by Sonali Dev
She’d had no answers.
Until those pale gray-blue eyes, the kind she had never before seen, had finally asked a question she could answer. You want to be friends?
She was about to close her eyes when the branch above her moved. She looked up and found those eyes staring down at her again.
Not him. Not here. Please.
His eyes were more weary than she’d ever seen them, tinged with red and ringed with shadows. They widened with panic when they caught what she was so desperately trying to hide. He hopped off his perch and landed on the wet grass next to her. “My God, Ria, what happened?” He grabbed her by her arms.
She closed her eyes and let her chin drop to her chest, letting hair cascade around her face and hide her from his searching gaze. If the tears started again she would never forgive herself.
“Hey.” He tried to pull her close.
She shoved him away. “Why can’t you leave me alone, Vikram? What’s wrong with you? Can’t you just go away and leave me alone?”
He didn’t budge, so she pulled her arms from his grasp and moved away herself.
“I would love to, Ria. But first I need to know what the hell is going on with you.” The pulse in his throat set off its familiar beat.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He touched his bandage with two fingers. His forehead was tinged purple under the gauze. The jeans he’d worn all day still hung low on his hips, but he had changed into a white T-shirt that caught the dawn’s light. “You keep telling me you don’t want me. But I would have to be blind to believe you. I would have to be a fool to buy any of this bullshit.” He waved his hands around. Her scarf was rolled around his fist. “What’s going on, Ria? Why do you even do it?”
“Do what?” She didn’t bother to conceal her weariness and leaned back into the gnarly bark.
His chest rose under the snug cotton. “For starters, why do you deal with this shit—the fans, the attention? It’s obvious how much you hate it.”
“I don’t hate it.” At least not as much as she used to.
“Come on, Ria, things didn’t turn out like you expected, why is it so damn hard to admit it?” He reached out and tipped her chin up, forcing her to look into his eyes. “We were so young. So we made mistakes, so what?” Understanding softened his eyes, tinted them with insidious hope. For a few seconds his hope seeped into her heart. Then it gave way to panic.
She pushed his hand away. “It turned out exactly as I had expected.” She thrust her chin up. “I was given an opportunity and I took it. And it turned out great. Why is that so hard for you to accept?”
That earned her a disbelieving frown.
She matched it with a determined one. “At least I took the opportunities I was given. At least I didn’t run from them.”
His eyes narrowed. He took an unconscious step back, and that pushed her over the edge. “What about V-learn? It puts that stupid ecstatic look on your face. How can you not do anything with it?”
“You don’t know anything about V-learn. You don’t know anything about me anymore. Stop acting like you do.”
“Fine. Then tell me. Tell me what you do.” Tell me I didn’t ruin your life.
“Okay. I teach a class at the University of Chicago. A special workshop on sustainable construction techniques. You have to qualify for my class, you can’t just take it. Because when I was running around the world after my girlfriend dumped me, I spent so much time on construction sites I figured out that indigenous populations use some amazing technologies that won’t fucking kill our planet. And because I couldn’t sleep for years I figured out how to apply them to modern construction. And now they think I’m some sort of fucking expert. But you know what else I figured out? That there’s more to life than chasing shit. That I didn’t have to achieve things to be someone everyone wants me to be.
“Oh, and those videos on V-learn—they didn’t make themselves. I put them there and I put more on every day. But V-learn is mine. I can give it to whoever wants it, whoever needs it. I don’t want someone to take it and turn it into another moneymaking machine. I don’t want it to turn into another screw-the-little-guy tool. Does that answer your question?” He was breathing hard. And he had put several feet between them.
“So what you’re telling me is that success still chases you the way it has chased you all your life and that you’ve learned to run away. When did you turn into a coward, Vikram?”
He had the gall to laugh. “Really, you’re calling me a coward?” He stared her down until heat suffused her cheeks and his eyes softened. “Fine, so I’ll stop being a coward first. I’ll come out and say it. It’s time for us to stop lying to each other.”
“I’m not lying. I’m trying to tell you the truth, but you won’t listen. I don’t regret becoming an actress.” She couldn’t regret it. But he deserved at least a piece of the truth. “But I do wish I hadn’t put you through what you went through.”
Again he laughed. Was he crazy? Her heart was breaking into pieces—what was there to laugh about?
“That’s the first honest thing that’s come out of your mouth since you came back. But it doesn’t matter. What I went through doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago. What matters is what’s happening to us now.” Hope surged in his eyes again.
She had to find a way to snuff it out. She forced her mind to count all the damage done. Baba’s body burned to the ground. The nurse, an innocent bystander, burned to the ground. Her ancestral home burned to the ground. Vikram’s career burned to the ground. A murder she had covered up, allowed to go unpunished. Generations of insanity coiled up inside her, waiting to spring lose.
The only kind of future they had together was more horrific than what they had already endured. Ria knew she would make the same choices again.
“Vikram, I would do the same thing again.”
He flinched, but instead of stepping away he stepped closer. “That’s not a lie either. But why?”
“Because I love what I do, that’s why. I love the fame and the fortune. It’s the greatest high there is.”
He threw back his head and laughed as if she’d given him exactly what he was waiting for. Then he leaned into her, bringing his face so close their breath mingled. “Bullshit.” She smelled the barest sting of alcohol. But she knew he was as sober as she was. “I’m calling bullshit on that one too. I bought your lies once, Ria. Not this time.”
This time? There was no “this time.” She searched desperately for something to turn things around. “What about Mira?” How could she have forgotten Mira? Now she clung to her like a drowning woman.
Vikram took a step back. “None of this has anything to do with Mira.” Guilt dulled the intensity in his eyes.
“How can you say that? It has everything to do with Mira. She’s your girlfriend.”
“Actually, she’s not anymore.” The guilt in his eyes grew so heavy he squeezed them shut. Thick dark lashes spiked from his lids.
“Oh God, Vikram, what did you do?”
He opened and closed his mouth, but he couldn’t bring himself to say what he was trying to say. Instead he said simply, “We broke up. Actually, she broke up with me. Two days ago.”
“That can’t be. She came to the store today.”
“Only because she wanted to talk, and I wanted to make sure she was okay and to let her know she should stay for the wedding if she wanted to. But she didn’t. She’s going to Michigan to spend some time at home. I’m not proud of what I did, but it’s over, Ria.”
She wanted to ask him what had happened, but something in his face told her she didn’t have the strength to hear it. Not right now. Not with his eyes on fire like that.
“And really, it was coming from the day you stepped into that basement.” He watched her face, the full strength of his focus back on her. “Actually, long before that. I had no business being with Mira. With anyone.”
She wanted to clamp her ears shut with her palms, but her arm
s had turned to lead. “No. That’s not true. She’s perfect for you. You said so yourself.”
“No, Ria, she’s not the one who’s perfect for me.”
A massive airless space formed inside Ria, tugging everything into it. This wasn’t happening. She turned away and headed back to the house, needing to get away from him.
He fell into step next to her and she sped up. “You can’t outrun this, Ria. Mira didn’t deserve to be caught in the middle of it. There’s no place in this for anyone but us.”
She climbed up the deck steps and stopped. She made herself turn around and look at him. He stood one step below her, eye to eye with her, the decision in those gray blue cystals a physical thing. “Vikram, listen to me.” She wanted to shake him. “Don’t do this. Don’t do this to yourself again.”
His eyes bored into her, his laser-like focus trapping her in place. It was a look she knew only too well. A look that was so him it made her light-headed with wanting. It was the kind of look most people got before they flew into a skydive, but one Vikram got every time he decided he wanted something.
“Too late,” he said just as Uma slid open the kitchen door and stuck her head out.
19
“Are you kids trying to kill me?” One look at Vikram and Uma slapped both hands around her cheeks. “I’m not thirty anymore, you know?”
“It’s a little scratch, Umu.” Ria hadn’t heard Vikram call Uma that since she’d come back, and it made Uma grin like a little girl. “Oh, and we aren’t ten anymore, so please stop acting like we hurt ourselves just to get your attention.” He dropped a kiss on Uma’s head and pushed her into a chair. “Coffee, anyone?” The look he threw Ria zinged straight down to her belly.
He was talking about coffee, for heaven’s sake. But it made her entire world careen on its edge as if they had taken a sharp turn in his monstrous truck and spun off a cliff. Her worst nightmare and all the dreams she’d been too afraid to dream tumbled on top of each other.
Uma had loved to tell them stories from Indian mythology when they were young. Tales from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, stories Ria had heard many years ago from Aji, but were often new to Nikhil and Vikram. Vikram had especially loved the Pandava prince, Arjun, the most heroic of heroes and the most legendary archer of all time.
“The royal guru was giving the princes a lesson on archery,” Uma had said as the three of them huddled around her on the bed. “He placed a wooden bird on a tree and asked each prince to load the bow and aim. Then he stopped them and asked them what they saw.”
Uma had waited for them to guess the answers.
“Why would an archer see anything but the bird’s eye he’s supposed to shoot?” Vikram had asked incredulously, ruining Uma’s punch line and making her laugh.
The other princes had seen the leaves on the trees, the clouds in the sky, the flowers in the meadow, but Arjun had seen only the bird’s eye. And so had Vikram.
Vikram moved to the coffeemaker, a new lightness in his step. All that sullenness that had clung to him like a disease, gone. All his defenses laid down, all of him laid so temptingly bare it made her as helpless as the leaves swirling in the wind outside the window. She had to find a way to wrap him back up, to protect him from the disaster he was hurtling toward.
She fidgeted with the carton of eggs sitting on the island.
“Will you make your spicy scrambled eggs, beta?” Vijay asked, bringing the newspaper to the table and sitting down next to Uma.
“Wow, the starlet’s making her spicy scrambled eggs?” Nikhil strolled into the kitchen in his pajamas and tugged Ria’s hair.
Ria hadn’t cooked in ten years, but she desperately needed something to do. She searched the kitchen for a frying pan.
Vikram came up behind her and placed the pan on the stove in front of her. His heat wrapped around her. His closeness mussed up her brain. But she was cooking for her family after ten years and somehow that made the world exactly as it should be. She tightened the cord of her kimono around her waist and took the coffee he handed her.
She started chopping onions, he started cracking eggs. She sautéed the onions, he whisked the eggs. She plucked toast out of the toaster, he buttered it. He poured the eggs into the pan and she stirred them into the onions, sprinkling in cumin and red chili powder. They moved together, they moved apart, synchronized as dancers, two halves of a whole. Warmth danced behind her lids. A smile bloomed in her heart.
Nikhil set the table, balancing the forks and knives in the center of the table like a tent, just like he had always done. The world clicked into place one more notch as the five of them took their places around the table. Everyone oohed and aahed about the eggs, and it led to reminiscing about their summers together, and Ria found herself soaking up every timeless detail, even the heat of Vikram’s thigh, inches from hers. He didn’t close the distance as he had always done, and need built in her belly like a monstrous thing.
She had to tell him how wrong he was, how his hope was hopeless. But Uma’s to-do list had taken on a desperate note in terms of priority with just three days to go, and so, they all got to work. Vikram was sent out with a grocery list that ironically enough included coconuts, Vijay and Nikhil went off to have their clothes altered, and Uma and Ria sat cross-legged on the family room floor and got busy wrapping gifts for the wedding guests, who were flying in from all over the world starting tomorrow.
Ria slipped the gifts Uma handed her into gift bags—saris for women, jewelry for girls, shirts for boys and men, and tablecloths for seniors—as Uma made notes in her notebook and stuck labels on the bags. All the while Ria searched for the resolve to tell Vikram once and for all that they had no chance in hell.
But two minutes after he came back home the doorbell rang, and the aunties streamed in, all four of them. Their husbands trailed behind them, their hands laden with platters of food, bottles of wine, and boxes overflowing with decorating supplies.
Vikram took a box from someone’s hand and caught Ria’s eye over a tangle of Christmas lights, and she knew he knew where her mind had been all afternoon. On him.
The aunties settled in, laying food out on the kitchen island and setting a pot of chai to boil. Soon they were all eating and talking and starting projects in groups around the kitchen—peeling and chopping vegetables, cutting and hemming fabric for table runners for the cocktail dinner, rolling out the sweet milk fudge pedhas that Uma had labored over for hours yesterday and wrapping them like candies in squares of cellophane to distribute after the wedding.
Anu looked at the tray of samosas and poked Vikram in the shoulder. “Remember those samosa-eating contests Nikhil and you used to have?”
“I’m still up for it,” Nikhil said. “But pretty boy here is probably too worried about his girlish figure.”
Vikram picked up a samosa and saluted Nikhil with it. “Pretty boy here can still kick your ass at pretty much any contest.” He popped the samosa whole into his mouth.
Nikhil did the exact same thing, perching on a bar stool next to Vikram. They proceeded to stuff obscene quantities of the savory pastries into their mouths, trash talking each other between grotesquely ill-mannered bites. Everyone stopped what they were doing and gathered around, clapping and cheering and whining about how unfair it was that these two could get away with eating like that without showing it around their waistlines.
Vijay pulled out the camera. Uma popped another tray of samosas into the oven. Nikhil and Vikram had had food contests involving everything from pizza to rotis to chocolate cake. Once, Uma had stood in front of the stove frying puffy dough puris for two hours before one of them had given up. How was it that so much had changed and yet nothing had?
Vikram saluted Nikhil with another cone-shaped pastry and took a giant bite. Nikhil tried to look like he was just getting started. Someone started taking bets. If she were the betting kind, Ria knew exactly whom to put her money on. Sure enough, a distinctly green pallor was starting to spread across Nikhil’s fac
e.
As the samosas on the second tray dwindled, Jen looked like she was going to throw up, and called a stop to the madness. “Don’t worry, Jen. Those two have had years of practice being stupid. They’ll be fine,” Ria said.
Vikram grinned at her like a little boy, and her own years of training at pushing her feelings away disappeared faster than the tray of samosas had.
Her fingers itched to wipe off the flaky crumb that clung to the corner of Vikram’s mouth. He pushed it into his mouth with an unsteady thumb. She backed away from his gaze and joined the group at the dining table putting finishing touches on the centerpieces.
As the aunties went back to their projects a sense of old-world femininity settled over the kitchen. The men started to stick out like sore thumbs, growing uncomfortable with the sewing baskets, the fabric cascading from the table, and the platters of candy twisted into pretty bows. Conversations started to shift to hormones and relationships, and the men fled.
They escaped into the yard, carrying their boxfuls of festive lights, and started their own project of decorating the house. For the next few hours the women huddled over their projects in the kitchen while the men decked the house with lights, laboring to transform it into a traditional wedding home, a lagna ghar, just like they would have done back in India. Some of the neighbors joined them, throwing their own Christmas lights in for good measure.
When they were done Vijay knocked on the kitchen window and beckoned the women to come outside and inspect their handiwork. Ria followed the aunties as they crowded onto the front lawn. The house looked like a bejeweled bride dripping from head to toe with twinkling gems. The aunties went into raptures and clutched their hearts. Their husbands beamed shamelessly.
The beauty of the house swirled around Ria like magic. She squeezed into Uma, hiding behind her. Her eyes swept the crowd, but she couldn’t see Vikram anywhere. She knew he had been helping with the lights because she had heard his voice and his laughter from the kitchen. Her eyes searched the yard, the driveway, the street. Finally, something tugged at her heart and she looked up. He was perched on the roof above the garage, his elbows resting on his knees, the twilit sky wrapped around him.