by Anna Kaling
“Of course we will.”
She smiled and exhaled a long, shuddery breath. “Thank you for listening to me rant. I suppose it’s good you see my true colors before the wedding. I wouldn’t want to cheat you into marrying a blubbering mess.”
“You’re not a mess.”
“You’re a good listener.” She reached up, tentatively. Arjuna made himself sit still as she brushed his jaw with the back of a finger. He locked his muscles as she leaned in and forced his lips apart when she kissed him.
She was soft, too soft. He couldn’t keep his arms hanging by his sides, so he cupped her face, but her cheek was round and didn’t scratch his palm with stubborn blond hairs. He moved his hand higher and there it was—thick, soft hair that became tangled in his fingers, determined to become mussed and stick out the wrong way.
Arjuna buried his fingers in that beautiful, unruly hair and kissed harder, deeper, stronger. Kris’s hand rested on his shirt, over his heart, and he groaned with weeks of suppressed longing.
But when he pushed his tongue between those lips, it wasn’t Kris’s mm it elicited.
He jerked back, disentangling himself from Sharanya and her hair and only resisted the urge to wipe his mouth because her wide eyes jolted him back to his senses.
“Sorry,” he said, gripping his knees to stop his hands shaking. “We shouldn’t. You know, before the wedding.”
She gave a laugh and ruffled her hair shyly. “A traditionalist. Okay. Maybe a movie?” She exhaled, her mouth an O, and looked around the room. “What happened to your Tulsi plant?”
“She… I don’t know. Some kind of blight.”
“Oh, no. That can’t be a good omen for the wedding.”
“No.”
“Oh, well. Just don’t tell my parents.” She stood up, dropped her coat onto the sofa, and began rifling through his DVD collection.
KRIS CLEARED his throat. Tricia looked up from the Tulsi plant she was tending and arched an eyebrow at him.
“I brought you a present,” Kris said. He held out a plant. “It’s a peace lily. Like a peace offering. Get it?”
“Yes, subtle as it is.” She took the plant and examined it at arm’s length. She was wearing another yellow sari that blended into her hair, so maybe she liked being colorless.
“They’re very easy to look after. Just put it in your room and keep the soil damp. I thought you deserved a low-maintenance plant that you could enjoy instead of worrying about.”
“Is this an apology for dumping your orphaned Tulsi with me?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I could have called social services, you know.”
“I know. Uh, how is she?”
Tricia put the peace lily down and beckoned him to the back of the greenhouse. Kris recognized the marble pot but not the withered plant inside. Many of its leaves had dropped off and most of the remainder looked dry and sad.
“Oh dear,” Kris said.
“Indeed.”
“It’s been here the whole time?”
“Right in that spot.”
The plants either side of his Tulsi were healthy and green. Kris wanted to touch her, but he was afraid one nudge would leave her standing bald in a pile of brown leaves. Maybe Tricia would let him buy another of her plants, but he knew it wouldn’t be the same to Arjuna. This one was like his child, or a younger sister he had helped raise.
“Okay.” He sighed. “Let’s try it your way. What do I need to do?”
“Take her home and sort out your differences.”
“I don’t think I can get drunk enough to have a conversation with a plant. I mean, I’ll give it my best shot, but….”
She caught her bottom lip between her teeth and tapped a foot. “Maybe there’s another way… but you’re going to hear a lot of things you don’t like, and you’ll have to at least pretend to agree with them.”
“That sounds hard.”
“Yes. Love is hard. We’ve already been over that.”
Kris put his hand on the cool marble of Tulsi’s pot. It was hard to feel much loathing for her when she looked so… dead.
“All right,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”
“How do you feel about playing God?”
TULSI VIVAH fell on a Sunday. Sharanya invited Arjuna and his parents to her temple for the festival. Her parents were visiting relatives in India, but she didn’t seem to be missing them. In fact, she was radiant.
Arjuna leaned in close to her ear as they headed for a bustling marquee tent in the temple grounds. “Did you take something? Because that’s frowned upon at my temple.”
Her eyes widened, and then she caught his grin and swatted his arm. “I’m an upstanding and law-abiding citizen, I’ll have you know. Actually….” She shrugged sheepishly. “I’m happy to be off work. Sundays aren’t as bad as Friday or Saturday nights, but they’re still hideous. Tomorrow and Tuesday is my weekend, so it’s three whole days until I need to be back there.”
“You really hate it that much?”
Her radiance dimmed, and Arjuna kicked himself. “You know, I don’t think it’s that at all,” he said. “And since you claim it’s not drugs, I have to conclude it’s the sari. Orange suits you.”
She beamed, then looked over his shoulder. “Oh, it’s Karuna. Hey, Karuna! Arjuna, come and meet her. We were at school together.”
Arjuna’s stomach clenched. This was the third of her friends they’d met in the last five minutes, and each time came a flutter of panic that they would see him as the imposter he was.
But Karuna greeted him with a friendly smile, like the others. Among his relief there was disappointment.
At least she was chatty, so he was able to hang back and lose himself in thought without being obvious. It seemed all he did lately was wish for the spotlight to be on somebody else, anybody else, so he didn’t have to pretend to be okay. To be a decent human being.
At this rate, before the year was up, he’d be listening to Evanescence and writing terrible poetry like he was thirteen again.
His vision came back into focus when he realized somebody was staring at him across the marquee. His mother, whom he’d last seen chatting to an old friend in the car park.
Arjuna started at her intense expression and hurried over to her. “Mum? Are you okay? Here, sit down.”
“I’m fine. Come and try the halva.” She led him to a table at the side of the tent and dropped her voice as they surveyed the tray of sweets. “Tell me the truth, Arjuna. Do you like Sharanya?”
Arjuna’s pulse ratcheted up about twelve notches in the time it took him to open his mouth. “Of course. Why?”
“Because you’ve been like a zombie ever since the engagement.”
“Not true. I haven’t eaten any brains in months.”
“Arjuna, be serious. I can cope with what’s happening to me if I know my family will be okay. I want you to be happy.”
“Mum, I’m fine. Promise.” He put an arm around her. “Let’s get some halva for Sharanya, too, before the play starts. I’m not sure if food is allowed in the theater.”
Sharanya led them to the small theater ten minutes before the play was due to start. Arjuna battled to keep himself in the present and not drift into the land of angsty poems, but it was so hot in the crowded room, he wanted nothing more than a nap.
Finally, somebody banged a drum for silence, and the play began as a slim woman slipped into the seat on Arjuna’s left.
The play opened on a scene at the palace in which Tulsi grew up. Arjuna knew this because the pair playing her parents wore red curtains fashioned into capes and cardboard crowns decorated with colored pencils. The nostalgic amateurishness of it, the same as he’d seen once or twice a year in his own temple, since he was a child, brought out his first genuine smile of the day. The acting was enthusiastic rather than convincing, the props cheap and cheerful, the audience whispering and waving at the actors when they saw a friend or relative, rustling sweets and generally behaving in
a way that would outrage a typical Australian audience.
Tulsi, played by a young woman with a flowing green sari, snuck away from her parents’ palace and battled through changing scenery of trees, rivers, and mountains, all represented by actors waving banners of colored tissue paper.
Brahma was a middle-aged man with a booming voice, accompanied by wild arm movements that threatened to give Tulsi a black eye more than once. Arjuna shifted in his seat, wincing and forcing his hand to stay in his lap instead of covering his eyes.
Sharanya caught his eye and grinned, but his smile faded when the actor’s next line reverberated around the room.
“You may be united with Lord Vishnu and spend your life in married bliss with your true love. But I wish you to marry another.”
“Oh!” Tulsi gasped and flung an arm over her eyes in a parody of despair.
Sharanya leaned close to his ear. “Come on, the script isn’t that bad. I’ve seen worse on medical dramas.”
He rearranged his face and froze it into neutral position, staring at the stage as Tulsi made her decision, married Shankhachuda, spent the best years of her life with him. He determined to think of nothing but the play. It was just a play, Tulsi an actress, nothing to do with him or with real life, and he would not think of Kris.
He was doing pretty well, until he heard Kris’s voice reverberate around the theater.
“You,” Kris said, in a voice thin with breathlessness and rich with feeling. “You’re here.”
Kris was on stage. Painted blue and draped in a dhoti but still recognizably, unmistakably Kris. Only Kris’s hair could manage to stick up out of a wig, refusing to be subdued no matter what was done to it.
Arjuna shook his head and blinked several times. The hallucination remained, even though Kris could not be at this temple, in this play. It was like finding his mother DJing at a nightclub.
“I’ve missed you,” Kris said. He was looking at the Tulsi actress, addressing her. Not Arjuna, who was probably invisible beyond the stage lights. “I knew you’d come back.” He took her hands, and even though Arjuna was several meters away, he could see the joy and longing on Kris’s absurd blue face.
He realized it wasn’t his shock and pounding heart that had blocked out sound, because he could hear Kris’s words crystal clear. The theater had fallen silent.
Tulsi withdrew her hands and turned away to face the audience. “You can’t touch me. I’m married.”
“Shankhachuda is dead.”
“Because you tricked me!”
“Because I love you. You’re free now, Devi.”
“Free?” She gave an ugly laugh. “You move me from his shackles to yours and call it freedom. Freedom is making my own choices, not being deceived into doing what you want me to do. Don’t you think the caged bird longs to be free, even if the keeper is kind?”
“Tulsi.” Kris’s voice caught in his throat. “You didn’t love him. You can’t tell me you wanted to stay with him, that you won’t come with me now he’s gone. We’re bound, body and soul. We can be happy.”
“Is your happiness all that matters?” She rounded on him. “Or mine? We’re not the only two people in the world. I promised Lord Brahma I would serve him always, and he asked me to marry Shankhachuda, and so I did, and you took it upon yourself to make me treacherous, and now you expect me to dance with you off into the sunset? No. I am still Brahma’s servant before I’m your lover.”
“I’m your lover above all else.” Kris’s voice was so soft that half the audience moved as one, leaning forward to catch every syllable. Arjuna was frozen in his seat.
Tulsi wiped away a tear. The bright white lights glinted off her cheek, and Arjuna didn’t think the special effects budget would stretch to fake tears.
“Yes,” she said, “and until you learn how to be a servant first, to give all of yourself to somebody else’s happiness, you will never know what it really is to love. Go to Vrindavan.”
“Tulsi….”
“Go, Vishnu. I have to bury my husband.”
Kris stared at her for a long moment, and everything was in his face. Then he turned and walked off the stage, and Arjuna’s body wanted to follow him.
Someone in the audience let out a long sigh, and it broke the spellbound silence. Arjuna clapped his hands together with the rest of them, but he didn’t feel a thing. None of this made sense. How did Kris even find the temple, let alone end up in a play? Did he know Arjuna was there? Both answers seemed absurd. And Arjuna would never know, because Kris no longer owed him any answers about anything.
The woman beside him leaned close to his ear. “He was good, wasn’t he? Especially since he only had a few days to learn those lines; he stepped in and saved us when the actor playing Vishnu pulled out last minute. It’s almost like he didn’t really need to learn them.”
Arjuna tore his eyes from the stage to look at her. She was petite and nondescript, with pale skin and bright blue eyes much like Kris’s. He didn’t know what to say.
“Are you staying for the feast?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Come to the greenhouses afterwards. I have your Tulsi.”
She slipped away, leaving him gaping at her back.
ARJUNA SPENT the feast thinking of an excuse to slip away, but he needn’t have worried. Sharanya and his parents both found old friends in the prasadam room, and neither of them seemed to mind when he mumbled something nonsensical and walked out into the temple grounds.
He found the greenhouses after a few minutes of wandering through the crowds, but he didn’t really expect to see the thin woman there. The whole evening had such a surreal quality that it seemed more likely he would find himself waking up, or in a Salvador Dali painting.
But she was there, humming softly to herself as she tended rows of Tulsi plants.
“Oh, hello. She’s here.” The woman nodded at a shelf beside her, and Arjuna missed a breath when he followed her gaze. It was his Tulsi, no doubt about it—he knew her like he would know a childhood friend grown up—but she had changed almost beyond recognition. A few of the leaves near the soil were still green, but most of her was withered and brown and dry.
She gave him a sympathetic look. “Kris brought her to me.”
“Kris?” His heart began to thud again, and he looked around as if Kris might be hiding behind a plant pot.
“Yes. A colleague of his introduced us. But we’ve done everything you can do for a plant and… well… she’s had the same treatment as all of these.” She waved a hand at the rows of leafy green Tulsis around her, basking in the afternoon heat.
“What do you think is wrong with her?”
The woman didn’t answer for a moment but watched him with searching eyes. “Tulsi heals. She brings peace, makes people whole.”
Arjuna waited for the point, but the woman seemed to have said all she was going to say.
“Kris tried his best,” she said, speaking each word slowly and clearly. “But maybe one person isn’t enough.”
A wave of cold nausea spread from his stomach through his torso.
The woman gave a slow nod. “Do you want to take her home?”
Yes.
No.
“I… I can’t. I can’t heal her. I’m sorry.”
The intensity went out of her blue eyes. “I see.” She straightened her sari. “I don’t think he’ll be coming back now the play’s over. It seemed to be quite cathartic for him. You’ll be safe if you want to visit with your… family.”
Arjuna’s shoulders curled in. “Right. Well, thanks. I’d better go. Thank you. Really.”
She nodded.
He stumbled out onto the gravel path, ears hot. He took random turnings at forks, no room in his brain for conscious decisions among the jumble of thoughts, and came to his senses when he heard Kris’s voice again.
“School?” Kris said. “Pah. I never bothered with school, and look how I turned out. Don’t bother with it. Put all that effort into playing.”
>
Still blue-skinned and wearing his costume, he stood in a small paddock beside a children’s playground. He’d given up the wig, and his hair shone bright in the afternoon sunshine. Brahma and Tulsi were there too, but it was Kris the children crowded around, giggling and daring each other to touch him. One small girl crept up behind him, arm outstretched, and he waited until the last second to whirl around and growl at her. She shrieked and ran to hide behind a bench, dissolving into laughter.
“I liked school,” said the Tulsi actress, giving Kris a significant look before turning back to the children. “You need to work hard at school if you want a good job when you’re grown up.”
“Excuse me,” Kris said, putting his hands on his hips. “Who’s head god here?”
The children covered their mouths with their hands and giggled.
“That’s right,” Kris said, even though she hadn’t answered. “I’m head god, and I say playing is better than school.” He bit his lip and surveyed the children. “Though I still did what my mum told me, for a quiet life. They get very unreasonable if you don’t bend to their whims and do all that rubbish stuff like eating your broccoli and not playing with fire. Best to play along and you can get your revenge later. Grow up safe, and then you can eat cake for breakfast and bring home a boyfriend or girlfriend that makes your parents want to lie down in a dark room and rock back and forth. Right, who’s going to bring me a drink? It’s thirsty work, being a brilliant god.”
Arjuna became aware he was a lone man staring intently into a children’s playground, and that wasn’t a great look. Even so, he had to tear himself away and force himself to concentrate on his footing until he was out of sight of the playground. His neck muscles still burned as he fought the urge to look back.
The prasadam room was thronged with people, which gave him an excuse to press his back to the wall and wait for his breathing to slow. He spotted his mother in animated conversation with a woman he didn’t know, and then a group of men moved and he saw Sharanya sitting cross-legged where he’d left her, her plate still full, staring at something with her hands twisting in her lap like they had been when he’d first met her.
