Bollywood and the Beast (Bollywood Confidential) Read online

  He shrugged one elegant shoulder. “During the half an hour she and your mother were shopping, I was shopping as well. For insurance. Her computer, her second mobile and the last paper copies are also in my boot.”

  “What?”

  Kamal just slid his mirrored sunglasses down and let her stare at her own dropped jaw.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Caroline Varma was a beautiful woman. He’d known many in his time; he could still objectively make that distinction. Rocky shared many of her features—her slim build and short height—but Caroline was a full gori, blond and white and fair and lovely. Were she twenty years younger, someone would have snapped her up for an item song or a big, splashy masala number.

  “Mr. Khan,” she called him now, as if he were a schoolteacher or a solicitor. “I want to talk to you about my daughter.”

  He’d known she would, sooner or later. Though they had become compatriots of sorts while taking care of Nina, they were clearly adversaries once more. Ashu had been home barely one night, and the truce was broken. “So I was mistaken in thinking you would ask me about my roses?”

  She was not amused. And, like her daughter, she did not rise to the bait. Nahin, she was all business, sitting down across from him as she’d, no doubt, sat across from Nina two days prior.

  “I don’t know what you’re playing at with her, but the last thing Rocky needs in her life right now is some antisocial has-been who never leaves his house. What kind of life can you give her? I know my Rocky. She’s had to face a lot, growing up in an interracial, interfaith household…and, trust me, it was no picnic for any of us. She never let any of that faze her. She has the most open heart in the world, and she will stick by you no matter what. But the world isn’t that kind, Mr. Khan. All they’ll see when they look at the two of you is Beauty and the Beast. Is that what you want for her? A lifetime of whispers and pity?”

  “I think you’re gorgeous, Taj…and I just want everyone to see what I do.”

  It was not what he wanted for her. More than that, it was not what he wanted for them together.

  The doors to Taj’s bedroom were wide open. Teasing her. Saying, “Come over the threshold, little girl,” like the spider to the fly. It was the middle of the day. Usha was leading a parade of sweeping girls through the haveli like an army battalion. It just wouldn’t be smart. So Rocky was trying her best to ignore the devious voices. When Taj set down the TV remote and turned to her, it was a very welcome distraction.

  “How good is your cinema history, Rakhee?” His voice was no less devious, pouring out her given name like a slow spill of honey. But there was an ominous note in there, too, that instantly straightened her spine. “Do you know Suraiya? She fell in love with a Hindu. Her costar in many films.”

  “I know. It was Dev Anand, right?” Rocky was infinitely glad for her habit of doing her movie homework, even if the lack of high-speed Internet here made it far more difficult. “He saved her from drowning and it was totally romantic. Are you implying this is a metaphor for our relationship because my dad is Hindu, and you’re…”

  “Godless?” Taj suggested with a cynical quirk of his mouth.

  “Ha-ha.” She made a face. “You don’t need to save me. I’ve never drowned. I was on swim team in high school.”

  “Nahin. Your head is above the water.” He kissed the top, as if to punctuate the fact. “But their love was not enough. It couldn’t combat society; it could not fight her family. He proposed, but they were never allowed to marry. Soon, they were forbidden even to work together. She loved him the rest of her days, and she died an old woman alone, unwed.”

  “That’s awful.” More than awful. Taj certainly had a way of collecting tragedies like other people collected stamps or porcelain dolls. “But I still don’t see why you brought this up. It’s not the 1950s anymore, and no one’s running my life.”

  He stroked her hair, pushing errant strands back before taking one unruly ringlet and tugging on it. “Is that true? Do you think your father wants you to stay with me here, in the Beast’s garden?” The rhetorical questions zinged. “Will Caroline approve of me as her son-in-law? Will you ferry back and forth from here to Mumbai for every party, every function and every project? Don’t be foolish, Rakhee. Zara socho. Think,” he urged. “Dev Anand felt love again. He moved forward. He had a wife and a son and a long, healthy career. I’m the one who can’t swim, Rocky. I am the one who can’t fight fate. And it is you who will have to move on.”

  “Wh-what?” Somewhere in the middle of his big, martyrous speech, ice replaced the blood in her veins. She slipped from his arms, backing up until her butt hit the arm of the couch. “Where is this coming from, Taj? I mean, we haven’t really talked about the future at all. I know you. You don’t even want to think about tomorrow. So, why would you even say—” And, just like that, Rocky knew. “Mom said something to you, didn’t she?”

  “Arré. Stop it.” Taj grabbed her ankle, slowly tugging her back across the cushions to him. “She is worried for you. She should be worried for you.”

  “Why are you defending her again?” She gawked at him like he was a legitimate freak show. “Why are you on her side?”

  He hadn’t growled at her like a monster in a long time. But he did now. Frustrated and worried and hurting. “Because I am thirty-five years old and have no face, no life, and you are twenty-one and have the whole world open for your exploration.”

  “Do I have to point out again that it’s not the 1950s? I’m not stuck here,” she reminded him. “Yes, I can take planes back and forth between Delhi and Bombay. Businessmen do it all the time. And I can go anywhere in the rest of the world, too…and come back and tell you all about it. Get this place wired for Internet, and I can show you. Did you know they’ve invented phones that take pictures and video, or do you insist on carrier pigeons as part of your whole recluse thing?”

  He scowled, and it cut even deeper grooves on either side of his mouth. “It is not funny, Rocky.”

  “No, it’s not, Taj.” She straddled his knees, taking his hands in hers and squeezing them tight. “It breaks my heart. I hate that you don’t think you have a future. I hate that you think I could have a future without you in it. And I hate that you think you don’t have a face. I love your face,” she whispered. “I love what’s behind it.”

  He pressed his forehead against their combined fingers. “Don’t. Please…please, don’t.” It was as close to a prayer as she’d ever heard him come.

  “Too late.” She snuggled closer, pressing her lips to his temple, and then to the steeple their fingertips created. “Like I said the day we met: you’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

  He shook with suppressed emotion. Mirth. Tears. There was no way he was allowing her to know, with his head bowed and his eye mutinously shut. “That is what I am afraid of, sweet Rocky,” was all he said. “It is precisely what I fear.”

  It wasn’t what he needed to be afraid of.

  No. What he needed to fear was the exact opposite.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  It had been days, maybe weeks, since she’d found herself in the gardens. Literally. Rocky had found herself amid the rosebushes and flowering trees—become this happy, whole person in Taj’s arms. And being there without him felt vaguely sacrilegious. Like she was cheating on him with jasmine, betraying him with the marigolds. But it was also quiet and fragrant and open. A patch of brightness attached to a dark, still oppressive, house. Perfect for a love song with an aerial camera that spun and spun.

  She breathed in. Breathed deep. And almost choked when a hand came down on her shoulder.

  “Rocky Mem?”

  Kamal’s gentle query did nothing to add the five years back on her life, and she was still off-kilter and gasping when she whirled around to face him. “Kamal! Jesus! Wear a bell, why don’t you?”

  “It has been suggested before.” A faint smile tugged at the corner of his somber mouth even as his dour, dark eyes telegraphed an
apology. He echoed it aloud. “So very sorry. I did not mean to startle you.”

  Then what did he mean? Rocky still didn’t know what to make of this enigma who meant so much to Taj and Ashraf. She and Kamal had seldom spoken over the course of the past eight weeks, despite living in the same house and caring for the same men. Even after their quasi-surveillance mission at the restaurant, Kamal was almost as much a stranger now as he’d been on day one.

  “Were you looking for me or something?” she wondered, once she had a decent grasp on her equilibrium. He looked like he’d just come from outside—a jacket thrown over what looked like a scrub shirt, half-tucked into a pair of jeans. No scarf this time. It was more casual than she’d ever seen him dress. And he managed to make it look like a suit of armor.

  “Did you need to be found?” he countered, almost frighteningly on par with what she’d been thinking just before his interruption.

  There was something almost unearthly about him. And not just the ninja-like way he moved. It was his calm and his confidence, and how he seemed to know so many things intuitively. Kamal was somehow…more. But he was human. She knew that. Because how he felt about Ashu was visceral and mortal and real. It was how she loved Taj. With everything. With too much. “I don’t need finding,” she assured him. “I know exactly where I am.”

  He stared down at her, remote and unapproachable. A statue made of flesh. And then he flinched. “Then you are the only one of the two of us, Rocky Mem.”

  “Just Rocky,” she corrected, not liking the formality of Mem and how it repeatedly marked her as an outsider. And that wasn’t her only correction. Her assessment of him as an enigma was completely wrong. With just one small gesture, just a few embittered words, Kamal was an open book. A romance novel, actually. She could totally relate. “Aren’t you happy that Ashraf’s home? That he’s safe and getting better?”

  For a moment, it looked like he wasn’t going to answer. Then he laughed, raising one unsteady hand to shake the salt and pepper of his hair. “Nothing brings me more joy,” he confided in a near-whisper. “It is all that I wished for.”

  “Then why do you look so miserable?” Miserable. Tired. Older than a handsome man in his prime ought to look. She had a strange, sudden impulse to hug him that she had to rein in.

  Especially since Kamal turned away, moving restlessly down the row of rosebushes and forcing her to follow if she wanted to hear what he was saying. “Affection is a cage, is it not?” he asked rhetorically as he stopped at the entrance to the arbor. Again, like he just knew where her thoughts lived. “It binds us. It does not set us free. To stay with me, Chote must lock himself away. To stay with Taj, you must lock yourself away. How is that bearable?”

  The intricate latticework, draped with greenery, didn’t look like a cell to her. But she went with his analogy. “Because we love our fellow prisoners, right? I mean, that’s why they call marriage a life sentence.”

  If the mention of marriage—something illegal for Kamal in this country—seemed incongruous, he showed no sign of it. He just sighed. “It is not enough, Rakhee. He should want to set you free.”

  “He does want to set me free.” Every time he’d pushed her away. Every cruel thing he’d said. The entire conversation about Dev Anand and Suraiya. That’s what it all meant. “But I can’t control what he wants, Kamal. I can only control me. And I want to stay.”

  He looked at her, both eyebrows raised imperiously. “Indefinitely?”

  No. She didn’t even have to say it. It was just there. Obvious. She loved the haveli, loved the garden and Nani and Usha and driving past that stupid Saxena mansion every day on the way to the set. But this wasn’t her home. She didn’t want to be here forever, trapped in a fairy tale. She wanted to go back to Mumbai and home to Chicago and visit Bali and Berlin and Botswana. She still had so many things to do and to see.

  Kamal nodded, coming to the same conclusion. “Haan. Yehi hai asli baath. This is the whole truth, Rakhee. You need more than this prison to heal and grow. As does he.”

  Some part of her knew that Kamal’s “he” was Ashu. The rest of her shoved it aside and latched on to one crystal-clear realization: Taj needed more than this prison, too. But he would never leave.

  “Ashu seems better, don’t you think?” It was overstating the obvious, but the tentative note in her voice gave him pause—began an annoying buzzing in his belly, like mosquitoes caught in the netting of his gut.

  He shifted away from the window, facing her. “Haan. Much improved.”

  One of her eyebrows rose in challenge, but she slid her palms down her thighs as if rubbing away nervous sweat. “It’s amazing what medication and regular therapy can do.”

  Ah. So that was her game…one he had no intention of playing. “They will not do for me.” He hoped the ominous finality closed the subject before it began.

  His hope was futile in the face of her brash Amrikan determination to push forward. She huffed her disapproval, shaking her head. “How do you know, Taj? Have you ever tried? Did you ever have Kamal bring someone in for you to talk to? Take anything besides painkillers? You don’t have to be on a ledge to need help.”

  She meant to evoke the unforgettable image of his brother’s agony, and it worked—casting the magnified picture across his eyelid like an IMAX film. He shuddered, pushing away from the wall at last and stalking toward her. “You foreigners always want to fix everything with doctors and pills, na? Bas. Chohro. Leave it alone, Rakhee. I’ve been poked and prodded enough in my life.”

  Hurt flashed in her eyes, tightened her body as though she was bracing herself for further impact. But her voice carried nothing but frustration. “I’m a foreigner now? Because I’m making a rational suggestion?” She shoved at his chest. “Because you’re so normal holed up in this house like a villain in a gothic melodrama? Do you know how many people actually need wheelchairs? They don’t just use them as a security blanket or for theatrical effect. Come on, Taj. Get over yourself. Get outside yourself. Haven’t you ever wondered what happened to the world while you were shut away? Haven’t you wanted to see the ocean again?”

  Yes. No. He caught her hand, pressed it flat over his heart. “I have TV. I know what the world has become.” What it always was: a place of progress, violence and increasingly shorter skirts. “And I do not need the ocean when I have you to drown myself in.”

  Her fingers flexed against the material of his shirt. She swallowed. What did he need of the outside world when he could feel her smallest movements and watch her subtle tics? She slid her palm up, resting it along the jagged column of his throat. “That’s not flattering, Taj. And it’s not enough. You can’t just assume I’m going to be your conduit to the outside and it’s all going to be okay. You have to work for it. You have to work for me.”

  “Why? Because you will leave me? Is that not already set?”

  He laughed.

  She didn’t.

  “No. When I leave, it’s because you won’t give me any other choice.”

  The stone staircase to the roof seemed to extend high into the heavens. Certainly, they had almost ushered him to his eternal reward. Ashraf was torn between returning to the scene and turning tail and running as far as his legs could carry him. In the end, the choice was taken out of his hands: He did neither.

  The sharp clicks of heels against the veranda floor turned his head. He would’ve thought it Rocky, but she had long since begun wearing chappals at home instead of unwieldy, expensive shoes. Nahin, it could only be—and was—her mother. Bhaiya had characterized her as a marvelous bitch, a woman of shrewdness and strength, not to be trifled with. All Ashu saw was a pale, tired memsahib in a pretty dress completely unsuited to the Delhi heat.

  “You must be Ashraf,” she murmured, clearly taking his measure in the same way.

  “My reputation precedes me. As usual.” He didn’t know where the impulse to joke came from, hadn’t known he could make light of something that had plagued him for so long.


  “Are you all right now?” Her frown was…maternal. Strange, when he had been without a mother for most of his life. “Taking your meds? On a schedule?”

  “Yes. I am not a hundred percent, but perhaps…eighty?” Again his answer was half in jest, half-serious. And when her frown deepened, pulling lines from her smooth forehead, he shifted on his feet like a schoolboy caught smoking. “I am better, madam. Much improved. I…I want to live,” he felt compelled to assure her.

  Saying it almost made it feel true. As though he had made great strides since the last time he’d climbed the stairs ahead. As if it wasn’t only the pill he took each morning keeping the demons at bay. But he knew it was not so easily fixed. You could not close gaping wounds with cello tape and expect them to heal.

  Caroline’s voice intruded on the thought…with a painfully appropriate subject of discussion. “What that woman did to you? It was disgusting.” She shuddered, pale fingers clenching into fists. “If someone took advantage of my Rocky that way…I don’t know what I would do. I’d…I’d probably kill her. I don’t know how your brother resisted.”

  “Death is an end to the suffering,” he pointed out, since he knew that from personal experience. She flinched at the reminder, and he wanted to reach out—to place a hand on her arm—but he couldn’t make his fingers move. He was not ready to. “We know opportunists, Mrs. Varma. To deny them the life they desire is a better revenge. My brother is not such an opportunist,” he couldn’t help but add. “Taj will not hurt Rakhee willingly.”

  “It’s never willingly when you love someone.” Caroline laughed, moving past him to stare out and down, at the green grass and the flagstone path to the garden. “It’s always accidental. Asking too much. Not asking enough. Thinking you know what the other person needs, forgetting your own. Taking a step when you should’ve put your foot down. Before you know it, you’re uprooting your entire life and changing yourself to fit the new one. I don’t want Rocky to change, Ashraf. I like her just the way she is.”