No wonder their female deities sometimes had so many arms. Men were impossible with their demands.
But she shouldn’t care about Rishi’s future wife. If there was a woman out there who could accept his requirements for what they were, good for him. A woman who would look into his shiny concrete eyes and see love in them. Somewhere. The poor thing would have to take a jackhammer to that cement stare, but somehow she’d find it.
The plane dipped low, taking her out of her thoughts of Rishi and his perfect bride, and the attendant announced they were making their descent toward the Bangalore airport.
Knowing the seat belt sign would come on any minute, she jumped up to go brush her teeth. As she walked toward the bathroom, she eyed Rishi, who was a few rows back, his face illuminated pale blue by the TV screen.
The bathroom overpowered her senses with its disinfectant smell that tried, and failed, to cover up the germs. She had gray shadows under her eyes, and her face was unusually pale. Or was it these lights? She looked green. All she needed was some coffee and to stay awake until the evening, and she should be good to go for the office tomorrow.
The flight landed, and Emma waited for Rishi at the gate. She powered on her phone, and gloriously, her international plan worked. A flood of emails and text messages filled her screen. She glanced through them and clicked on the one from Jas with an important flag on it.
Emma/Rishi,
I wanted to come to the airport to meet you both but had a meeting come up this morning I have to attend. Rishi, can you bring Emma to the office from the airport, and we’ll sort things out from there? She can meet the team and I’ll give her keys to her housing, etc. Sending a company car to get you. Thanks, Jas
Emma looked down at herself. Not only was her dress wrinkled from twenty-four hours in the air, but a smell also wafted from her that could only be described as eau d’airplane bathroom. This would not do. This was definitely not how she wanted to meet her new team, her new boss, and show them that she was capable of leading the project to success. Maybe she could grab her makeup bag, which also housed her deodorant, out of her suitcase.
People were pouring around her from the flight like she was a boulder in a sea of humanity. In a moment, Rishi was standing before her, also looking at his phone.
“Jas wants us to go . . . ,” they started to say at the same time.
Of course. Emma pressed her lips together. It should have been funny. She should’ve been laughing. But she felt stiff and her limbs unmovable, almost like she had no control over her body. Like his mere presence stressed her out.
“So I’ll meet you at the baggage after customs?” he asked, sounding as excited as she was. The most reluctant welcome wagon.
“Sure.” It felt like a moment when they should have been parting ways, but in reality they still had to walk together, down the long hallway to customs.
After a beat, Emma started and Rishi fell in beside her, looking through his phone and typing.
“Do you live near the office?” Emma asked.
“Uh, no. I’m not particularly excited about going there first. Traffic here is insane,” he huffed out.
“Well, I can just go by myself, I’m sure. It’s fine.” He didn’t need to act like it was such a major inconvenience to her. She would be fine if he left now.
“I’m not going to defy Jas by letting you go by yourself. He’ll wonder what happened to me.”
“I’ll just tell him you wanted to go home.”
“Emma, he asked me to take you.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but it’s not like you need to take me. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”
“I’m aware, trust me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” They’d reached the point where the lines parted. One for foreign nationals and one for Indian citizens.
He just smiled and walked into the Indian citizens line.
Fire breathed out of her nose. Or at least what felt like fire. Like he literally made her blood boil, and her lungs needed to filter it out before she exploded. She was still watching him walk away into his line when someone hit her backpack while walking behind her. She couldn’t let Rishi distract her. She just needed him for his skills—that was all. There were other people on the team. She didn’t have to spend all her time with him.
She met him outside customs, and beside him were both her bag and his.
“Thanks for getting my bag,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s the only bright-blue one, so it was easy to spot.” He rolled it over to her. “Ready?”
“Let’s go.” The glass doors slid open, revealing the outside world. Emma blinked as she stepped out into the sunlight, half-blinded and half-trying to welcome its vitamin D to her parched skin. But it wasn’t just the sun that was dazzling. Diamonds and gold flashed on billboards. The glint of the airport’s massive glass walls sliced through the light. Sifting dirt and construction in the distance even sparkled somehow. Saris in a kaleidoscope of silk occasionally swished past her.
And the honking. The honking was everywhere.
Her new world was intense, loud, colorful, glittering, and refusing to relent on even one of her senses.
A muggy heat seared her skin and forced her breath down into her throat. Her stomach turned on itself as she eyed her surroundings. A coffee shop across the parking lot lured her from a distance.
Coffee, the sweet nectar of the jet lag gods.
A wind blew, the smell of heat masking something earthy and pungent. Everyone around her was being greeted by drivers with official uniforms or family members excited to see their husbands, wives, and children. More uniformed men lined the inside and outside of the Bangalore airport, holding signs with names typed in a large font. She was examining them all, and apparently so was Rishi.
“Do you see our ride?” she asked Rishi.
“No, I’m calling.” He already had his phone against his ear and then was talking to someone in not-English. “The driver is stuck in traffic.” Rishi turned around and put his phone back in his pocket.
The coffee shop across the parking lot caught her eye again, glowing as if the heavens were beaming down on it; her mind was playing tricks on her, promising a taste of how good it would feel on her tongue. So good. Milky and dark and caffeinated. “Do you mind if I get a coffee?”
He looked behind him. “I can get you one.”
“No, it’s okay. I can pay for it—”
He swatted the air behind him as he walked toward the shop. “Just watch our stuff.”
She searched her purse for a mirror. A crumbly old compact was still in there. She opened it and wiped the powder off the mirror.
Puffy and blotchy, her pale skin showed every emotion in varying hues of clown-cheek crimson. She took the bottle of water from the plane she’d been rationing off, sip by sip, and splashed some on her face.
A throat cleared behind her. She whipped around, water droplets still clinging to her cheeks.
“Your coffee?” Rishi held out a cup toward her.
“Thanks,” she said as she took the two-inch-high cup from him. She held it at eye level, trying to hide her disappointment when she really wanted sixteen ounces of latte to jump-start her mind into catching up with her senses. Honking cars and masses of people streamed past, across, and alongside them. The language was mostly unfamiliar, some the same flavor of English she recognized from her colleagues at work. Her mind needed to process all of this, and it was on a thirty-second delay. She took a sip. The coffee tasted like it was 50 percent sugar.
“I got you our famous South Indian coffee, and you don’t like it?” He sounded seriously offended.
Jordana always told her she could never hide her feelings—they just popped up on her face like an unwelcome visitor—and she could only guess at the kind of grimace that was gracing her face now. “It’s fine. Just sweet. I don’t drink sugar in my coffee.”
“Just fine? I can’t believe you don’t like it.” He took a
drink, and a hungry kind of hum vibrated in his throat that she would almost have described as sexual. He must really have missed that coffee.
The dirty truth was that Emma was a creature of habit, of routine. She craved the predictability of her Sunday-morning latte being made the same way by her favorite barista, and of the Science section of the New York Times sitting on her doorstep every Tuesday. She loved taking the bus to work because it was on a punctual schedule that somehow defied Seattle traffic. Of course, she’d have to adapt to living in a new country with new kinds of coffee, noise, cars, language, and—if the billboards near the airport exit could be believed—people dripping with diamonds and silk. But she thought this would involve a gradual change and not hit her all at once. Not in the first ten minutes she stood outside the airport.
She threw the coffee back like a shot of whiskey. Her nerves buzzed, forced awake by newness and the excessively sweet coffee trying to jolt her senses to attention, when all they yearned for was a bed.
Rishi’s phone rang. “Driver’s here.”
They got in the car, left the airport, and headed onto the highway. Emma gripped the bar above the window as the car surged into one lane and then back into the next. Outside the window was a blur of the fascinating and unfamiliar. The motorcycles and scooters wove in and out of the cars as if the riders were on a dare. One motorcycle carried a family of four. Black smoke from auto-rickshaw exhaust pipes puffed out like a hacking cough. The hem of the passenger’s blue sari, the rich hue of a peacock’s chest, fluttered out the side, sequins catching the light. Dust billowed along the sides of the road behind the vehicle. Bright-pink bougainvillea hung down the sides of a cement wall. Her eyes took it all in—the glorious contrast of an electric rainbow against a dull-beige background. This would be her new life.
“What do you think of Bangalore so far?” Rishi asked. So casually. Like landing in Bangalore had transformed him into a normal person.
“I’m really excited. I love Indian food.” The car lunged around an auto-rickshaw, and the driver honked as he squeezed in between it and a motorcycle.
“You like spicy food?”
“I do. I always ask for three stars at Indian restaurants in the US.”
“In India, restaurants don’t ask how many stars you want to dumb down the spice. You should try Hyderabadi biryani. See if you can handle it,” he said.
She could handle anything this guy threw at her. “Oh, I can handle it.” She tried to sound as confident as possible, even through the driver’s manic swerving around the traffic.
“Really? It’s super hot. So, what do you actually know about India?” he asked. “You aren’t scared about all the cobras and scorpions we have?” He bit down on his lip like he was trying to keep from laughing.
What game was Rishi playing? “I mean, it’s not like they’re all over the place, right?”
“Well, not everywhere,” he said, looking out the window. “But they’re there.”
She rolled her eyes. What did he think he was going to do? Have her write his stupid marriage code for him and then scare her back to Seattle?
“And I’ve heard there’s still bubonic plague.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Somewhere. And leprosy. And malaria. I hope you’re prepared.”
It didn’t say anything about cobras in Bangalore in her guidebook. Or did it? The other things she’d been assured weren’t really issues. She couldn’t worry about snakes when she had an entire new world to adapt to. The clogged-up, whiplash-inducing traffic seemed more dangerous than a cobra at this point.
“We’re here,” Rishi’s voice piped up again as they slowed down.
Emma’s gaze shifted to the other side of the street. The tech park in Bangalore jutted up stories above the other buildings, proclaiming, in glass and steel, its position of power in the world of technology. The power-supply tower was protected by barbed wire, and set back off the road were ten-story buildings with words like Dell, Microsoft, and Google plastered on the sides.
Several women with low-handled brooms swept the road with broad, bored strokes. The dust had no place to go, though, except back out to the street, to be swept again. Emma stared after them as the car descended into the parking garage, ferrying them away from the chaotic reality of the outside world.
The car pulled into an empty space in the garage. They both got out and walked to the trunk, which the driver popped open.
“Can I just get my bag out?” Rishi asked him, and then he turned to Emma. “You can leave your suitcase in here and get it when you leave.” He tilted his head as he examined it. “It’s really big.”
The driver started to shut the trunk, and she stopped him. Deodorant. Makeup. Double standards. There was no way she could meet her team looking like she did now. “Wait, I need something first.” They should be in a plastic zippered bag, easy to find. She’d stuck it on top, the last thing she’d packed.
Emma unzipped the side of the suitcase, which was squeezed in the small space the hatchback allowed for it to fit. She submerged her arm and couldn’t feel for it. “I need to get the suitcase out.”
She tried to heave the bag out. But it was stuck. The driver edged in, gripped the sides, and pulled hard, almost falling backward. As the suitcase dislodged, a few things spilled out on the parking garage floor from where she had opened the zipper—a shirt, underwear, and a book. She grabbed the underwear first, hoping he hadn’t seen it, and stuffed it in her pocket. But Emma hadn’t packed a book, besides her travel guide, and she definitely didn’t recognize the art on the cover.
The Kama Sutra?
Rishi stifled a laugh at the cover lying on the ground mere inches from his feet, an illustration of two lovers intertwined in an embrace.
“That’s not mine.” Emma pointed at it like it was a dead rat on the floor. Was this some kind of jet-lagged nightmare? She couldn’t imagine having a rougher start to a working relationship than what she and Rishi had already had, and now this? She looked like an American character out of a bad comedy who took this job to have her own Eat, Pray, Love experience with a side helping of stereotypical sex guide.
It couldn’t get worse than this.
“That’s not mine. I don’t know how it got there.” She somehow managed to get the words out, ignoring her heart as it threatened to lurch out of her chest. She snatched it off the ground and stuffed it back in the suitcase.
As she bent over, her body was seized with the sudden urge to stay squatting on the garage floor, to stay curled up like one of those roly-poly insects, feigning paralysis. She’d turn mute, and someone would rush her back to the airport. They’d want someone who didn’t hallucinate the Kama Sutra emerging from her bag, like a curse from the breakup fairy telling her to Get back out there, sport.
She could hear Jordana’s last words to her in her head. “Half a billion men . . .”
This had to have been her doing.
She glanced up at Rishi. He was biting his bottom lip to keep from laughing.
“Rishi, I swear, it’s not mine.” She replaced her shirt, grabbed her makeup bag, and zipped her suitcase closed before setting it upright. The driver awkwardly took it from her and put it back in the car.
“Sure.” That stupid smirk on his face. Those concrete eyes about to crack with laughter.
“I swear,” she insisted.
“Oh, and I totally believe you. The Kama Sutra often sneaks into my luggage when I’m least expecting it.”
She couldn’t even shoot him a look. Of course he didn’t believe her, and why should he? The book had shot out of her bag like a big, hardcover sex cannonball.
She stood up, unable to even look at him. She’d have to ignore what happened and hope he’d just forget. “Where are we going?”
“Just follow me.” He gave her the biggest smile she’d seen from him yet. And this time it was real, full of absolute glee, and completely directed at her.
CHAPTER 12
Rishi couldn’t believe it. As he pressed the
elevator button to go up, he chuckled to himself, shaking his head. The Kama Sutra? Was it supposed to be her guidebook?
He glanced over at her. She was fully immersed in her phone, her cheeks red, and she still refused to make eye contact.
The elevator dinged and opened. “Jas is hopefully in his office now. We’ll check there first.”
“Wait, can I go to the bathroom first?”
“Uh, yeah.” He led her down the first hall and gestured to the bathroom doors. She disappeared inside. Maybe he could just leave her. Go find some coffee, his friends. She could figure out her way around the office. No one had given him a tour on his first day. He shouldn’t have been stuck as her escort. Not cool, Jas. He should have let him mourn his lost promotion without sticking the person who’d gotten it right in his face.
Rishi looked at his watch. Ten minutes. She must have been taking a shower in there.
Now Rishi had to go. He might as well, if she wasn’t coming out. He ran in and splashed water on his face. He looked like a zombie. He should have tried to sleep more on the plane. And the smell. It wasn’t as bad as the bathroom stench that had woven itself into his clothes last time, but it wasn’t pleasant either. He had a sink and soap. Might as well use them. He took his shirt off and washed his armpits. At least that was a little better. Now he just needed coffee. Coffee alternating with naps. As he dried off the water with a paper towel, the door cracked open.
“Rishi?” Emma’s eyes locked with his, and then her mouth paused, half-open, as she stared at his shirtless torso.
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