by Sonali Dev
6
Mili’s heart thudded as Ridhi and Ravi backed out of the parking lot. She waved madly until Ridhi’s beaming face disappeared from sight. Ridhi looked so happy that the flutters of nervousness bouncing about in Mili’s belly seemed pointless. Even so, she joined her palms together and said a quick prayer for their safety before turning around and heading back to her apartment building. Ridhi called it a rundown shitpot but with its red bricks, white balconies, and sloping black roof Mili thought it was the most beautiful building on earth—after her home in Balpur, of course. She would never disrespect the home that had sheltered her all her life. But she sent up an apology anyway. Things were going so well she didn’t want to jinx fate by appearing ungrateful.
Life was wonderful. Ridhi was going to have her happily ever after, Mili had aced her midterms, and her boss had asked her to coauthor a paper with him. There was the small problem of the rent. Of course Ridhi wanted to keep on paying her half, but how could Mili make her pay rent for something she didn’t rent? Not that any of that mattered right now. Ridhi and Ravi were finally together and in this moment Mili couldn’t bring herself to care about anything else.
It was just so incredibly romantic. Slightly crazy, awfully scary, but insanely romantic nonetheless. Mili jiggled her hips in a little thumka dance. She’d find a way. She’d made her way from Balpur to America. She could make the fifty dollars in her purse last until her paycheck came in next month.
Please, please keep them safe. And please don’t let Ridhi’s family find me. She repeated the plea for the hundredth time that day. No matter how hard she tried she hadn’t been able to stop worrying about ruining Ridhi’s love story if Ridhi’s family found her. She did a quick sweep of the parking lot with her eyes, 007-style. Then followed it up with a full 360-degree spin. There wasn’t a soul in sight but one could never be too careful. Better get inside. Considering Ridhi had just taken off, chances were it would be at least another day or two before Ridhi’s family caught on and came after Mili. Even so she planned to stay out of the apartment and hide out in Pierce Hall and the library until she knew that Ridhi and Ravi were safe.
Something rustled behind her and she jumped and spun around. A man was parking a bicycle too close to the huge green refuse tank across the parking lot. Oh no, today was the day the collection truck came.
“Sir!” She ran after him. “Hello?”
Clearly, he didn’t hear her because he sauntered off in the opposite direction. She raced to catch up with him and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around and looked down at her as if she had just broken out of a mental asylum. Had to be her hair. Her grandmother always said she looked a little mad when she left it loose. She pushed it back with both hands. It bounced right back and spilled all over her face.
“You parked your cycle too close to the dirt,” she said, panting slightly.
Almost lazily, he pulled a headphone from one ear and gave her a look that suggested she wasn’t worthy of being listened to with both ears.
“They’ll take your cycle away if you leave it there.” She pointed at the bright yellow bike.
The poor fool just stared at her. Maybe it was her accent. They often didn’t understand her English. A sharp stab of homesickness pierced through her followed by an intense urge to hear the familiar tones of her mother tongue. Yes, big fat chance of that happening here.
She slowed down and tried to speak more clearly. “The big truck, it comes to take away the dirt today. They’ll take away your bicycle if you leave it there.” She swept her hand from the bike to the huge green tank in which everyone dumped their trash bags.
More blankness. Maybe he didn’t speak English.
She tried again. “They collect it on Friday—you’ll lose your bicycle.” She walked up to the bike and rattled the handle.
Finally understanding sparked in his eyes. “You mean the Dumpster? Are you trying to tell me they collect the garbage today?” He laughed, but it wasn’t a kind laugh.
She refused to feel small or stupid. Dumpster. Garbage. Not “tank.” Not “dirt.” It was just a matter of getting the terms right. Next time she would.
She nodded but couldn’t get herself to smile at him anymore.
“Yeah, I know,” he said really slowly, enunciating each word as if she hadn’t just spoken to him in English. “Why do you think I put it there?”
She gaped at him. “You don’t want it?”
“Well, duh. Why would I like throw it in the Dumpster if I wanted it?” He jammed the headphone back in his ear. “You can have it if you want it.” And with that he walked off.
Did she look like someone who picked up things other people threw away? You can have it if you want it, indeed! What was she, a trash picker?
But instead of heading home she found herself standing in front of the Dumpster inspecting the bright yellow bicycle. The paint had scraped off in a few spots but other than that it was beautiful. If she had a bike she wouldn’t have to walk around campus or make the mile-long trek to the grocer on foot. She darted a furtive glance around to make sure no one was watching, then grabbed the bike and quickly backed it away from the Dumpster and walked it to the bike rack just under her balcony, unable to stop smiling. There were several other bikes there. She parked hers in the one remaining spot and gave in to the urge to wiggle her hips in another little hip-wiggling dance. Naani was right. When a door closed, a window always opened. You just had to have the good sense to stick your head out of it.
Samir hated slowing the Corvette down. It was a damn shame. But once he got off the highway he ran into red light after red light until the insanely sexy growl of the engine started to taunt him. He revved it. An uppity looking blonde swept a sideways glance at him from her giant SUV. Automatically, he counted under his breath. One . . . two . . . three . . . And there it was, the double take. Not looking so bored anymore, are we, missy? He burned her with his smolder just as the light turned green, then drove off, leaving her gaping in his wake.
Slowly the buildings got closer together and older and more decrepit, going from the set of a rural saga to a period film. Redbrick bungalows with steeple ceilings and snow white trim lined the gravelly, rundown street. He sped past a concrete sign that said EASTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY EST. 1883 and the GPS started to go crazy. Turn left, turn right, turn left. Make a U-turn! Reluctantly, he reined the engine in, listened, and the tinny electronic voice led him to a dingy little parking lot that smelled as if the world had rotted and gone to hell. A garbage truck was digging up a Dumpster. Impeccable timing, Sam!
Samir screeched to a halt as far from the Dumpster as humanly possible, pulled himself out of the convertible without bothering to open the door, and stared up at peeling trim on the deserted redbrick building. It was lights, camera, action time.
Mili was in the middle of peeling the wrapper off her last remaining chocolate bar when she heard the knock. She took a quick bite and put the rest of it back in the empty fridge. Her stomach growled in protest. She hadn’t eaten anything all day. There were some noodles from Panda Kong in the fridge but she needed those for dinner. Who could be knocking on her door? No one, and she meant no one, had ever knocked on that door in the four months that she had lived here. Except that one time those Jesus Christ people had stopped by and tried to give her a Bible. Another forceful knock. Too forceful. The Bible people had been too polite to knock this hard. Something about that knock made her defenses bristle.
It couldn’t possibly be Ridhi’s brother, could it? Ridhi had said they’d send him first.
Another knock.
Oh Lord. Oh Ganesha. Oh Krishna. What now? Ridhi was gone only about half an hour. If Mili let anything slip they would find Ridhi and Ravi before they got away. A complete tragedy-style ending to their love story. Mili could never let that happen. Never. Never.
She tiptoed to the door.
“Hello? Anybody there?” A deep, authoritative man’s voice shouted from the other side. A deep, authoritativ
e Indian man’s voice. She looked through the fuzzy peephole. All she saw was a blurred outline of a large figure. Oh. Lord. She tiptoed backward and tripped over the shoes she’d left in the middle of the floor, and landed on her bum with a thud, knocking over the lone chair that stood in the middle of the room. Oh no, she had probably broken the one piece of living room furniture she owned.
“Hello?” the voice called again, sounding a little confused. He’d heard her. Oh Lord. She hurried to the balcony. No way was she going to be the reason for Ridhi taking on her monosyllabic-slash-near-suicidal avatar again. She leaned over the white spindle railing and saw her new bike on the bike rack just below her. It wasn’t much of a jump. Just about seven feet to the grassy mound below. She jumped.
She landed on her feet and then toppled headlong into her bike, which in turn crashed into the three other bikes next to it. Metal tore through her shirt and jabbed her shoulder. The crash made her ears ring. “Shh,” she hissed at the bike she was lying on and tried to straighten up.
Samir heard a loud crash. He ran to the open stairwell and leaned over the railing. Some sort of crazy creature with the wildest mass of jet-black curls was dusting herself off and trying to grab a fluorescent yellow bike from a jumbled heap. Was she stealing it? In her rush to pry it free she stumbled backward and her eyes met his. Something in the way she looked at him set alarm bells gonging in his head. His eyes swept from her panicked stance to the low-hanging balcony. Had she jumped? Damn it.
“Hey! Wait a minute. Are you Malvika?” he yelled at her.
Her eyes widened to huge saucers, as if he’d accused her of something truly heinous. Was she crazy? She had to be because before he knew what to do next she yanked the bike free, hopped on it, and took off as if he were some sort of gangster chasing her with a gun.
He ran down the stairs, taking almost the entire flight in one leap, and saw her desperately peddling away from him. The rickety piece of shit she was riding wobbled and teetered, looking even more unstable than she did. She turned around and gave him another terrified glance. What was wrong with the woman? Just as she was about to turn away again the bike’s handle jerked at the most awkward angle as if it had a mind of its own and she went hurtling into a tree at the end of the street.
“Holy shit!” He ran to her.
By the time he got to her she was lying on her back, her butt pushed up against the tree trunk, her legs flipped over her head like some sort of contortionist yoga guru and the bike intertwined with her folded body. Through the tangle of hair, limbs, and fluorescent metal he heard a sob and a squeak.
“Hello? Are you all right?” Leaning over, he lifted a long spiral lock off her face. It bounced against his palm, soft as silk.
One huge, almond-shaped eye focused on him.
“Teh thik to ho?” he repeated in Hindi. He had no idea why he’d spoken it or why he had used that rural dialect he now used only with his mother, but it just slipped out.
The tangled-up, upside-down mess of a girl, looking at him from behind her legs, literally brightened. There was just no other way to describe it. Her one exposed eye lit up like a firework in a midnight sky. He pushed more hair off her face, almost desperate to see the rest of that smile.
“You can speak Hindi,” she said, her surprisingly husky voice so filled with delight that sensation sparkled across his skin.
For one moment the almost physical force of her smile and the uninhibited joy in her voice stole his ability to speak.
She squinted those impossibly bright eyes at him. “Sorry, is that the only line you know?”
“What? No, of course not. I know lots of lines.” Wow, that must be the stupidest thing he’d ever said in his life.
She smiled again.
He gave his head a shake and forced his attention on her mangled situation instead of that smile. As carefully as he could he pulled the bike off her. “Can you move?”
She bit down on her lip and tried to push herself up. But instead of her body moving, her face contorted with pain and tears pooled in her eyes.
He dropped down to his knees next to her. “I’m sorry. Here, let me help you.” He ignored the absurd shiver of anticipation that kicked in his gut as he reached for her.
No man had ever touched Mili like that. Ridhi’s ridiculously handsome brother wrapped his arms around her and tried to ease her into a sitting position. Pain shot through her back, her legs, through parts of her body she wasn’t even aware she possessed, and all she could think about was the warm bulges of his arms pressing into her skin. So this was what a man’s touch felt like.
Yuck. She was an awful pervert. You’re a married woman, she reminded herself.
But then he gave her another tug and she forgot her own name. Pain buzzed like a million bees in her head. She tried to be brave but she couldn’t stifle the yelp that escaped her.
“Shh. It’s okay. Let me look at that.” He propped her up against his chest and reached out to inspect her ankle. His face faded and blurred and then came back into focus. His skin was almost European light and his hair was the darkest burnt gold. If he hadn’t spoken Hindi the way he had, she might have mistaken him for a local.
He touched her ankle and she was sure something exploded inside it. She sucked in a breath and her head lolled back onto his chest. A very bad English word she had heard only in films rumbled in his chest beneath her head, which suddenly weighed a ton. Her stomach lurched. She heard a pathetic whimper. It had to be her. He didn’t look like the whimpering type.
“Shh, sweetheart. Try to breathe. There, in, then out.” His breath collected in her ear. His voice had an almost magically soothing vibration to it. He slipped a cell phone out of his pocket. “Is there anyone I can call? We need to get you to a hospital.”
At least that’s what Mili thought he said, because her ears were making funny ringing sounds. She leaned back into his wall-like chest and tried to focus on his face, which started spinning along with the fading and the blurring. “Snow Health Center is around the corner. I can walk.”
“Right,” he said. “Or why don’t you ride your bike?”
She was about to smile, but he made an angry growling sound and scooped her up in his arms. How could a flesh-and-blood body be so hard? Like tightly packed sand, but with life. The buzzing in her ears was a din now and she had to fight to keep her eyes open. He jogged across the parking lot to a very shiny action-film-style car.
“I’m going to put you in the backseat, okay?”
She nodded. As long as he kept talking to her in that soothing voice of his, she didn’t care what else he did. “Your car is yellow,” she said. “Just like my bike.”
He grinned and laid her down on the backseat of the roofless car so slowly, so very gently, she felt like she was made of spun sugar. Her ankle hit the seat and she felt like a sledgehammer on an anvil. She dug her fingers into his arm to keep from screaming. He didn’t pull away. He just kept talking in that magical voice until finally he faded out. The last thing Mili remembered was asking him to put her bike in the rack. No, the last thing she remembered was his smile when she asked him to do it.
7
The first thing the girl did when they entered the clinic was throw up. She had passed out in the car but when Samir lifted her slight body and carried her into the building she started mumbling incoherent words into his neck. And when he put her on the gurney like they asked him to, she leaned over and threw up—on his shoes. His custom-crafted Mephistos. Super.
It was all downhill from there. The receptionist kept asking him all these questions and for some reason he felt compelled to make up shit on the fly. And since he did such a bang-up job sounding like he knew what he was talking about, thanks to DJ’s research on the girl, they gave him a clipboard crammed with forms to fill out while they rolled her away to get some X-rays.
“Sir, you put her name down as Ma-la-vai-kaa Sanj-h-va—” The perky redhead behind the counter was going to hurt herself saying the name.
“Maul-veeka Sungh-vee.” He enunciated it slowly and tried to put her out of her misery.
She fluttered her clumpy lashes at him for his effort. “Yes. Um. There’s no one by that name in our database.” She looked at him like she expected him to help.
He shrugged.
“There’s a Malvika Rathod—a Malvika Virat Rathod.”
Exactly what he needed to hear. His anger came back in a choking surge. His brother’s comatose body, Rima’s hands clasped in prayer, Baiji’s silent desperation—the nightmare flashed in his mind. Keep your mind on why you’re here, asshole. Get her to sign on that line and get the hell out of here.
“Yes, that’s her,” he said.
“You put your name down as Samir Rathod. Are you related?”
“No. No, we’re not related. I was confused when I filled the form out. I thought you were asking for her last name, not mine. Let me change that.” Samir gave the clumpy-lashed girl his patented smolder and watched as she, like the rest of her sex, melted in a puddle at his feet. She pushed the clipboard back toward him, batting away with those eyelash clumps.
Samir scratched out the name Rathod and put down Veluri. His agent’s name would have to do.
“You can see her now,” a nurse said, coming up behind him as he handed the clipboard back.
She led him to a large ward separated into sections by curtains with the most hideously girly pink flowers. What was this, the Victorian tea-party ward?
“She needs to stay the night. She doesn’t have an emergency contact listed and she said there’s no one we can call.” The nurse’s tired eyes searched his face, as if she too expected him to help.
“No one?”
The nurse nodded.
Shit.
“I’ll stay.” What else was he supposed to say? He could hardly leave her here to crawl back to her apartment on her hands and knees. And it wasn’t like he had anywhere else to be.
