The Object of Your Affections

by Falguni Kothari

A red haze flared around the fringes of my vision and shot down to my kundalini. This time I didn’t wait for Sarika’s cawing and bitching to cease, I simply let loose my wrath.

  * * *

  “Now then, desi girl. What the fuck is going on between you and your sister?”

  I wondered if that was Paris’s prosecutorial voice—cajoling, yet firm. Minus the expletive. I wanted to see her interrogating a witness on the stand. I’d bet she was a sight to behold. Or, no, I didn’t ever want to see the inside of a courtroom again. Not even for Paris. Everything I’d done over the past two years had been to avoid involving lawyers and judgments, and maybe that was why it had been so easy for Vinay to manipulate me.

  “Ftharth ftheaking,” Paris ordered after she’d sucked the last two olives of her Girlfriend Cocktail into her mouth.

  Carrie Bradshaw and her gang had had their Cosmos and Manhattans. We had our Girlfriend Cocktails—a Grey Goose martini, shaken, with a dash of passion fruit concentrate, a button-sized chunk of jalapeño and a drop of vermouth.

  I drained my glass in three gulps, hoping my face didn’t match the scream waiting to typhoon out of me as chilled, spicy vodka lit a fuse from my throat to my belly. That. Felt. Ghastly. But, tasted good.

  One night, after a particularly hard-won dance trophy, I’d concocted the GFC with the assistance of an incredibly cute Armenian American bartender. It had instantly become a raging hit, especially among our troupe of twenty-odd dancers whose palates tended toward the spicy, and had eventually become a staple drink at the Lexington Avenue Dosa Bar.

  Being at the Dosa Bar tonight was strange. I felt chronologically displaced, like a character in The Time Traveler’s Wife. Like the last seven years hadn’t really happened and Paris and I were still students, celebrating our triumphs with vodka and our disappointments with even more vodka. The Dosa Bar had been our go-to place for all of life’s events. At street level, it boasted an Indian fusion restaurant serving specialty—wait for it—dosas. But one flight up—usually where students wound up on most weekends—was a cozy, crowded, insanely noisy bar lounge. We used to bookend our dinners at the lounge, consuming half a dozen martinis between us by the end of the night. I remembered several nights when the count had gone up to half a dozen drinks each. Bad nights, those.

  I wondered if tonight qualified as a bad night. Or was it worse than bad?

  My brother-in-law had stolen four pieces from my husband’s carefully curated art collection and his wife—my own elder sister—didn’t think he’d done anything wrong.

  “He’s helping you with everything, isn’t he? Running around sorting out the mess Kaivan created. So what if Vinay took a few pieces he liked? Consider it a fitting compensation for his time,” she’d said.

  Why was I surprised by this? Hadn’t she done the same thing with my jewelry under the guise of “keeping it all safe for me”? I hadn’t let her take everything. I’d fought to keep the jewelry Kaivan and his parents had given me. And, at least, Sarika had intimated that I could have my jewelry back once my troubles were over. Her husband hadn’t even bothered with pretense. I was supposed to simply gift whatever remaining assets I had to him now?

  Did my parents know that my sister and her husband were taking advantage of my bad luck and robbing me blind? Did they care?

  How had it come to this? To a place where I couldn’t trust my own family? To the point where I didn’t know whom to trust at all.

  My tummy churned like the blades of a food processor, mincing anger, despair and helplessness into an unpalatable pulp. The taste of hope, so tender and sweet, had been all but eroded from my tongue.

  I dropped my head on the edge of the bar and closed my eyes. I didn’t care that the leather-edged granite counter was sticky and gross. I just wanted to sleep forever. And when I woke up, I wanted it all to go away. I wanted Kaivan to be alive.

  “Goodness, Naira. What is the matter with you? Talk to me. Please.” Paris grabbed my arm and shook me when I didn’t respond, her nails digging into the flesh of my upper arm.

  “You quit biting your nails.” Nothing made sense anymore. Not even Paris’s nails. I shifted, peering at the French-manicured hand wrapped around my arm. A thick princess-cut eternity band and a sizable emerald cut solitaire framed with smaller diamonds adorned her ring finger. No classic round for Paris. Or hearts or pears or anything cute. Just four solid lines telling the world that she was taken. Her eyebrows were arched when I met her eyes.

  “They’re fake,” she admitted, and signaled the bartender—who wasn’t an Armenian American cutie or a man—to get us refills by tapping her nails on her empty martini glass.

  For a confused second, I thought she meant her rings, not her nails. My mind felt completely jumbled. I couldn’t even recall how we’d gotten here—to the Dosa Bar. Or, I could, hazily. I remembered shouting at Sarika until my throat felt raw. Paris and Randy had come running into the room and tried to calm me down. Paris had wrestled the phone from my hands while Randy had run back out to fetch a bottle of water. I’d begged for something stronger—way stronger. And now here we were drinking GFC martinis. I suddenly wondered what had happened to Randy and his crew?

  “Did you tip Randy when he left? Did he take all the garbage out?”

  “Yes,” Paris said. “He cleaned up while you cleaned up in the bathroom. Tipped him too. Now talk. What’s going on?”

  “Why don’t you go first? You wanted to run something by me, didn’t you?” Glum. I felt glum. Completely in discord with the peppy lounge music trying to pound my eardrums into dust.

  “Quit stalling, Naira. Spill it.”

  Paris and I had discussed worse things, washed far dirtier linen in front of each other. Why was I embarrassed to tell her of my failures? “How long do you have before you have to go home?”

  “However long you need, girlfriend.” Her expression softened. She’d learned how to enhance her eyes with tasteful applications of eyeliner and mascara instead of butchering them with overuse—all on her own. I was so proud of her. Not just for her glamorous transformation, but for everything she’d accomplished despite her rough childhood. And I’d fallen apart at the first sign of trouble.

  Paris was my hero. She was who I wanted to be when I grew up.

  “Neal is in LA. He won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon. Not that it makes a difference. I do my thing when I want to,” she assured me.

  Unlike Kaivan and me. She hadn’t said it but I knew she was thinking it, comparing our marriages as I’d often done. Kaivan had been a possessive husband. He hadn’t liked anything or anyone stealing my attention away from him. Paris had thought he was a bully. To some he was, but never to me. She’d never understood that what he demanded of me, he gave equally in return. And that I’d loved it—his attention, his possession. Everything.

  I stared at my nails, untidy from a hasty home manicure. Cuts lined my fingers from packing. Kaivan and Paris had never seen eye to eye. I’d never understood why he’d taken such a dislike to her from their very first introduction. He’d never told me. And now he never would. Paris hadn’t helped matters by being...exactly who she was. Neither one had tried to hide their mutual aversion, not even for my sake. Which was why I was determined to get along with Neal no matter how uncomfortable he made me. Whatever I knew about him was hearsay at best and was in his past. He’d seemed like a great guy at Lavinia’s wedding, not at all the brash drunkard the media made him out to be. If I’d learned one thing since my troubles began three years ago, it was that the media sensationalized everything. Also, as proved by the example sitting in front of me, people changed.

  I pushed my hair out of my face and sat up straighter on the bar stool. I could do this. I had to make amends. “It’s a M. F. Husain, one of the art pieces my brother-in-law...borrowed.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Borrowed? Really? That’s why you were shouting ‘thief’ at the top of y
our lungs?”

  “Borrowed,” I repeated firmly, embarrassed that I’d lost control like that.

  I would get the Husain and the other pieces and all my jewelry back. Eventually. I refused to believe Vinay was a thief. I shouldn’t have said what I’d said. He was family. Sarika was right. He was only trying to help. I was like his kid sister. Of course, he’d take care of me. And I was fond of him too. Sometimes. Well, I would be when all of this was sorted. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. My mind had become the devil’s workshop. He wasn’t turning my father against me. Everything would be fine once I got busy again.

  “In her defense...” I began and Paris snorted, cutting me off.

  “In her defense? Are you serious?”

  “Can you stop echoing my words?” I cried, then took a deep calming breath and continued, “In her defense, she believes they’ve only taken back in kind the money I owe them.”

  “You owe them or Kaivan?” Paris asked pointedly.

  “Does it matter?”

  The distinction sure didn’t matter to the people who’d lost their money, including my own family. Kaivan owed them, therefore, as his widow and beneficiary, I owed them. And I would pay them back. All of them. All of it. I would pay back every paisa we owed even if it took me the rest of my life to balance the scales. Only, I hoped it wouldn’t take that long. I hoped with the sale of the Manhattan place and the art portfolio most of the debt would be paid.

  The problem was—and this was why I’d become suspicious—the debt pool seemed bottomless. I didn’t know if Kaivan really owed all those people such tremendous sums of money or whether the figures had been fudged now that he wasn’t there to confirm them. And if the figures had been fudged, who’d fudged them? Vinay or the others? I couldn’t separate fact from fiction anymore as there was no way to corroborate, as, apparently, such deals took place by word of mouth—or so Vinay explained. The people who’d come to me with burden of proof, I’d already paid back in full with interest where applicable.

  Paris opened her mouth to argue no doubt. I shook my head, silently begging her to leave it alone. “I’m handling them. Okay?”

  Badly. And I’d more or less run away from Mumbai. But that was okay. It was...easier.

  I didn’t want to discuss my family tonight. I didn’t even want to talk about Kaivan. I was done explaining his business to people. The world had judged him and found him guilty and nothing I said would change anyone’s mind. Even the people who’d liked and respected him before spoke horribly about him now, forget the sycophants who’d hounded him and begged him to invest their money. Paris had never liked Kaivan to begin with. And if she ever came to know just what my husband had done to try and get us out of this mess, it would be the end of our friendship.

  I took a sip from my replenished cocktail. “He was jealous of you. Kaivan. Of our friendship. He didn’t like that I told you things I wouldn’t share with him. That’s why he behaved badly around you. I think.”

  My lousy attempt to brush my husband’s flaws under an imaginary carpet was interrupted when the maître d’ from the restaurant came to get us. Our table was ready, and by the time we’d been seated, our GFCs replenished and our orders scribbled down—again, we paid homage to our college days by ordering the spicy hummus crepe and the chilies and cheese dosa special to share between us—I’d regained some of my poise.

  I reminded Paris that she’d been the pot to Kaivan’s kettle. “I’m not yet forgiving either one of you. Your attitude wasn’t any better around him. You both should have forced yourselves to get along for my sake. But neither of you showed the slightest respect for me or my feelings. Did you even once consider the position you put me in? To choose between you? And I didn’t, you know. I didn’t choose him over you. You made that choice for me.”

  Paris had fought with me, then she stopped talking to me when I didn’t make it to her wedding. She’d cut me off like she did with anyone who disappointed her. It couldn’t have been any other way. I didn’t know how to explain that to her without bringing up events I’d rather forget.

  She had the grace to look abashed. Neal’s influence perhaps? “You’re right. But, God, he made it difficult for me to like him. And I stand by my opinion that he wasn’t good for you. Especially now, after everything he’s put you through. I swear, Naira, if he were alive, I’d shoot him. Clean head shot.”

  “Me too,” I agreed, squashing the awful roiling in my gut. “Through the heart.”

  “He hurt you.”

  “Yes.” I couldn’t look at her, or expand on that. Oh, but I wanted to. He shouldn’t have died. My chest was tight with memories and it hurt to breathe. Kaivan had died just before his thirty-fifth birthday. How was I supposed to get over it?

  Paris touched my hand and the air between us thickened in wordless apology.

  “It’s okay,” I said, squeezing her hand in return.

  She opened her mouth, paused, then shut it. Then opened it again and cleared her throat, and still didn’t say anything. I raised my eyebrows in encouragement, curious because Paris wasn’t the hesitant type. She bulldozed over conversations.

  “Did he abuse you? I have to know,” she said in a rush.

  For a second the question didn’t register and I stared at her blankly. Then I yelped, “What! Are you out of your mind?”

  “That’s a no...right? I thought...when you... Shit, never mind what I thought. I was wrong, obviously.” She grimaced, looking both vaguely relieved and tortured.

  Now, my mouth opened and closed a few times before I found my voice. “I cannot believe you thought that about him...about me! Do you know me at all? You think I’d stay with a man who hit me? You think I’d marry a man who disrespected women in any way? Kaivan would have died before harming one hair on my head. He loved me.”

  The shock of Paris’s insinuations scattered my other worries to the four winds. I stood up, stiff with outrage.

  “Calm down. It was just a question.” Paris tugged at my hand, urging me to sit. But I was too distraught.

  If I could only tell her what Kaivan had done for me it would prove his love. Oh, God! She’d thought he’d abused me?

  “It was surreal seeing you at Lavinia’s wedding. Even now, you look...wounded. Shattered. I don’t know. I never thought any such thing before, never got that sense. And you might be petite, girlfriend, but you’ve always been fit because of the dancing. But you don’t look well right now. So I wondered.”

  I looked wounded and shattered? I felt an absurd urge to giggle. That had to be an improvement from the marble statue that my mother had said I’d become. No, I hadn’t been abused. Ever. Not even the harsh rules we’d had to abide by in my father’s house could be called abuse.

  “Naira, please.” Paris tugged on my hand again. I sat because I had no other choice. I needed us to forgive and forget. She gave my hand one last squeeze and let me go.

  “It’s been on my mind this whole week so I had to make sure. It drove me crazy to think that I might’ve missed the signals. Or that I’d failed you, failed our friendship,” she added, softly.

  “You are so not the Green Arrow. And I don’t need saving.” Not in that way.

  My droll superhero reference had us both snorting out in giggles. We’d been obsessed with the TV show back in college. We’d even stood in a five-hour queue just to get a picture with the lead actor of the show at Comic Con.

  The welcome distraction of fangirling over our shared object of lust, Stephen Amell, who only seemed to be improving with age, went some ways in smoothing my ruffled feathers. From there it was a natural regression into the past. Paris updated me on our mutual acquaintances. It was silly to snigger over the boys we’d crushed on and the girls we’d barely tolerated. But we did it anyway, at least until my bruised heart ached a little less.

  Our dosas arrived, and between swallowing chilies so hot that
my eyes watered, I began to tell her my tale.

  Obviously, Kaivan wasn’t a buffoon, I clarified at the outset. He’d been a shrewd businessman. But luck hadn’t favored his last investment and to recoup the loss he borrowed heavily and reinvested. It was the only mistake he’d ever made. Well, two. But the other one had nothing to do with business.

  “He planned for contingencies.” I ignored Paris’s skeptical eye-roll. “He never took his success for granted. Understood that businesses can fail, empires can topple. He invested in property, art, stocks—I’ve liquidated most of it. I’ve come to sell the last bit of our assets in New York. The Realtor assures me the Manhattan apartment will move fast. And you’re right, I don’t have to sell the apartment, which is in my name, to pay off Kaivan’s remaining debts. I can declare bankruptcy, but I don’t want to. I want to get our goodwill back and start with a clean slate.” I took a gulp of my GFC and forced myself to go slow, think before I spoke. I didn’t want to accuse someone falsely. I didn’t want Paris to know the whole truth.

  “I have money. I’m the sole beneficiary of a life insurance trust Kaivan set up, and I’ll receive a yearly stipend for the rest of my life no matter where I live. I don’t need to work, but I can’t fathom being idle forever. I want to open a lifestyle store here like the ones I had in India. An online atelier, to begin with. And that’s where you come in.”

  I wanted Paris to go into partnership with me.

  “I’ll put in the money and manage the whole business, but I need your name on the front of everything. I can’t start anything in my name in India, not with all the legal hassles attached to it. Besides, I signed a noncompete when I sold An Atelier in Mumbai to Vinay. And until I have my immigration status sorted, I can’t legally start anything in New York.”

  I also couldn’t trust that the courts or Vinay wouldn’t try to usurp or shut down any business I started in my name. I hadn’t gone to my father with this plan because one, he wouldn’t defy Vinay. And two, Papa was old-school. He’d never understood my need to be self-sufficient. Kaivan had and he’d been so proud of An Atelier in Mumbai.