by Sonali Dev
“Hey, I want to be a sexy siren too! Teach me too.” Mira laughed and turned to Vikram. “What d’you think, Vic?”
“I think you’re perfect the way you are.” He pulled a bottle of beer out of the fridge.
“Isn’t he the best?” Mira asked no one in particular. She went up on her toes and gave him a peck on the cheek. It took him a moment too long, but he put his arm around her shoulder and Ria kicked herself for noticing the moment he’d taken to do it.
“He’s the best suck-up, that’s what he is,” Jen said, laughing. Vikram twisted the cap off the beer and took a deep swig.
Ria had never been more thankful that people never expected her to say anything. Being an Ice Princess had its advantages.
Jen looked from Ria to Mira across the polished concrete breakfast bar. “You guys haven’t met, have you?” she asked. “Ria, this is Mira. Mira, this is Ria.”
“Oh, we met yesterday,” Mira said. “She found Vikram and me in the—”
“Where’s Nikhil?” Vikram cut Mira off and glanced around the apartment. The pulse in his throat beat out a frantic rhythm. His eyes met Ria’s for a split second. His hand reached for his neck and he pressed the pulse down with his thumb.
“He’s getting coffee. Or growing it. He’s been gone a while, I’d better call him.” Jen headed back into the bedroom. “Oh, by the way, Mira, Ria loved your paintings.” She pointed to the artwork on her walls and left the room.
Mira rounded on Ria. “You like them, really?”
Words stuck in Ria’s throat. These paintings were Mira’s? The flutter of envy that Ria had refused to recognize earlier flared inside her.
Mira stared at her, waiting for a response. For the first time since Ria had met her, Mira looked insecure about something.
“They’re beautiful. I love them,” Ria said, and meant it.
Joy blossomed on Mira’s expressive face as though Ria had just handed her a medal. It made her look so young, so guileless, a ridiculous surge of protectiveness rose inside Ria. “Seriously. The strokes, the colors, the movement, it’s impossible to look away from them.”
Mira jogged around the wide bar and threw her arms around Ria. “Aw. I love you, thanks!”
Startled, Ria patted Mira’s back and caught Vikram’s eyes over Mira’s shoulder. He was giving nothing away today. His eyes stayed flat and unfathomable. Which was just as well, given their last meeting.
“I hate displaying my work,” Mira said, walking to a painting. “I can’t handle it when someone doesn’t like it. You’re an artist too. You know what I mean, right?”
Blood drained from Ria’s face. How did Mira know she had painted?
“She’s talking about your movies.” Vikram’s voice broke through her panic. His gaze steadied her, then pulled away. He pushed away from the bar and paced out of the kitchen, restlessness pouring off him in waves.
“What else would I be talking about?” Mira asked, following him, but she didn’t wait for an answer. “You put your soul into something and people think they can pass judgment on it just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I’ll never get used to the critics.”
Ria didn’t know how to respond to that. What the critics said about her performances usually made her want to laugh, mostly because she agreed with their clever little reviews. But her art, there was only one person who’d ever been exposed to that part of her.
“It takes courage, Mira.” Ria heard Vikram’s voice from behind her. “You put yourself out there. Not everyone has the balls to do that. It’s easier to hide things, to never let anyone see what you’re capable of.”
Ria refused to reach for the concrete and steady herself.
Don’t let anyone see.
She turned around to face them and found Mira leaning against him, her back to his chest. His arms hung at his sides.
“What’s the point of art if you hide it away?” Mira said, looking appalled, as though the very idea of hiding anything was inexplicable to her. “All artists dream of sharing their art with the world. Right, Ria? I mean, who wants to make a movie no one watches?”
Ria nodded, not sure how to respond to that either.
“So, Ria, how did you become an actress? Did you always want to be one? ”
Vikram went completely and utterly still.
The very air around him went still. It strained and tightened. The tightness dug all the way into Ria’s lungs.
Mira stroked Vikram’s shoulder. He stepped away, letting her hand slide off. Mira didn’t seem to notice, but Ria felt Mira’s hand fall off his shoulder in slow motion. Suddenly everything moved in slow motion.
“I’m sure it’s a great story. Tell us.” Mira sank into the couch with an interested smile and waited. Vikram stood there motionless, and Ria knew his mind was miles away, years away.
Just like that Ria’s tongue turned to lead in her mouth. She reached for words, but try as she might, she couldn’t make them. She stared at her hands, clenching them together, the familiar paralyzing helplessness engulfing her.
“Maybe it’s something she doesn’t want to share, Mira,” Vikram said softly, the echo of too many memories making his voice raw.
Ria looked up at him.
The kaleidoscope of his eyes was alive again, the cold flatness gone, crystals shifting to expose all the things she wished she didn’t see.
For a long moment she couldn’t look away.
“Maybe it’s something she isn’t proud of,” Vikram said finally.
Ria wanted to wrap her arms around herself, but she didn’t. She wanted to look away in shame, but she didn’t. She forced all the emotion from her voice, from her face. One of them had to stop this, whatever this was. She relaxed her jaw, opened her mouth, and focused only on Vikram. As she’d known they would, her words came when she looked in his eyes. “It was just such a long time ago, I hardly remember it.”
His jaw tightened. The pulse in his throat jumped to its beat again. He turned away and stalked to the wall of windows overlooking the lake and stared out at the waves that had turned dusty gray in the fading light. Water and sky meeting and melding into one.
“Was it one of those stories where a talent scout saw you at the mall and thought you’d be perfect for a role?” Mira asked, persistent and blind to the silence the moment begged for.
Ria looked back at her, disoriented. “Something like that,” she said.
Only it hadn’t been the mall. It had been her father’s funeral.
9
Back in Jen’s bedroom, Ria took her time stripping off her sari. It had been ten years since Baba’s funeral. But it might as well have been yesterday. The heat of the cremation pyre was still fresh on her skin. The lungful of smoke still made it hard to breathe. The fire painted the white cotton sheet tied around him black before the orange licks of flame ate it up. Uma and Vijay flanked her on either side, but it was the most alone she had ever been.
The only other person present was Baba’s photographer friend. He freelanced for film magazines and happened to know that India’s largest production house was looking for a new girl—someone who combined innocence and sex appeal. Ved had told her later that was industry-speak for a young girl with big breasts and empty eyes. She had been a perfect fit.
Against all Uma’s protests Ria had gone with the photographer to Ved’s office.
“Ved Kapoor personally picks the girls he wants in his films,” he’d explained solicitously. And by “the girl he wants” he had meant “the girl he wants to fuck for the duration of the film.” But she hadn’t found that out until it was too late, after she had signed the contract for both the film and the asylum.
With Baba gone, the house gone, and a year’s cost of the asylum more than her entire college tuition, the promise she had made Baba had tightened like a noose around her neck. The only thing that had made sense was that Vikram was too far away to witness it. He’d been spared having to see what she would become, or where he would end up if he stayed with her.
> Vikram’s camp in the Amazon basin was entirely disconnected from the outside world, but he had told his parents about being in love with Ria just before leaving. Baba’s death had brought his terrified mother rushing over to Mumbai to see Ria. But she had wasted her time. By the time Chitra got to Mumbai, with her threats and her predictions of doom, Ria had already sent Uma and Vijay away and signed the film. She’d also already learned it would turn her into a whore.
Ved had felt her up and got instantly aroused when it made shameful tears spring in her eyes. Such an Ice Princess! he’d said, with that smile they said drove women crazy, but to this day made Ria physically ill. You know, you’re too fancy-schmancy for a ghati name like Pendse, he’d said, using the slur people from other states used for people from Ria’s home state. We should call her something fancy and English, he’d said to his secretary as he typed up papers for Ria to sign.
A Parker pen happened to be lying on his desk. Ved’s spelling had been just as lax as his morals and Ria had become Ria Parkar.
She pulled her sweater over her jeans and folded the saris into perfectly edged rectangles. If she took long enough, maybe Vikram and Mira would be gone.
But Mira’s animated voice was the first thing she heard when she came back into the living room. Jen and Mira were making dinner plans.
For all five of them.
If things had gone badly before, this put the day in a whole different class of disasters. Vikram was talking to Nikhil in the kitchen and looking perfectly calm—that loaded-spring-like calm that was such a part of him now.
How had Vikram allowed this to happen? Given the anger she’d seen in his eyes, he should have done everything he could to not be stuck with her all evening.
How had Nikhil allowed this to happen? The way he had looked at Jen when they were trying on the saris, he should’ve wanted nothing more than to get rid of everyone. Ria had loved every minute of her time with Jen and Nikhil today, but she had definitely been the third wheel. Now the crowd of three had turned to a crowd of five, and she was a third wheel twice over. How much worse was this day going to get?
As if in response to that question, the beginnings of a migraine nudged at the back of her head. With her medication back at the house, her only option was to convince Jen and Nikhil to let her take a cab home. She pulled them aside, but neither one of them would hear of it. Nikhil had already made reservations at Ria’s favorite restaurant in the city. And that was that.
Their procession of five marched down Lake Shore Drive toward Millennium Park with Vikram and Mira heading up the front, Nikhil and Jen bringing up the rear, and Ria sandwiched somewhere in the middle. The sun was almost gone from the sky so at least she had the encroaching darkness on her side. She pulled on her sunglasses and buried her face in the high collar of her jacket. A few Indians stopped and did double takes, but Ria didn’t wait long enough to let recognition dawn. She kept moving.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had gone traipsing down a public street without a security detail. DJ was going to bite her head off if he found out. He had called a local security company and set up a bodyguard, but Ria couldn’t imagine bringing her film world into this world. It seemed like a violation of something sacred. The truth was that with Nikhil and Vikram so close, she felt safer than she had in years. At least physically.
Nikhil and Jen looked so cozy walking hand in hand she smiled at them, dug her hands into her pockets, and tried to give them some space. But when Nikhil pulled her close, she unabashedly sidled up to him.
As for Vikram, his mood had completely altered. He seemed to have decided to compensate for whatever had happened earlier by giving his complete and undivided attention to Mira. He laced his fingers through hers and plastered himself as close to her as was humanly possible.
When they reached the restaurant, he squeezed in next to Mira on the curved couch, leaving the rest of the booth jarringly empty. Ria sank into a chair across from them and steeled herself for an excruciating evening. It was one of those Asian fusion places where you threw your own ingredients into a bowl and let a bunch of exuberant chefs cook them on an enormous smoking griddle.
Ria had loved the place as a child. It had given her the same freewheeling feeling she experienced at amusement parks, like she could do anything she wanted, like reality and rules were just far enough away to not matter. But today the crowd was too loud, the smells of soy and ginger and searing meat too overpowering, and her lemonade too sweet. That migraine was getting closer by the minute and try as she might Ria couldn’t invoke a single happy association with the place.
To make things worse, Jen went over every moment of their day together in painful detail. The shimmies, the sashays, the sexy pouting, playing Ria up to be some sort of avenging angel for all wardrobe issues. Fortunately, Vikram was too preoccupied with plastering himself against Mira to notice. Between Nikhil and Jen making an obvious effort to keep their hands off each other and Vikram nuzzling various parts of Mira’s anatomy, Ria almost prayed for the migraine to put her out of her misery.
If she had any sense at all she would get up and leave right now. But she felt like she had to stay and show Vikram that she was just as okay as he was and even more to show him that she was okay with how okay he was. Maybe this is what it was going to take for them to attain some modicum of normalcy. To fake it first. As they said in the industry, you have to act like a star if you want to be a star. So she squared her shoulders, pasted an expertly crafted smile on her face, and focused on the conversation.
Mira launched into the story of how she and Vikram had met a few months ago at a charity gala for Asian artists where Mira had shown her work. “Vikram told me his name and I said, ‘Did you know that’s an Indian name?’ Because seriously, I would never have guessed he was Indian. With those eyes and that skin, who would know? And he says, ‘You know, it might just be, since my Indian parents named me after my Indian grandfather.’ After that it was just a matter of asking him out over and over again before he said—”
“I was traveling.” Vikram cut her off. “I was out of the country. And then we found that Mira went to high school with Jen.”
“It was meant to be,” Mira said.
Ria smiled politely. But when Vikram caught her polite smile, his eyes grew harder. She then tried to act disinterested. But with every sign of indifference, the set of his jaw grew tighter. The changes were almost imperceptible, but they screamed at her. She wished she could block it out, this insane awareness of his every movement.
“You know how Vic does that silent brooding thing? It’s very hard to resist.” Mira smiled at Vikram as if he were some sort of enigma.
Why couldn’t he be an enigma to her? Why did she have to see his every thought?
Vikram had the grace to look embarrassed. He shot Nikhil a warning look. Nikhil put down his beer and grinned like a five-year-old with a bowl of candy. Anyone calling Vikram an enigma was preposterous. Everything about Vikram had always been out in the open, all the time. He wore all his feelings on his sleeve. If he loved you, you knew it. If he wanted something from you, there was no keeping it from him.
“You should ask my mom about Mr. Enigma here,” Nikhil said. “He got us in so much trouble when we were kids because he couldn’t keep a damn thing off his face.”
Vikram took a long drag of his beer. “That’s only because Uma had some sort of witch’s sixth sense when it came to me.”
That was true. It was almost as though Uma had been able to sense Vikram’s schemes even before he came up with them.
“Remember Nuts?” Nikhil said, and despite herself Ria smiled. They had tried to domesticate a chipmunk in the basement when she was ten. “Vic named the chipmunk Nuts because, to quote Vic, ‘look at the size of his!’” Nic cupped his hand and pointed at his belly and he and Vikram both started laughing. “Poor guy was probably some sort of chipmunk alpha-stud and Vic decided to put him in the old doggie crate in the basement and tried to teach him trick
s.”
“Hey, we almost made history with him,” Vikram said, still laughing. “And the only reason that experiment failed was you. If you hadn’t bawled like a baby, Uma would never have known.”
“He bit me! I had to get ten shots. Ten!”
“He nicked you. Didn’t even break the skin.” They were both laughing so hard Ria found her own shoulders shaking. “And he was responding to his name.”
Nikhil shook his head, “No, he wasn’t. Ask Ria.”
“I don’t remember,” Ria said. Although she was sure Nuts had responded to Vikram calling his name.
“Of course you don’t,” Nikhil said as they got up to get their food.
Ria threw some vegetables into her bowl and sprinkled them with olive oil. The idea of eating with the headache pushing at her temples made her sick to her stomach. But if she didn’t eat there would be a million questions and the atmosphere had just turned casual enough that she could hope for a quick dinner and an uneventful end to the evening.
Her food was cooked long before everyone else’s, and she took it back to the table and watched as Nikhil and Vikram argued about the laws of physics that enabled them to fit as much food as they possibly could into their bowls until towers of vegetables and meat and noodles teetered in their hands. Ria found herself smiling again. For the umpteenth time she was struck by how little had changed under all the changes. Maybe things didn’t have to be uncomfortable around Vikram. Maybe things could be normal.
“Uma was so calm about all the stuff we got up to. I have no idea how she put up with us,” Vikram said as everyone gathered back at the table. His face, his entire body, was more relaxed than she’d seen it in the past few days. Maybe he’d also come to the same realization that they could come up with some version of peaceful coexistence. Vikram attacked the overflowing bowl in front of him. “I think Ma tried to sell me to Uma a few times.”
Nikhil raised his hand, stuffing copious amounts of food into his mouth. “Correction: Chitra Atya tried to barter you for me. It’s no wonder the woman is such a brilliant businesswoman.”