Incense and Sensibility

by Sonali Dev

  There wasn’t anything Yash wanted to discuss with anyone. Least of all with yoga instructors whose eyes had collected old anger like gemstones in long-lost treasure. He hadn’t gotten where he was by digging up things. You couldn’t walk on dug-up dirt without stumbling.

  Usually, when Yash left, Esha told him everything was going to be all right. This morning she didn’t. She just patted his cheek sympathetically and went back into her room.

  After a quick shower, Yash made his way to his father’s office. It was detached from the main house and empty because HRH was at the hospital.

  The smell of leather-bound books and furniture polish wrapped around him. The year that he’d spent in his wheelchair, the entire house had been fitted with accessibility features. He’d asked his father not to make his office wheelchair-accessible. HRH hadn’t questioned Yash—a courtesy he seldom afforded his children. He’d understood.

  Maybe Yash had wanted it to be his carrot, this room that he loved and coveted. Maybe Yash hadn’t wanted to taint his memories of this cherished place with a time he wanted to leave behind. Whatever the reason, Dad had understood.

  Sometimes Yash thought he had managed to survive the accident by the sheer force of his father’s faith in him. When Yash had decided that he would prove the doctors wrong and walk again, not everyone had believed him, but HRH had.

  Calling Yash’s relationship with his father complicated was putting it mildly. HRH’s particular brand of bulldozing when faced with obstacles in Yash’s “path” was something Yash had always ignored because he believed his goals were his own.

  I thought you didn’t want to be a politician. I thought you wanted to be a public servant.

  Who was the person who had said those words?

  Where had he gone?

  Suppressing the need to pace again, Yash opened his laptop. The speech he’d been working on stared him in the face. Page upon page of goals turned into policies then spun into dreams.

  He wanted to erase it all and replace it with one word.

  Abdul.

  He didn’t need a therapist to tell him what that was. Survivor’s guilt.

  Yash had always navigated guilt by setting goals and shutting out noise. When you had a family like his, goals tended to get snarled up with expectations. Esha’s vision of him in a certain white building in their nation’s capital when he was nine had sealed his fate. Her visions were never wrong. She’d seen him in a wheelchair before it happened too.

  For the first time in his life threads had come loose in the securely woven fabric of his dreams. Tugging at them could unravel everything. Yash hadn’t built his life to unravel it.

  It was time to get to work. Two speeches waited for his attention, along with Rico’s notes about his health care talking points.

  The next time Yash looked up from his laptop, the sun was high in the sky. J-Auntie, his parents’ housekeeper, had slipped in and dropped off his favorite chocolate-glazed donuts. Freshly fried.

  He’d made his way through most of the plate and was contemplating popping another one in his mouth when footsteps sounded on the stairs outside. Sitting up, he quickly fastened his top button. No one ever saw Yash with his shirt unbuttoned. What lay beneath his clothes was no one’s business but his.

  “Yash?” Naina knocked on his door the way she did everything, impatiently and without entertaining the possibility of not getting what she wanted.

  “Come on in,” he said, standing to greet her.

  She flew into the room and gave him a hug. A new practice since the shooting. Naina might be one of Yash’s oldest friends, but touchy-feely she was not.

  “How are you?” she asked, looking genuinely concerned. Nurturing was another thing Naina was not, so this was all a bit awkward.

  “Please tell me you’re not going to go all concerned-auntie on me. The bullet barely even made it past my epidermis.”

  She dropped into the leather armchair across from the desk and crossed her denim-clad legs. She was wearing a red YASH IS US sweatshirt, and despite his impatience at having his work interrupted it made him smile.

  “I love when you go all science-nerd on me.” She picked up a donut and bit into it. “Seriously, though, doesn’t it hurt? How are you up working already? No wonder your poor mother is having conniptions in there.”

  He did feel bad for Ma. If she had her way she would wrap her kids in cotton wool and keep them locked up in the safety of her home. Yash had tried to tell her it wasn’t her fault when she’d sat by his hospital bed for two days and he could practically hear her mentally kicking herself for not doing something to prevent the shooting.

  “Whatever you decide to do with the campaign, I’m going to support you,” Ma had said to him when they came home.

  “Why would you think he wants to do anything with the campaign but win it?” HRH was not kicking himself for anything. He was congratulating himself for the excellent security firm he had hired. The firm Abdul worked for.

  Naina waved a hand in front of Yash’s face. “Where did you go? I thought you were okay talking about the shooting. Is it giving you PTSD?” She recited the letters as if it were a new hashtag. How could a woman who was so empathetic with her work, which involved an ocean of strangers, be so disconnected from the people she was supposed to be close to?

  “Obviously I’m okay talking about it. It only hurts the way a scraped knee hurts. I’m fine. My life isn’t going to change at all.” He sat back down and fidgeted with the notes he’d made. The speech had been fighting him hard, and speeches barely ever did that.

  “Speak for yourself, buddy,” Naina said, with the kind of smile he hadn’t seen on her face since they’d been in grade school and she used to get into all sorts of mischief that he then had to get her out of by taking the blame. They’d had fun together. It would’ve made everything so much easier if they’d felt anything other than friendship for each other.

  “Prince Yash to the rescue,” she’d loved to say.

  He hated that nickname. Monarchy was the most abhorrent of all forms of government. Even dictatorship was more respectable; at least dictators worked their way into power. Their power wasn’t dropped into their lap by a genetic accident. Not that Yash could say any of that without insulting his ancestors, who believed themselves chosen and worked to justify that belief by making themselves worthy of their gifts. A combination of entitlement and guilt. His legacy. They should have put that on the Raje crest Instead of Victorious Through Truth.

  “The polls are continuing to climb,” Naina said. “If the election happened now, you’d be a shoo-in.”

  Yash didn’t want to be a shoo-in because of a sympathy vote. He’d worked too hard for that. Especially when the sympathy came from Abdul’s life hanging in the balance and Naina’s tears that everyone assumed were a lover’s tears.

  Why was the deception suddenly sticking in his throat like a bone? It was a harmless arrangement.

  Or it had been meant to be.

  Harmless to everyone but one person. One person he had completely shut out until now.

  Naina leaned toward him. “Don’t be tiresome, Yash. Why are you always so brooding about any good fortune that comes your way?”

  “Good fortune coming my way would pretty much define my entire life. Both our lives, as a matter of fact.”

  “You were just shot. What part of that is good fortune?”

  Yash stood and walked to the window. A spectacular view of the mountains stretched before him. Mountains he’d always thought of as his. As though he were Simba and his life were The Lion King.

  “The part where another man took a bullet for me.”

  Joining him at the window, she touched his arm. “What happened to Abdul is sad. But it’s not your fault.”

  What was wrong with all of them? How could they not see how unfair it was for him to be standing here when Abdul was hooked up to a ventilator? Suddenly he was tired. “How has your day been? When do you head back to Kathmandu?”
>
  She bounced on her heels. “What if I said that I’m considering not going back?”

  “Not going back?” Their arrangement worked because they were never in the same place together. The whole damn point of the arrangement was that she could go wherever she wanted and do whatever she wanted.

  “What if I told you that I’m considering staying in California for a while?”

  “In California? For a while?”

  “Okay, echo, you sound like my mom when my dad speaks. Except without the question marks you’re adding.”

  “Why would you do that? I’m fine. I’ve come out of this as though it didn’t even happen.”

  “Except with a ten-point lead in the polls,” she said, a smug smile splitting her face. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

  “Thank you for being so distraught when you thought I might have died, by the way.”

  She didn’t like that. “You’re my best friend, Yash. How would I not be distraught? I had no idea what I was going to do if . . . if . . .”

  “If I wasn’t around to be your fake boyfriend.”

  She went to the door and checked if anyone was outside, then shut it and glared at him. “That’s unfair. Our friendship is the most real thing in my life.” She spun a finger around his face. “How long is this brooding going to last?”

  It was a question he’d very much like an answer to as well. There was an endless list of things to do, and brooding was putting a damper on all of that. The desolate, restless fog that wrapped itself around him when he thought about the yoga studio was no better than the cold nothingness it had replaced.

  He apologized and she waved it away, her excitement returning. “Never mind all that, because I have something to cheer you up. Aren’t you at least a little bit curious about why I’m saying I want to stay?”

  Curious would be one way to describe it. “I’m all ears.”

  “You know how hard we’ve been working to get the foundation funded and it’s been like trying to fill a silo with pennies? Well, Jiggy Mehta called me this morning.”

  Yash sat up. “Jiggy Mehta? The billionaire, Jiggy Mehta?”

  “The gazillionaire, Jiggy Mehta.” She laughed delightedly. “Isn’t he one of your donors too?”

  “Yes, he’s been very generous.”

  “Well, you can say that again. He’s donating thirteen million dollars to my foundation. That size of endowment means we can put the plans we’ve been struggling with for a decade into action, no compromises.”

  “That’s terrific, Nai.”

  “Thanks. And you know what this means, right?”

  “It means all the hard work you’ve done for all these years is going to come to fruition.”

  “Yes! And that means the foundation gains the kind of visibility that can spell . . . it can spell . . .” She took a breath, so deep it made her look like she was going to explode. “The Nobel!” Reaching across the table, she took his hand. “Can you imagine what that means for us as a couple?” She squeezed it. “It means we’ll be unstoppable. We’ll be the ultimate power couple.”

  Proud as he was of her, his hand felt heavy and cold in hers and he pulled it away. “But that was never the deal. We never meant to be a power couple.”

  They had never meant to be any kind of couple, other than one who kept their parents from pressuring them about finding someone to be a couple with. A way to avoid her father from controlling her life. A way to avoid his own weaknesses from controlling his life.

  “We meant to get what we wanted. I’m fully aware that I was the one who bullied you into doing this because I wanted to go to Nepal,” she said without a whit of guilt. “But we’ve both benefited from it.”

  “You did bully me into it.” He tried to smile at her. The rebellious girl who’d stood by him always. Sticking it to her dad might have been higher on her list back then than rural microfinance reform, but right now Yash couldn’t quite manage the hypocrisy of judging her for it.

  No one had ever told him he couldn’t do something he wanted because of his gender. No one had ever held his sisters back either. In all their bulldozing glory, his parents had pushed them all equally brutally. They weren’t like Naina’s parents. Subverting people like that, people who refused to evolve their views no matter the evidence, it had felt right.

  It no longer felt right. Not when a private deception that was meant to help a friend was misleading the electorate.

  “So, our deal . . .” She walked around the desk and leaned her hip on it, staring down at him. “What if it’s time to adjust it? Our goals have changed, shouldn’t our deal change too? We can achieve things we couldn’t even imagine back then.” She hadn’t changed one bit.

  “Like winning the Nobel?”

  Excitement flashed in her eyes. The kind of excitement for one’s work that Yash had always taken for granted. Now it was gone, and he couldn’t seem to retrieve it from the hole that had opened up inside him.

  “Like winning the Nobel. Like running California. All we have to do is figure out how to make living in the same city work.”

  Or maybe it was time to figure out how to get out of the arrangement. Living on different continents and getting together for the occasional photo op, that was easy enough to fake, and harmless. It was a different thing entirely to perpetually be around each other and pretend to be something they were not.

  It was a different thing entirely to profit from people’s sympathy for a sobbing lover over a fallen body.

  The excitement on Naina’s face told him that they were not on the same page. “How long would you stay in San Francisco?”

  “Indefinitely, at this point. I’d manage the project from here. You’d mostly be in Sacramento. And I’ll be there when you need a first lady.”

  “First lady?” He jumped out of his chair. Maybe he should not have sounded so horrified, but what in the hellish hell?

  “Keep your boxers on, I’m not saying we have to get married. At this point I don’t think the public cares if we get married or not. I think being partners actually makes us more relatable to young voters.”

  “And our parents? The reason we’ve been able to avoid marriage without them losing it is because we’ve never lived in the same place.” He squeezed his temples.

  “It’s not about our parents anymore. We’re too old to not be able to just tell our parents to butt out of our lives.”

  “Actually, we were too old for that at twenty-eight, by normal people standards,” he said.

  “Well, we aren’t normal. My parents certainly aren’t. How is it normal to hold your daughter’s career ransom to marriage? The only reason Dad let me take off around the world for my career is because I was with you. The prized catch of the community wanted his daughter. He thinks it’s his greatest achievement.”

  This was doubly preposterous, given that Dr. Kohli was credited with pioneering the imaging of certain parts of the human body using an MRI.

  Naina’s laugh was too sad by half. The laugh of a child who’d never felt like she was enough for her parents. It was this determined laugh that had made Yash go along with all her shenanigans when they were kids.

  “MRI machines don’t have vaginas that you get to hand off to the most deserving member of the next generation,” she added with fiery bitterness.

  “And yet you never figured out how to say any of this to your father.”

  She looked at him as though he were being willfully naive. “Truthfully, I can tell him to go to hell now. I can support Mummy, so she doesn’t have to put up with him. I really don’t care about him anymore. But I do care about you. The election is on the line now. So is my foundation. Don’t you see?”

  He did see.

  “I thought you’d be excited for me. Why are you acting like you don’t want me here?”

  “I’m saying having you here means we’d have to fake a relationship in full public view on a daily basis. Do you really think we can do that?”

  “Why not? We like
each other, which is more than most real couples.”

  “We aren’t a real couple, Nai. We tried, remember? It didn’t work out.”

  “We can try again!”

  Without thinking about it, he stepped back and away from her. Annoyance, even hurt, tightened her mouth, and he kicked himself for not controlling his reactions.

  “Friends with benefits” was a phrase Naina had thrown around a lot in the early years of their arrangement. They had even tried it, but sex had been such an awkward, mechanical experience, they’d given up.

  He knew she was right that it would make everything easier. Sleeping with anyone else would be perceived as infidelity. An affair would have ended his hopes at running for any public office.

  This hadn’t been much of a problem for Yash. The idea of physical intimacy froze his insides, and not thinking about it was usually the best way for him to deal with it.

  His early experience with intimacy had shredded his ability to trust. Julia Wickham, Trisha’s college roommate and best friend, had drugged him, and taped him having sex with her. She was underage, and his intern. Then she’d used it to blackmail him.

  Yash would never forgive himself for putting his family through the amount of money and legal corralling it had taken to make Julia and her threats disappear. So, forgive him if intimacy did not come easily to him.

  Yash started to pace, hating that the discomfort of the memories made it necessary to move. Naina had picked up pretty quickly that Yash wasn’t quite into it. She’d tried to help, she’d tried keeping it light, keeping it purely physical so his head didn’t get in the way. He trusted her enough that the physical release wasn’t bad. But the work involved in getting there was exhausting. For both of them, and when she’d given up, it had been the greatest relief.

  Naina’s eyes softened. “We don’t have to try again. There’s a lot of couples who don’t have sex.” She smiled. “It’s like we’re already married.”

  He stopped pacing and leaned on the desk next to her. “Wait, this is sounding more and more like a proposal.”