The Bollywood Bride

by Sonali Dev

  “I crushed Vic’s dreams? Was I the one who lured him in? Used my body to trap him? Was I the one who ruined his career? Almost ruined his life?” How could the woman’s voice be this calm, this controlled, when she was spewing such venom?

  “You threatened to cut off all ties with your son if I stayed with him. You threatened to disown him, to never see his face again. As if he were a sick pet you could put down and forget about. You threatened to take everything away from him when he needed you the most.”

  “He needed us? Or you needed us? And it worked, didn’t it? Without our support, you didn’t want him either. Where did your love go then? Who wants a penniless boy when you can have fame and fortune, right?”

  Ria was shaking too hard now and she didn’t care if Chitra saw it. “Fame and fortune?” she asked, her voice trembling. “Fame and fortune?” she repeated the words, spitting them out and throwing them up in the air as if they were hot coals she was trying to juggle. Her voice turned more and more high-pitched with each rendition. Chitra took a step back.

  “If fame was what I wanted, you think I needed to leave Vikram for it? If fortune was my dream, you think Vikram would have stood in my way? He wouldn’t have left me no matter what I wanted to be. He would’ve stood by me no matter what.”

  “And yet you chose to dump him like so much garbage. You took the easy way out. You could’ve ignored me. You didn’t have to do as I asked. You could have struggled to build a life with him. But it was easier to open your legs and get what you wanted instantly, wasn’t it? God knows you had enough practice.”

  Everything turned hot and black and singed. Chitra’s blue-gray eyes sparkled with triumph and an intense urge to smash her angel head into the wall behind her overcame Ria. She pictured blood running down her hands as she kept slamming, unable to stop. She backed away from Chitra, putting distance between them as fast as she could, her fists clenched so tight her fingers numbed, her jaw clenched so hard her teeth ground out dust in her mouth.

  “You have no answer for that, do you?” Chitra goaded, her sari billowing in the wind, her petite form turning gigantic and distorted in Ria’s vision.

  “Are you really that stupid?” Ria hissed through the physical, tangible heat of her breath. “Can you really not figure it out on your own? Didn’t you ever wonder why I never told Vikram about your threats? Don’t you wonder why he still doesn’t know? Why I still haven’t told him, all these years later, when I have nothing left to lose?”

  Chitra took a quick step back, wobbling slightly on her heels. The triumph in her eyes popped like a bubble. No, Chitra wasn’t stupid. Fear flooded her eyes as understanding dawned on her. Ria wanted to get away from her, but she couldn’t stop now. This too had to end today.

  “It was never about you. Never about your threats. Never about keeping you from disowning Vikram and throwing him out. It was about keeping him from throwing you out of his life. Even today, I can take your son away from you with one word.” She snapped her fingers in Chitra’s face. “If he ever finds out what you did, you’ll never see him again. You’ll lose him forever.” She watched terror spread across Chitra’s face and drew strength from it. “Fortunately for you, I would never do that to him. I am the only reason you still have your son.”

  Chitra had gone as white as the clouds streaking the blue sky behind her—all the fight squeezed out of her silk-wrapped body like a deflated balloon. A wisp of tinder that Ria could ignite with just one spark. And it made Ria sick to her stomach. Evil as Chitra was, she had to be better than the mother-shaped hole that had defined her own life. Hard as it was to imagine right now, even someone like Chitra for a mother had to be better than the indelible scars Ria carried on her body and the desperate craving and shame she had lived with all her life.

  Chitra was Vikram’s mother and the thought of losing him made all her arrogance, all her brutal machinations go up in smoke. Vikram had that. Ria would never have that. How could she take that away from him after everything else she had already taken?

  Suddenly all her anger, every ounce of her strength dissipated, leaving her drained. Chitra stared at her—her Vikram-shaped mouth hanging open.

  “Are you going to tell him?” she asked, her voice paper thin with fear.

  Disgust rose in Ria’s chest. She wanted the same thing Chitra wanted—to protect Vikram from the unforgiving secrets of her past, from the inevitable violence of her future. But she’d be damned if she gave Chitra the satisfaction of knowing that. “If you ever threaten me again, or if you ever try to control Vikram in any way, I’ll make sure you lose him forever.” She turned around and walked away.

  This time Chitra didn’t follow her. “Are you going to tell him?” She called from behind Ria, as persistent as her son.

  “No. But I’m going to rip his heart to bits,” Ria mumbled to herself. “Good luck picking up the pieces.”

  Ria pushed the heavy metal door with all her strength and it swung open. She stepped into the lobby and slammed it shut behind her, needing a physical barrier to separate her from the woman she hated almost as much as she loved her son. She never wanted to be faced with either of them ever again.

  Across the lobby she saw an elevator open and rushed to it, reaching it just as it started to slide shut. She slipped in through the closing doors and started pounding on the Door-Close button as if this entire mess was its fault and not hers. But it didn’t respond, didn’t recognize her desperation. The mirrored doors took their time to make their way across the wide opening with lazy grace. A far too familiar hand wedged itself into the closing gap and the doors slid open again.

  Vikram stepped in. Ria tried to rush back out, but his arms wrapped around her and held her in place. The doors closed, this time too fast. The elevator started to move. He tried to turn her in his arms, but she lurched away from him.

  “Okay, that’s it. Game over, Ria. What’s going on?” Patience laced his voice, and strength, so much strength.

  The shaking started again. Maybe it hadn’t stopped at all. She had to do this right now. If she wanted to get away from him she had to get the words out. He wasn’t going to let her go until she got the words out.

  “You’re right, game’s over.” She tried to imagine the heat of the set lights on her skin, but the ice wrapped around her was too thick. She willed it to harden in her veins and hold her up.

  “What is that supposed to mean? Will you at least look at me?” The muscles in his forearms flexed as he controlled the reflex to reach for her again. “Sweetheart, at least look at me. Please. Tell me what’s wrong. We can fix this.”

  No, we can’t. God, if only we could.

  The elevator stopped. Ria rushed out and kept walking, Vikram hot on her heels.

  “There’s nothing to fix. I should never have let this happen. I should never have let you suck me in again. I have to get back to Mumbai. I have a movie starting next week. I’m leaving tonight.”

  “Like hell you are.” He stopped mid-step, his voice no longer gentle. “You’re not going anywhere.” His words slashed like a whip against her back.

  She had to stop. She had to do this. “Don’t, Vikram,” she said, turning around. “Don’t do this. You can’t stop me. You knew I wouldn’t stay. You knew I had to go back to my life in the end. The wedding’s over. It’s done. I was always supposed to leave after that. That was always the plan. You complicated everything by starting this up again and now it’s going to turn into a huge mess.”

  “Like hell I started it,” he said. “And don’t call me Vikram. I hate it.” She could see his control slipping, see the age-old anger and hurt kindle back to life inside him.

  She stoked it. It was her only hope. “Believe whatever you want. But you did start it. You came after me. You were the first man in my life, my first relationship, and those are always easy to fall back into. But I have a movie to shoot and—”

  “Ria, cut the crap. What’s going on? The truth, plain and simple. Something’s scared the sh
it out of you, what is it, sweathear—?”

  “Of course I’m scared. Nikhil, Uma Atya, Vijay Kaka, they’re going to kill me. If you run off and do something stupid again, they’re going to blame me for it and I’ll never be able to face them again.” The words flowed fast, spurting from her, fuelled by the force of her mounting fear.

  His breath sped up, came in spurts. He didn’t want to believe her, but they had those ten years between them, and they overpowered him. She watched him turn twenty again, watched him fight it.

  “Are you crazy?” he asked. “Weren’t you there yesterday? Weren’t you back there in the linen room just now? Where’s that person I made love with? Where are you, Ria?” He tried to look into her eyes again. But she couldn’t bring herself to let him. His voice rose. “How can you do this? Haven’t you learned anything? You’ll never find this again.” He waved his hand between them, tracing that invisible arc, that bloody invisible arc that was her noose, her lifeline. “There’s no more of it out there, Ria. Can’t you fight for it? Can’t you fight for us? Whatever it is you’re so damn terrified of. Whatever the fuck it is. Isn’t this bigger?”

  His chest pumped, his sherwani caught the fluorescent light in silken flashes. His hair stood in spikes after umpteen assaults from his fingers.

  “Ria?” He searched her face, lost, in shock, desperate for answers.

  But her words were gone. She was wrung dry, empty. Words that were afraid of everyone else had never been afraid of him. Now he was their greatest fear.

  His hands balled into fists, pushing against defeat, refusing to back down. Remnants of hope mingled with such pain in his eyes, shame burned through what was left of her.

  “Just tell me what it is. Just open your mouth and tell me what the hell it is.” His eyes beseeched her, opening up until each glistening crystal exposed his soul. He could take anything. He would pay any price, walk away from his family, his work, give up everything that mattered to him, give up being a father without so much as a thought. He wouldn’t leave her, not when she turned into an animal, not when she turned his home into a mausoleum, not even when she set him on fire. This she knew with as much certainty as she knew she was alive. And she would never let that happen.

  Every cell in her body hardened with purpose. With every fiber of her being she shut him out, and she knew the precise moment when he saw it. If his eyes had bled thick, black liquid pain, his hurt couldn’t have been more visible to her.

  “Fine,” he said when the silence between them had stretched out long enough that he knew it was impregnable, knew she was immovable.

  When he spoke again, his voice had a deadly finality to it. “So again, you’ve made up your mind. You get to decide. I don’t get a say.” Anger suffused some of the pain in his eyes. “If you can still hear me. If any of this is still reaching you, I want you to listen very carefully. I told you this once before—I won’t chase you again. I can’t. If you can throw this away, if you can live without it, then go. But if you leave me now, if you run from us again, it’s over. Finished. Don’t bother coming back. Ever. You hear me? Never again. If you walk away from me now, you will never see me again.”

  He waited for her to respond, his body locked in place, his chest stock still. No breath entered or left him, every part of him focused on her answer as if all he had to do was want it badly enough and it would be his.

  “Ria?”

  Nothing.

  Finally he lifted her chin, unsteady fingers forcing her to meet his eyes. She lifted her eyelids and let him look. He searched the charred emptiness left inside her. She wasn’t afraid to let him look anymore, because there was nothing left there to hide except the leftover scraps of her. He pulled his hand back, letting her go, unable to bear what he saw. And it finally pushed him away.

  When she walked away from him, he didn’t try to stop her.

  Where Vikram went after that, she didn’t know. She was barely conscious of her own actions. Somehow she got herself through the rest of the day. Nikhil and Jen tried to talk to her before they left, but she had this down to an art. No one stood a chance. No one would get through to her and they wouldn’t even know it. She didn’t say good-bye. She couldn’t. They would find her gone tomorrow at the reception. She would make up for it later. Later, when she knew how.

  The only person she spoke to was Uma. The only person who would understand that she had to go, without forcing her to come up with reasons neither one of them believed. “I have to go, Uma Atya, it can’t wait.” She dug the words out with all the strength she had left.

  “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?” It was all Uma said when Ria allowed herself one last pleasure of letting Uma hold her close when she said good-bye.

  Ria would have given anything to be able to talk to Uma, to put her mind at ease. But the words were all gone. Lost forever. There was only silence inside her. She could find only one word to whisper into Uma’s hair before letting her go. It rose up inside her and slipped from her lips. “Aie,” she said, and then she wrapped it up in the feel of Uma’s softness and took it away with her.

  27

  Mumbai

  DJ threw the drapes open, and Ria blinked and pulled the white cotton quilt up to her chin. Bright light rushed in through the windows and pierced daggers into her head. She crossed her arms over her eyes. Pain shot from her elbows.

  Why was DJ in her bedroom? “How are you feeling?” he asked, and Ria had to clear the fuzz in her brain to know what he was talking about.

  He put a cup of tea on the nightstand and leaned over to help her up. She pushed him away and sat up by herself, picking up the cup. The tea tasted like dishwater. Ria wanted coffee, with the perfect balance of cream and sugar and mellow bitterness. And a strong, steady hand to slide the cup toward her. She pressed her hand against the pain in her heart and straightened against the headboard. A more bearable pain spasmed in her back and smarted in her elbows, her knees, the side of her face, and the memory of that night came back to her. How long ago had that been?

  “Do you need a painkiller?” DJ asked, frowning at her.

  She shook her head. The pain felt good.

  “Are you going to tell me what you were thinking, doing something so stupid?” He gave her the famous DJ glower. She had forgotten it.

  The journey back to Mumbai had gone by in a blur. It had felt in part like the blink of an eye and in part like an eternity. Coming out of Mumbai airport Ria had been so numb, so disconnected from herself, she had forgotten that she should wait inside the terminal for DJ to come and get her. She had walked straight out of the airport, meaning to hail a cab. It had taken less than a minute for the mob to collect, and another minute for them to start pulling and tugging at her. Touching her hair, her clothes, groping parts of her she did not want anyone to touch ever again.

  By the time she realized what she had done, it was too late to get herself to safety. Fortunately, DJ had been nearby looking for her. It had taken the combined strength of him, his driver, and two security guards to pull the mob off Ria and pick her up off the sidewalk, where she sat on her knees, her face pressed into the concrete with her hands over her head, her clothes ripped, her skin gouged off, mauled and bleeding.

  DJ had asked over and over again how she could do something as stupid as that. She had no idea how to tell him that she had forgotten who she was. That she had forgotten everything she had been before she left. That she would never be any of those things again. She had no idea how to tell him how being torn on the outside was nothing compared to how she felt on the inside.

  DJ stared at her, waiting for an answer. The impatience in his eyes pushed at the deadening sadness inside her. She knew she should answer him, but forming words was taking too much effort these days.

  “Sorry,” she said, forcing the word out and then coughing from the effort it took.

  He waited for more, but she looked away and took another sip of the dishwater.

  “ ‘Sorry,’ that’s al
l I get?”

  He wanted more? Maybe “I’m really sorry” would help. Again, she tried to say the words, but nothing came out.

  “Ria, it’s been four days since you came back and I’ve got a total of five words out of you. What’s wrong, babes? What happened in Chicago?”

  Ria wanted to laugh. Now there was a question worth sinking her teeth into, a question words had been invented for. He was a busy man. “How much time do you have?” she wanted to ask him.

  “What the hell is funny?” Concern flooded his face. He waited for an answer, then gave up.

  “Ria, it’s past noon. You were supposed to be at a meeting with the director at ten this morning. I’ve called you a hundred times. Don’t you answer your phone anymore? Where is it?”

  She had no idea where her phone was.

  He started to walk around her room looking for it. “Listen, babes, you have to snap out of it, whatever it is. You’ve never missed an appointment, what is—” He picked up the pillow next to her and found the phone under it. “It’s completely out of power.” He glared at the phone and started hunting for something else. “He’s rescheduled it. But only because it’s you. And because I spent all morning pacifying him.” He found a charger and plugged the phone in. “We need to get there in an hour. Shit! Look at you! Ria? Get out of bed, please!”

  He started to yank the sheets off her and she grabbed them in horror. She felt the sheet slide off her. Felt her bare body beneath it. Saw one of Viky’s eyes open as he laughed at her absurd bashfulness. Frantically, she pulled the sheet to her chin, reached under the sheets, and ran a hand over herself, touching her clothes to make sure they were there. Her cotton shirt bunched beneath her fingers. Relief and embarrassment flooded through her, crashing against the pain wedged so tight inside her she was amazed she could feel anything else.

  DJ looked at her funny again—a scared, pitying look you saved for rabid strays on their way to the pound. Ria forced herself to swing her legs off the bed and stood. Behind her DJ picked up the sheets that fell to the floor as she dragged herself to the bathroom. She hadn’t showered in days, didn’t remember the last time she had left the bed. She could smell herself, sticky and sour.