running, she still ended up where she had always known she was (but hoped and prayed she wasn’t) going.
She made it through customs with little struggle. She waited impatiently for her luggage to appear on the conveyer belt in baggage claim and when it did, she hauled it onto a trolley, muscles straining, staring enviously across the hall at the people who had been smart enough to carry pocket change to pay the valets to do the heavy lifting for them.
Outside, it wasn’t hard to spot the glaringly white sign sporting her name in thick, black capital letters. Holding the sign was a man who bore brown skin much like that of every other Indian resident. But other than that, he bore no resemblance to everyone else. He reminded Shya of home. His hair was dark, but it was long, tied into a messy bun atop his head. His face was stubbly, but his sideburns were full. His clothing, however, was strangest of all; rather than the shalwars or khakis most men wore, the man with Shya’s sign wore jeans. Rather than a kameez or button down, the man wore a Guns ‘N Roses shirt, its cut sleeves revealing the edge of a tattoo.
Shya approached it, leaning hard on her trolley to push it towards him. Coming to a halt. She stuck out her hand. “I’m Shya,” she told the man in Bengali.
“I’m Berht,” he replied in perfect, if accented, English, and Shya’s eyebrows rose a fraction. This man was turning out to be more of a home comfort than she had expected. “I’m here to take you home.”
Shya nearly corrected him, nearly told him that the States was her home, not West Bengal. Not Amalpur. Holding her tongue, she waited for him to make his next move.
Berht walked around her trolley and pried her hands from its handle. Be began pushing it, glancing over his shoulder once or twice to ensure that she was following.
They stopped in the lot before a station wagon that must have been beautiful once but was now worn with rust, its paint all but chipped away, a thousand dents like craters on its surface. “I have a better car,” Berht told Shya matter-of-factly. “But the drive isn’t worth ruining it over.”
Shya nodded.
Berht popped the tailgate and Shya watched as he swung her bags into the car, seemingly without a struggle.
“I’ll be back,” he told her, Then he left with the trolley, only to return a few minutes later without it.
Shya settled in the car beside him, the seat creaking under her. Berht keyed the ignition, and the engine rumbled to life, the worn seats beneath Shya’s thighs vibrating so hard that she wondered if there would be bruises.
They would be on the road for a couple of days together. The least Shya could do was make conversation to ebb away the awkwardness brou
ght on by sitting in an old, awful car with a perfect stranger.
“So…” she started as they pulled out of the lot. She had been hoping that something would come of the sentence. Nothing did.
“I’m the prophet’s son,” Berht supplied. “The one who made your prophecy when you were young. He’s my grandfather.”
Shya wasn’t about to reveal her skepticism on the art of soothsaying. “Ah,” she replied stiffly. “So do you...share his...ability?”
“Yes. I can’t quite control it yet, though.”
“Oh.”
Shya’s flight had landed in broad daylight, but it was bedtime back in America. She found herself drifting off, not particularly bothered with reacquainting herself with her new home, satisfied from the pizza roll she had had for dinner on her connecting flight.
When she woke again, it was still light out. The stretch of road they were on was busy, the sound of honking horn filling the air, the smell of gasoline filtering despite the closed windows.
“I have food,” Berht offered. “Are you hungry?”
“A bit,” Shya admitted.
Berht leaned back, his fingers finding the edge of a cooler. He opened it and drew out two lumps covered in saran wrap and knocked the lid shut with the back of his hands. He handed one to Shya and began unwrapping the other, one hand on the wheel, the other holding the lump as he peeled back the saran wrap with his teeth.
Shya unwrapped her own to reveal a smushed sandwich. She suspected the insides had tomato and chicken, perhaps even cheese, though that apparently wasn’t too common here. She looked over at her driver and smiled gratefully, but he was more concentrated on watching the road.
Shya bit into her lunch.
* * *
The next few hours passed in silence.
It was startling, how different her new home was to her old one. Where America was sleek and modern with high, glass buildings and brick-and-wood homes, India was a terrain of cement. Where America had pines and oaks, India had palm trees. If Shya was lucky, she’d spot a Lamborghini streaking past her on the road. She could never hope to find such a luxury here. America’s air was not clean by any means, but still, she couldn’t help but miss the sharp, cold, fresh air that stung her nose in the winters. It was far better than the hot, bitter smell of gasoline and smog. Even Berht’s car freshener did little to mask the odor.
Eventually, the busy road faded into an empty one, and the sun sank behind the horizon, giving way to a crescent moon.
“What time is it?” Shya asked, peering up through the windshield. It was July; there should be more daylight than what they had just gotten. Then again, she had fallen asleep earlier. There was no knowing how much time she had lost then. Plus, she was on the other side of the world. It wasn’t summer, here.
Berht consulted his watch. “Just after seven,” he informed. “We can stop for the night, if you like.”
“Oh.” Shya flushed. “I don’t have any money on me or anything so—”
“It’s on me,” Berht assured.
Shya nodded. “Thank you.”
In the next city, they found a hotel cheap enough to pay for with Berht’s pocket money. The room they ended up with had two double beds and Shyla was thankful. She had a feeling that she would be getting to know the man in her following years—days, to be honest—but she wasn’t quite comfortable with sharing a bed with him.
Shya had worried she’d have trouble drifting off (especially with the thin, lumpy mattress of her bed), but sleep came far easier than she had suspected. Apparently, jet lag was having mercy on her.
The following morning, she was awake before Berht was. She showered and changed, emerging from the bathroom just as Berht sat up and wiped the sleep from his eyes.
“Morning,” she greeted.
He offered a soft smile in return before swinging his legs off the bed.
They were out the door in half an hour, in the car, and back on the road.
Shya rested her head on the window.
* * *
Her head snapped up the moment she heard it: the familiar opening bars of Toxic, the violent strings, the blunt melody, the sexy drawl of Britney Spears’ voice. Shya’s eyebrows shot up, and she turned her head to Berht who, though he was looking straight at the door, was sporting a small smirk.
“This song…” Shya began, “is amazing.”
“Isn’t it?” Berht replied excitedly. It was the most emotion she had seen from him since she had met him the day before. “Nobody else I know even knows this song.”
Berht had changed into an AC/DC shirt that morning. It was clear to Shya that he was a Western music man.
“Is it a CD?” Shyla questioned.
“Cassette.” He paused. “My other car can do CDs.”
Softly at first, Shya began to sing. Then, Berht cranked up the volume and joined in, glimpsing at Shya through the corner of his eye as they sang loudly and badly in tandem.
After a few songs, their singing faded into a Spears-filled silence as they absently nodded their heads to the beat.
“I don’t remember this place,” Shya said eventually. “I’m from here, my parents met here but I don’t remember it at all.”
Berht said nothing, only gave her an acknowledging glance.
“Their marriage is...weird,” Shya continued. “They shouldn’t go together but they do, y’know? My dad is all about logic. And science. And my mom is...superstitious, I guess.” She chuckled. “You know, my mom puts prayer beads in the walls? She says it’ll ward off evil or whatever. And she watches daytime TV mediums. She likes the séances and stuff.”
Berht laughed quietly. “Science seems so far away, sometimes. Not that things aren’t getting more and more advanced by the day. But when I was a kid, I’d have to travel for ages to get to...modern civilisation. A TV, a telephone—we didn’t have them. It’s still like that in Amalpur.” He spared her a glance out of the corner of his eye. “We’re not rich. It’s not like big-city America. The people are farmers. We eat what we grow.”
“I was kind of expecting that,” Shya confessed. Another mile of silence passed until she spoke up again: “So who exactly am I getting married to?”
Berht showed no sign of having heard her save for a small twitch at the corner of his mouth. “I’m getting kinda tired of Britney Spears,” he said. Shya figured he meant it to sound offhanded, but even she could sense the tightness in his voice.
She let the subject slide.
THREE
As the second day of their drive progressed, the crappy pop music played softly in the background.
Shya thought about futility. She didn’t remember life before America. Now she was twenty. She had gone to elementary in America, high school in America, and college in America. She could have gotten a job and, given the time, could have found love on her own terms.
Her attempts at rebellion seemed pointless and childish in hindsight. She’d done poorly in school for no other reason than to feel like she was in control. Back then, it had been like throwing up one middle finger to the future and the other at her parents. Even if she had done incredibly well, she still would have, in the end, been torn away from that life. Nothing short of running away from home could have saved Shya from where she was going. A sudden sadness struck her. Should she have run away? She wouldn’t have lasted very long. She had lived with her parents her whole life. She relied on them. Perhaps if she had had a job, had saved enough money to move far, far away from destiny’s greedy hands, she would have gotten away. But would it have been worth it to lose everything if only to win back her freedom? Shya didn’t have an answer.
Still, she couldn’t help but feel so, so pointless. Her future husband, her parents, the decision their families had made before she even had the ability to think for herself, made her feel as though she was worth nothing. That no matter what she was able to achieve for herself, all she was was property, a mean to fulfil one end of a deal.
She had enforced the idea in
her own mind, too. She hadn’t made the most of what she had. She’d barely passed school, barely made it into college, hadn’t done anything more than art that she really, truly enjoyed. But then, she felt like making the most of what she had would be accepting what was coming to her, taking the injustice of it in stride as though it wasn’t injustice at all.
And yet, here she was, taking it in stride as though it wasn’t injustice at all. Exactly what she swore to herself she wouldn’t do.
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