The Bollywood Bride

by Sonali Dev

  Ria put her foot on the floor and slid it into her slippers, but his gaze followed her foot.

  He had dropped a hammer on her little toe when she was seventeen and they had been building shelves for Uma in the garage. Ria’s toe had always stayed a little crooked after that.

  “Vic—Oh!” Mira stopped in her tracks. One glance at Vikram’s guilt-ridden face and she looked like someone had slapped her.

  Ria wanted to tell her that his guilt had nothing to do with what they’d been doing just now. In fact it had nothing to do with anything. It was completely unfounded. The fault had been all Ria’s. But she could hardly tell Mira that she had been stupid enough to kiss someone with a hammer in his hand.

  “Hi, Mira.” Ria broke the silence. Mira gave her the barest nod, but still didn’t make eye contact. She looked at the platter in Vikram’s hand. “Everyone’s waiting for the dip, Vic. You coming?”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.” He stared at the spot where Ria’s foot had rested on the ottoman.

  “That venture capitalist friend of Vijay Uncle’s is looking for you. I thought you wanted to talk to him. Come on.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” he repeated absently, still lost in his thoughts.

  Mira glared at him for a few moments, waiting for him to look at her. When he didn’t she grabbed the platter from his hands and left the room without another word.

  Ria stood. If Uma Atya wanted her off her feet she could sit just fine in the kitchen. “You should go after her.”

  “I plan to.” His gaze moved from her toe to her face. “And you should be more careful. Do you have any idea how irresponsible it is to run long distances without training?”

  Ria opened her mouth then shut it again. She had no intention of getting into another fight.

  “I’m not trying to start a fight,” he said, meeting her eyes. “I’m serious, you can’t do things without thinking about the consequences. You can’t just wake up one day and run a marathon. The first guy to attempt it dropped dead.” He turned to leave the room, then stopped and faced her again. “And don’t worry, when I said I’d be civil, I meant it. You don’t have to look so terrified every time I open my mouth. I keep my word.” And with that left-handed jab, he jogged out of the room after Mira.

  Ria tried to remember the last time she had done something without thinking about the consequences. It was probably that kiss that had ended with having her toe smashed with a hammer.

  13

  Ria had forgotten to shut the blinds last night. The sun filtered in through the sheer drapes. She released the pillow, a pathetic substitute for the body she’d been clutching in the stupid dream she’d enjoyed far too much.

  Her phone buzzed next to the pillow. She picked it up.

  It was a text from DJ.

  What’s wrong, babes?

  Mindlessly she pressed the letters Wrng? and hit Send. What was he talking about?

  The script . . . ur never late responding . . . who died?

  Me. She was dying a slow death.

  And becoming outrageously dramatic.

  She jabbed at the keys.

  I’m on vacation.... Gime a bldy break.... BTW, I’ll do the film.

  Before she could backtrack, she hit Send. Then instantly regretted it. She hadn’t even opened the script yet.

  Her phone rang. It was DJ. She didn’t answer. It buzzed again.

  Gr8 . . . Call when ur ready to talk . . . complete silence frm blkmailer.

  She sat up.

  Great! Maybe he’s dead. But she deleted that and instead typed: THX. Keep me posted.

  At least now she was awake enough to get out of bed.

  She took the longest shower she had ever taken. Poured lotion on every inch of skin, rubbing more and more in until it formed a white layer and she had to wipe it off with tissue. She brushed her hair until the brush simply slid off it. She changed three times and still she felt all wrong. Finally, after Nikhil had hollered from downstairs for the third time, she settled on a black sweater with only the thinnest turquoise edging, thank God, and black jeans, and slunk down the stairs dragging lead with her feet.

  “Wow, starlet, that was the longest shower in human history.” Nikhil gave her a sheepish grin and tried to be his usual endearing self, but she was still too angry with him. She hadn’t said a single word to him since he’d tried to protect Vikram from her notorious talons.

  She focused on rolling her hair into a bun and ignored him.

  Vikram nodded at her over a cup of coffee, all freshly bathed and looking as good as the coffee smelled.

  She returned his nod and turned to Jen. “Hey, Jen. You look lovely.”

  “Thanks.” Jen twirled around to display the white kurta she wore over jeans. “You’re going to the temple with us to meet the priest about the vows, remember? Coffee?”

  “Yes, please. Use the biggest cup in the house.” She finally managed to twist her hair into a semblance of a knot and jabbed it with a chopstick.

  Vikram took the cup from Jen and poured the coffee. The chopstick slid from Ria’s hair, bounced off the floor, and rolled to his feet. Hair unraveled and spilled around her shoulders. His gaze grazed her tumbling hair, and hunger flashed in his eyes, hot and bright. He dropped to his knees and picked up the stick. Instead of handing it to her, he put it on the countertop between them.

  “Thanks.” She tried again to roll up her hair. She had done this a million times and never had trouble. Today, her hair refused to cooperate. Jen took the stick from her, rolled her hair into a bun for her, and wove the stick through it.

  Vikram dropped a spoonful of sugar and a few drops of cream into the coffee and pushed the cup toward Ria.

  She took a sip and almost moaned with pleasure. Perfect cream. Perfect sugar. Perfect.

  And he knew it. She saw it in his eyes before he looked away.

  “Where’s everyone?” She wrapped her fingers around the hot cup and took another long perfect sip.

  “Aie and Mindy went to the craft store. Something about the centerpieces for the cocktail dinner,” Nikhil said. “Dad and Matt are going to try to squeeze in nine holes.”

  “Wow! Golf? Really? That was brave of Vijay Kaka,” Ria said.

  “Yah. Brave. Stupid. Whatever.” Nikhil rolled his eyes. “He’s going to be making up for it for a long time, the poor man.”

  “More like poor Uma Atya,” Ria said, wondering what she had missed that morning. “This isn’t exactly the time for golf, is it?” she said loyally.

  “Why not?” Vikram met her eyes over his cup. His voice was nonchalant, but the way he held his shoulders and pressed his lips together wasn’t.

  “Yeah, why not?” Nikhil asked. “We have another week before the wedding, and everything is under control. I don’t know why Aie is so stressed out.”

  Instead of answering him Ria pointed her cup to the to-do list tacked on the refrigerator door. Items written neatly in black marker stretched all the way down two legal-sized sheets of paper taped end to end, each line bulleted with a star. A few items were crossed out, but most of the list remained starkly undone.

  “Oh please.” Nikhil walked to the fridge and scowled at the list. “Pack coconuts? Seriously? That’s a to-do item?”

  Vikram and Jen smiled.

  “Coconuts are an important part of the wedding ceremony,” Ria said as calmly as she could. “You need them for every ritual.”

  “She’s right, man,” Vikram said. “You’ve got to respect the coconuts.”

  Nikhil and Vikram guffawed and Ria glared at them

  “Shut up, guys,” Jen said. “Ria’s right. The details are important.”

  “Of course they are. The wedding’s all about the rituals. God forbid you had to get married without coconuts.” Vikram shuddered and took a sip of coffee.

  She was getting really sick of all these insinuations. “That’s not what I meant. It’s a wedding. The rituals mean something.”

  “It is a wedding. Th
e rituals don’t mean squat. There’s a bride and a groom and they make vows. Those mean something.”

  His look was pure danger. The response slamming in her heart was pure danger. She should have backed down. With anyone else, she would have. But his eyes did it every single time. Made the words burst out of her. She had spent a year not talking even as everyone tried to pry words out of her. Not being able to talk was about fear, about being terrified of what might come out, of what you might expose. But even now, with so much to be afraid of, one look in his eyes and her fear dissipated like stars in the dawning day.

  And it made her even angrier. “How does making vows respectfully and traditionally diminish them?” she asked.

  “You mean like in your movies?”

  “No. I mean like in real life. Like Nikhil and Jen want to do and like everyone in our families has done for centuries.”

  “I thought vows were about the promises you made. I should have realized it was about how you made them.” How did his eyes do that? Go from mocking to intense, from angry to hurt, in the span of one breath? How did they fill up like that? There was just too much there. Too much he didn’t understand. Too much he wanted to stop feeling, but couldn’t.

  She couldn’t take it anymore. Not another second of this crushed down feeling. “I know about vows,” she wanted to shout. “I know what it means to make them!”

  She couldn’t remember one single reason why she shouldn’t say the words. Why she couldn’t tell him how she felt. He was here, right in front of her. If she reached out she could touch him, and her entire body hurt from the effort it took not to. Something inside her reared up and shook itself loose, something desperate and voracious. That look in his eyes agitated it into existence, and fanned it until it filled her up.

  They stared at each other, no longer able to look away, no longer needing words.

  Jen’s phone rang and the trance broke.

  “Oh no,” Jen said into the phone, panic spilling from her voice.

  Nikhil moved closer to her, all his attention shifting from Vikram and Ria to her.

  “That was the altar guy,” she said when she was done. “His warehouse caught fire. Our altar is gone! Burned to a crisp. He was able to salvage a few others, but we need to go pick another one out right now before they’re all gone.” She gnawed at her cuticle, looking distraught.

  “But we have an appointment with the priest to go over the vow translations,” Nikhil said, rubbing her shoulders. “We need to hand those out to the guests and the priest only had time today.”

  “Ria was going to help us with those anyway, right?” Jen looked hopefully at Ria. “You can do it by yourself, can’t you, Ria? You don’t need us. Vic can drive you.”

  All of Jen’s panic jumped straight into Ria.

  Nikhil gave her a pleading look. “Please?”

  Really? Suddenly he was okay with her spending hours alone with Vikram? “What if I start something?” she almost said, throwing him a dirty look.

  Vikram raised a questioning brow at Nikhil, then turned it on Ria.

  She ignored them both and looked at Jen. “Vikram can go with Nikhil. I’ll go with you.”

  Jen shook her head. “Vikram and Nikhil don’t understand that stuff. Only you do. None of us can tell what is what. It has to be you. Please.” Jen’s voice cracked, and Ria put a quick hand on her shoulder.

  “Of course I’ll go,” she said just as Vikram wrapped his arm around Jen.

  “Relax, Jen,” he said. “We’ll take care of it. It’s at the Lemont temple in half an hour, right? Easy enough.”

  Jen sniffed and smiled a wobbly smile. “I’m so sorry. I swear this wedding is turning me into a basket case.”

  Vikram dropped a kiss on top of Jen’s head. “I think the word’s Bridezilla,” he stage-whispered, and she laughed and thanked them again and again, before Nikhil pulled her out of the room.

  “Thanks, starlet,” he said to Ria, pulling her into a hug before he left.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll keep my claws to myself,” she said into his ear. But she gave him a quick hug back. She might be angry with him, but she knew that the intensity of her anger far exceeded what he had done. None of this was his fault.

  The garage door clicked shut, and Vikram and she were alone in the house.

  Alone for the first time since that awful magical summer when they had made vows of their own. And then she’d torn them to shreds. The remnants of those shreds hung in the air now. They lingered in his eyes, and clung to her body. Impossibly stubborn.

  Needing to move, Ria gathered all the cups that were lying around the kitchen, and took them to the sink.

  Vikram stood rooted to the spot, as though no force on earth could move him, and watched her through lowered lids. The heat of his gaze warmed every inch of her body all the way to her aching heart. Silence stretched between them. She didn’t want to know what was going through his mind. It was too much, all this knowing, all this feeling.

  She rinsed out the cups, rubbing at each mud-colored stain until steam rose up to her face and her fingers reddened under the scalding water. Finally he moved. Stepping close behind her, he reached around her and turned off the faucet. His breath caressed the back of her neck. The downy hair at her nape prickled and stretched toward him, reaching for the familiar heat of his body. Just a whisper of a move and she’d be in his arms, her back pressed into his chest, his warmth wrapped around her. The cup slipped from her hands and landed in the sink with a clang. He backed away, moving quickly, not stopping until he was all the way across the kitchen. “We should go,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “Let’s find out what makes these vows so special.”

  14

  Ria followed Vikram to the big red truck parked on the street. This was his car? He held the door open for her. Even with her height she needed a ladder to get into this thing. With all the awkwardness of a newborn filly she pulled herself up into the seat. He slammed the door shut and jogged to the other side, leaping into the driver’s seat with all the easy grace of a stallion.

  The humongous monstrosity of a car purred to life beneath his fingers. He fit inside it as if it were built for him. Despite the preposterous amounts of space the car took up on the outside, the interior was tiny, with a single bench seat. Who made cars with bench seats anymore? She sucked everything in and squished herself into a sliver against the door.

  It didn’t work.

  Vikram’s presence beside her consumed her. She felt every breath entering and leaving his body. She felt his every move. Every time he changed gears or turned the steering wheel the muscles in his arms bunched and a zing shot through her. She would’ve given anything for a hand rest or a gearbox—something solid to provide separation. She placed her handbag between them and pulled her denim jacket tightly around herself, clutching it so hard her fingers turned numb from the pressure.

  Vikram leaned over and turned up the heat. “Do you want me to turn on the seat warmer?”

  She shook her head. The silence between them was heavy and exhausting. By the time they drove into the temple parking lot, Ria found that her knees were locked from the tension. Vikram opened the door for her, and she hopped off the high platform. His fingers wrapped around her elbow and their eyes met, making that spark she was getting used to zing through her belly again. Even when he withdrew his hand the awareness of his touch lingered on her skin.

  They walked side by side, the tug between them so strong, so palpable, it was a physical force. Silence followed them into the temple, trailing them as they went up the wide steps, hanging between them as they bent to remove their shoes in the shelf-lined room and walked barefoot across the cool ceramic tiles to the priest’s office. They’d visited the temple with Uma and Vijay a few times every summer and it was as familiar as everything else. The only thing new was the silence between them.

  And it was so disorienting that even when the priest launched into a lecture on the seriousness of marriage, neither one of the
m could find the words to correct him. Finally, when the priest asked how long they had known each other, Vikram cracked. “We’re not the bride and groom.” His voice was a low rumble in his chest. “We’re the groom’s cousins.”

  Not that his admission made a dent in the priest’s ministrations. He went on with his sermon regardless, his head shaking benevolently as he dispensed wisdom at them across the metal desk. Two ornate rosewood statues of the goddesses Laxmi and Durga flanked the window behind him and sunshine danced on his generously oiled bald patch like a halo. He had his lecture to give and he was giving it no matter what.

  “Temptations are ubiquitous,” he said in an accent so thick it was like an entire different language. “Coming at us from all directions, feeding on our desires, on our hunger for momentary excitement. The true nature of marriage is not external pleasure, it is internal oneness.” He paused, looking from Ria to Vikram as if they were part of a larger audience. Ria had the urge to turn around and make sure there weren’t more people behind her. She caught Vikram’s eye and almost smiled.

  The priest’s hands made sweeping motions. “The minds must marry first.” He clasped his hands together, then pulled them apart with drama befitting the finest character actor. “If we allow the external to transcend the internal we see only differences, and that can cause only separation, never harmony.” Another pause. Another emphatic nod. “Our intellect skews reality. We have to be connected to what is real and ignore that which masquerades as reality. It is your insides that must fit together.” He gave them a long meaningful look.

  Vikram was holding himself completely still as only Vikram could. His stillness was its own language. This one wasn’t an angry stillness. The effort it took him to keep his lips from quirking made his eyes shine. He gave her a warning look—Don’t you dare smile.

  The priest sighed contentedly, glad to have done his duty by them and curiously unconcerned by the minor detail that they weren’t the bride and groom. He reached into the desk drawer, pulled out two booklets, and placed them in front of him. “You will need the Marathi-language vows, correct?” he asked.