by Sonali Dev
To make things worse, her sheer slip strained against the heavy globes of her braless breasts and the powerful flash turned her nipples into dark darts poking through the thin fabric. The filmy hem of her slip had ridden up, exposing her midriff and throwing into stark relief everything from her bare ribs to the hipbones jutting out of her low-slung shorts. She looked like a complete lunatic trying to put some sort of dark, erotic end to her life.
It looked like a bloody poster for mental illness.
Anger so violent exploded in Ria’s chest, she wanted to scream into his face and shred the pictures until the abomination on them disappeared into nothingness. Instead she didn’t let her tone so much as falter. “They’re completely out of context, Big. Plus, they’re clearly Photoshopped.”
He looked utterly unconvinced and the sympathy that flashed in his eyes made her control stretch at its seams. He sat down next to her, his posture commiserating. “Talk to me,” his face said. “I can help you.”
“Oh for God’s sake, DJ, really?” She wanted to spring off the couch to get away from all that sympathy, but she refused to give him anything that would reinforce the direction his thoughts were taking.
He shook his head dolefully and reached into his shirt pocket, pulling out a business card and placing it on top of the envelope. “I knew you wouldn’t talk to me. But this guy comes highly recommended. The highest level of discretion. You won’t believe his patient list.”
Ria didn’t look at the card. She didn’t need to. She knew exactly what DJ had just offered her without looking at it. It was right there in his eyes. He had never looked at her this way, as if she teetered on the edge of madness and he wanted to help, but he didn’t know if she could be helped or if it was easier to just slowly back away before she snapped. That look was a snapshot of her childhood. Her teachers, the girls at her boarding school, that look captured all she had been to them.
The Girl Who Came From Insanity.
Ria sprang off the couch, unable to bear the weight of that look, and strode to the other end of the living room. She had worked too hard, given up too much, in order to wipe that look off people’s faces. Now it reached inside her and tugged at a part of her she had sworn never to let anyone draw out again.
“I don’t need a shrink, Big.” She struggled to stay calm, to not let him see how much this meant. An Ice Princess. She was an Ice Princess.
“You were on a ledge. On the fourteenth floor. That’s a sheer drop to death, babes!”
“My cell phone fell. I was just getting it back. It really was that simple.” Oh God, please let it be that simple.
He stared at her. Just stared. It was that look again. She refused to let it overwhelm her. “It’s not a very narrow ledge.” She kept her voice even. Perfectly level. Perfectly sane.
He didn’t respond.
“I’m just not scared of heights, okay? Is that a crime?” She loved heights. Higher and higher. As far away from the earth as she could get.
DJ continued to skewer her with that look. Her words sank down her windpipe, racing out of reach as her tongue grew heavy. But she couldn’t lose her words now. This was not the time for the solace of silence. She grabbed them with her voice and threw them at his skeptical face. “It was a crazy day, DJ. I wasn’t thinking. And I most certainly was not trying to kill myself. Why on earth would I?”
He didn’t react.
She made her voice even calmer. “If anything I was trying to save myself. You would have killed me if I had lost my phone.” She even smiled at her lame joke.
His frown turned positively gargantuan.
“Okay, I’m sorry. That was not funny. But seriously, that’s all it was. And I’m fine. Nothing happened.”
He shook the pictures at her, their roles reversed. Him silent and her babbling.
She walked back to the couch, regaining control with every step. “Okay, so something happened, but don’t you dare make some bastard journo my problem.” She picked up the pictures and stuffed them back into the envelope.
Instead of softening, DJ’s expression stayed as dark as ever. “I don’t think you understand how bad this is.”
Oh, she knew exactly how bad this was. He was the one who didn’t know just how much worse it could get. A reclusive Ice Princess the public couldn’t get enough of. Those comedy sketches where they mimicked her were funny enough. But an unstable star careening toward full-blown madness like her murderous mother—that was something they wouldn’t want to touch with a barge pole. The public wanted their darkness in bite-sized chunks, small enough to be entertaining. For real tragedy they had the terrorists, the rapists, the natural disasters. Film stars were for entertainment purposes only.
For the first time since Ria had got off that ledge, instead of feeling violated and cornered, fear stirred inside her.
Hard negotiator’s curiosity flashed in DJ’s eyes as he weighed all the pieces of the catastrophe at hand. “The only reason we got to see these pictures before they went to print is that my contact at Filmistan called me instead of printing them. I was able to track the photographer down. He’s the worst kind of bastard, all sleaze and greed. He says the pictures aren’t all he’s got.”
Ria clutched the back of the couch. The floor beneath her seemed to tip to one side. What else could he possibly have? No one, not even DJ, knew anything about her past. Not even her real name. “He’s lying. I’ve got nothing to hide.” Her tone stayed cool, but the blatancy of the lie scalded her tongue like a too big gulp of steaming coffee she could neither spit out nor swallow.
“I don’t know. But do we want to find it in the papers? Can we really call his bluff?”
We? Was he the one who would lose everything if anyone started asking questions? She wanted to scream at him to do his job, to make this go away. But she didn’t, because that would make her sound as terrified as she felt. And because it would make her sound crazy.
“Can’t we take legal action?” she asked instead. The man had, after all, photographed her in the privacy of her flat, without her consent.
Tea spurted from DJ’s mouth. The man had a law degree and the mention of legal action made him spray milky brown liquid all over the spotless marble floor. It took him a few moments to stop sputtering. “Legal? You mean like calling the police? Like filing reports and restraining orders and shit? Babes, this is Mumbai, not LA. Sometimes you’re so naïve, I forget how long you’ve been around.”
She threw a bunch of napkins on the tea and soaked up the mess.
DJ paced the room. “We should call the police. So they can arrest you for attempted suicide. Then this could turn into a real media circus. Money can’t buy this kind of publicity. We could stretch it out for months if we play it right. Why doesn’t this happen to clients who want it?”
Something warm prickled in Ria’s eyes. It had been ten years since she’d let herself cry off camera. The last time she’d cried she had been Ria Pendse, an eighteen-year-old on her back in Ved Kapoor’s bed in his fancy trailer. India’s biggest superstar had been excited by her eighteen-year-old tears. They had made him wild as he rammed into her. Don’t forget you’re getting the better end of this deal, girl, he’d told her. He had been right. Not only had he given Ria a new name and her first role, but he had pounded every last remnant of hope and innocence from her heart, and every last memory of Vikram from her body.
Crying because some bastard wanted to make a quick buck off her was an insult to those last tears she had cried. None of this trivial shit was worthy of tears.
She tossed the napkins in the trash and turned to DJ. “Fine. Find out what he wants. Pay him off. I don’t care how much. I don’t want these pictures to go public. And I do not want him digging around.”
“You got it.” DJ didn’t even bother to hide his triumph. This was the exact outcome he had been working toward from the very beginning. “I’ll take care of it. You go enjoy your cousin’s wedding. It’s the first time you’re taking time off in ten years, get so
me rest.” He sank back into the sofa, his body finally relaxed. The disaster averted for now.
Ria, on the other hand, was too aware of what lay ahead to feel any relief at all.
3
Chicago
Ria struggled with the zipper on her halter choli blouse. Yet again her designer had ignored her and made the heavily embellished garment far too snug. She sucked in a breath and gave the tiny metal zipper another yank. This time it complied and slid into place under her arm. She adjusted the choli so things weren’t pushed up quite so much, hooked the halter straps around her neck, and then pulled on her ghagra. The full ankle-length skirt of cream silk was much more obliging and slid easily around her hips.
Another wave of music and laughter seeped in through the door and her already-nervous heartbeat sped up. The party was in full swing downstairs. The celebratory sounds had shaken her awake an hour ago. She must’ve looked really pathetic when she arrived that morning because no one had come up to wake her when the party started.
She’d almost wept with relief when she’d seen Nikhil at the airport that morning. It had been the journey from hell. Some psycho terrorist had brought all of Heathrow airport to a standstill and it had taken twice the usual eighteen hours to get from Mumbai to Chicago. At home her aunt had fussed and fed her while Nikhil teased her mercilessly about being such a wimpy traveler. The sound of their beloved voices reverberating against these familiar walls had kneaded all the tension out of her and she had fallen asleep right there on the couch.
She vaguely remembered Nikhil leading her up the stairs. It reminded her of the countless times her uncle had carried her up after she’d fallen asleep in the car driving home from all those weekend dinner parties.
She blew the hair off her face and threw herself back on her bed.
Her bed. Uma Atya had gone overboard with the girly furnishings when Ria had first come to spend the summer with them when she was eight years old. Until then Ria had never seen so much pink. The house she had once shared with her father in Pune, the home he had banished her from, was overridingly gray. Her boarding school was grayer still. The color of Ria’s childhood had changed from gray to pink in this house. These brightly colored walls had held within them enough warmth to heal even the most broken child.
She stared at the frilly canopy that floated above her. Tiny wrinkles crisscrossed the faded pink flowers and Ria knew her aunt had washed and reattached the canopy in preparation for her visit. She crushed the matching comforter against her nose and sucked in a deep, drugging breath—lemons and lavender and sleep.
She had craved this smell, this bed for so long she never wanted to leave it. But Nikhil was waiting for her downstairs. Today was the engagement ceremony—the kickoff to the wedding celebrations that had reduced her fearless hero of a cousin to a nervous wreck. She remembered the relief in his voice when she’d agreed to come home for the wedding and kicked herself for the hundredth time for having hesitated in the first place.
“Just come home. Everything will be all right,” he had said on the phone that day.
She trusted Nikhil with her life. And he worked miracles every day, treating children no one else would go near, in places most people wished didn’t exist. But even he couldn’t pull off a miracle like that.
She dug her elbows into the mattress, pushed herself off the bed, and dragged herself to the bathroom, ignoring the pull of the bed and her weak-willed legs that wanted nothing more than to succumb. She had already washed her hair, twice. And dried it. Now she flat-ironed her already straight hair, one section at a time, until it took on an unnatural sheen.
Vikram had loved her hair. Loved to tangle his fingers in it, press his face into it, tug at it when he teased her.
She rolled it tightly into a bun, and poked in pins to keep it in place. Keep your mind where your hands are, her aunt always said, and the future will take care of itself. It wasn’t working. The future she’d been dreading since Nikhil’s phone call was here and it was far from taken care of.
She looked around for something else to do and found the long-handled brush that stuck out of her giant makeup pouch. Her eyes were too tired for makeup, but she grabbed the brush and swept bronze shadow across her lids. Then on went a thin line of kohl, then a coat of mascara. Ria Parkar, Film Star, stared back at her from the mirror and she tried to follow her lead. An Ice Princess wouldn’t be a terrified mass of jelly, and even if she were she most certainly wouldn’t show it.
Ria reached for the chiffon scarf and tried to drape it across her bare shoulders, but it took her shaking fingers a few tries. She closed her eyes and imagined the cameras turning on, felt the heat of the set lights on her skin. It didn’t quite create her usual disconnection, but she felt distant enough from her body to squeeze a few thin gold bangles around her wrists and sling a chain around her neck. By the time she had adjusted the diamond teardrop to fall precisely in the center of her throat her hands were steady enough. Finally, she pushed a pair of tiny hoops into her oversensitive earlobes.
Why do you wear those damn things? Out of nowhere his whisper blew into her ear. The memory of his breath on her bloodstained lobes so stark and fresh she almost pressed back into him. Earrings had always hurt too much and she had never worn them as a child. But Uma had given Ria her grandmother’s earrings the summer she turned sixteen and Ria had wanted to wear them no matter what. Even when Vikram hid them away she had made him give them back.
Ten years of wearing outrageously large earrings and her ears, like everything else, had adjusted to the pain.
She closed her eyes and stepped away from the mirror. So much for Ice Princess. Her insides, her limbs, all of it was a wobbly mess again. She tried to invoke the cameras one more time, but it was useless. Another wave of laughter and conversation drifted up from downstairs and she forced herself to the sweeping staircase and grabbed the handrail.
It was time to give the shot. She could do this. Once she made it down she’d find a nice quiet corner to hide in. She was good at being invisible under the spotlight. And he probably wasn’t even in the house. Nikhil hadn’t mentioned him once. Uma hadn’t mentioned him. Then again, they had stopped mentioning him around her ten years ago. Okay, time to stop this. She took a deep breath and took the last shaking step into the foyer.
And there he was.
Vikram.
Of course he was the first thing her eyes found in the crowd. The floor shifted beneath her feet. The entire polished mass of wood slid out from under her. There was no way she was making an entrance on her bum. It was the worst possible way she could think of to meet him after all these years. She dug her fingers into the handrail and regained her footing.
He stood there against the flaming red tapestry that had hung over the mantel for as long as Ria could remember. He was deep in conversation, completely focused on the person he was talking to. She realized with a start that there were people everywhere. Dark bobbing heads, a sea of them flooding the house, the buzz of voices loud and raucous despite the music. As always, he stood apart. A head taller than everyone else. And somehow more still, more rooted than anyone else. As if he had been standing there forever. She couldn’t remember how many times she’d seen him in that room or what he had looked like back then. She couldn’t remember anything at all. It was as if he’d stepped out of her thoughts, leaving them empty and here he was.
She forced herself not to close her eyes. But then he smiled. And that smile, that slight, almost economical movement of his lips, made the mad panic inside her still. The tight knot inside her eased. A weight she had carried for years lifted off her chest. It felt like someone wrapped her soft pink comforter around her and pulled her close.
Vikram was smiling. The last time she’d seen him he had looked like he would never smile again. She had looked into his eyes and watched him break, watched the gray-blue crystals shatter to bits.
He was smiling.
Breath whooshed out of her. A lifetime of crushed-up memories
floated from her and settled on him and disappeared.
She had been afraid for nothing. It had been ten years. Of course he had moved on. Of course the world had continued to spin and had not stayed frozen in place the way she had left it. And she could ask for nothing more.
He turned his head, as if he sensed someone watching him.
Ria’s limbs unlocked. She moved swiftly away from the steps. He hadn’t seen her and she wasn’t ready for that yet. She slipped out of the foyer. It had been ten years, but the house was part of her. She knew every corner, every door, every passageway. Crushing the chiffon of her scarf against her heart, she moved through the house, soaking up the warmth even as she fought falling back into the comfort of the memories.
That smile of his swirled inside her, pulsing sweet, warm pain through her veins.
Some men looked hard, their handsomeness rough and earthy. Some were more finely etched, almost angelic. Vikram had always been some sort of heartbreaking combination of both, rugged, but with something incredibly soft and yielding. He could conquer your every breath and get completely lost in you at the exact same time. His face was a perfect reflection of him—arrogant, demanding, and yet so steadfast, so very gentle that ten years weren’t enough to erase his touch.
A touch that had healed her once, and, ironically enough, taught her how to go on even after she gave up the right to it.
She had to find Nikhil. Remind herself why she was here, find a way to pinch herself awake. She found Nikhil in the family room, adorable in his silk kurta, his arm wrapped around Jen, who wore her matching black salwar kameez with the ease of a born and bred desi girl. Jen had fallen madly in love with everything Indian two years ago when she had met Nikhil and then been embraced by Uma and Vijay with their usual unconditional fervor. Uma Atya kept wanting to include Chinese and American rituals in the wedding plans. But Jen hadn’t been to China since she was three, when her American parents had adopted her from an orphanage, and she had steadily insisted on a traditional Indian-Marathi wedding. Ria for one understood the need to separate from one’s history better than anyone.