A Change of Heart

by Sonali Dev

  She climbed the black granite steps that led to the reception desk and waited. She couldn’t believe they were actually going to disembark the ship today. She was another step closer to going home to Joy.

  Part of her had never believed Nikhil would buy her story. If she’d had her doubts before she got here, after she had met Nikhil, it had seemed downright impossible to get through to him, and yet the impossible had happened.

  Maybe it was time to move from being a chorus dancer to an actor.

  Maybe it had nothing to do with her. Maybe Nikhil had been ready to stop drowning in pain and to move on to the do-something phase. Just his luck that she had caught him at the crest of that vulnerability.

  She pulled her headband off and shook out Jen’s hair, even as she tried to shake off all that strange, prickling concern and sadness for him that she’d been indulging in. The other choice was guilt. She couldn’t afford to let herself feel that either. None of these feelings were worth anything in the face of what she stood to lose.

  She was doing what she had to do, what she would do a million times over if needed. But at least she could stop twisting the knife she had slid so ruthlessly into his gut. The hair had done its job. It was time for it to go.

  The receptionist at the ship’s salon gave her a wide smile. “Welcome to the Well-Spa. How may we help you refresh and replenish today?”

  I need to erase the past ten years of my life. “I need to color my hair.”

  The girl’s gaze did a quick sweep of her hair and she looked visibly relieved that the hideous color had seen its last day, then apologetic for having made her relief so obvious.

  “Sure,” she said, flashing her startlingly white teeth. “It will be five minutes. Please take a seat.”

  Her phone buzzed just as she settled into the sleek patent-leather sofa that looked incredibly uncomfortable but held her body so perfectly, it was like finding an oasis on The Oasis.

  It was a text from Sweetie asking her to text him.

  Texts from someone asking you to text them were never a good sign. What’s wrong? she typed out. Then changed it to, What’s the matter? Not wanting to throw self-fulfilling prophecies into the universe.

  Sweetie’s text buzzed back in a second. Also not a good sign. It meant he was waiting for her to text. Those bastards gave Joy a ride home today.

  No.

  She knew they were watching him, but the bastard had promised not to touch him.

  Is Joy okay?

  He recognized the man who took him to the hospital when they took him last time. He thought something was wrong with you again.

  The eggs she had eaten for breakfast crawled up her throat.

  Can I talk to him?

  I told him you were fine, fed him ice cream, and he fell asleep perfectly happy.

  If he had worried about her then he had definitely not fallen asleep happy.

  I’ll have him call you as soon as he wakes up. But, baby, you okay?

  I’m fine. I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.

  But he knew just as well as she did that they were empty words. The only thing she could make sure of was to hurry this along.

  “They’re ready for you.” The girl from the salon gave her another perfect smile, and Jess followed her across the mood-lit salon that no longer felt peaceful or soothing.

  Another girl, just as beautiful, pulled out a chair for Jess. Both girls exchanged a look, taking in her black yoga pants, her black hoodie, her hair—every aspect of her appearance in a fraction of a second. An entire conversation passed between them without a single word being uttered. For a moment it was like being back in the dressing room on a film set. Why was appearance and judgment such a currency between women? Why wasn’t it enough that they were no more than their appearance to men? Why did they have to be that to one another?

  She sank into the chair and leaned her head back over the sink.

  A soft pillow cradled the back of her neck, so different from the sharp-edged sink at Beauty’s Beauty Parlor.

  “I’m Tiffany.” The girl turned on the hand spray and started to work the warm water into Jess’s hair. “What kind of color were we thinking?”

  Warm water seeped through her hair and tickled her scalp. One of the girls at Beauty’s had poured water on her head from a jug while another one had rinsed the color from her hair. The girls had argued about who should do the pouring and who should do the rinsing.

  The scene should have been funny, but the fact that she was stealing a dead woman’s hair to convince her husband that he wasn’t done with the tragedy had sucked all the humor from it.

  “Do you want to leave the extensions in?”

  She wanted to leave nothing in. She wanted it all gone. The entire ugly mess inside her gone.

  “Just the color for now, please.” The weight of the hair was a good reminder—of all the things that had to be done before she could go home to Joy, of all the things she could not wish away and that ticked inside her like a time bomb.

  The blast of pain in Nikhil’s eyes every time they landed on the hair flashed in her head. Maybe she should leave the color in; maybe she needed the pain to hurry things along. But she couldn’t do it, couldn’t go on witnessing it.

  His pain, his anger, every shade of undiluted feeling that passed over his face in those ruthless blasts had taken to bubbling up inside her at the most unpredictable times. Ever since she’d left him last night, an odd fear had gripped her.

  It was nothing like her fear when she thought about Joy in a car with those men, his little heart imagining her in trouble. That fear gave her purpose, made her so angry she would do anything. This fear she felt when she saw flashes of Jen’s Nikhil emerging from behind his grief was different from any she’d known before, and every time it bloomed in her belly it took her by surprise. It reminded her of that first time she’d felt her baby kicking and not known what it was.

  Tiffany held out a board of color swatches. “What looks good?”

  “Just a basic dark brown.” She just wanted her natural color back.

  She wanted her life back.

  One step at a time. That’s what her mother had taught her. The only way to get through life was to look at the ground beneath your feet and take one step, then another. Looking too far down the path was what made you stumble.

  9

  I glimpsed madness today. Evil so complete has to be insanity.

  —Dr. Jen Joshi

  Asif Khan had never been inside a beauty parlor. But true leaders did what needed to be done. If saving his empire—Mumbai’s most feared gang—meant walking into this flowery-smelling hole where women had hair ripped off their soft parts, he’d do it.

  He had to hand it to the bitches. The things they went through to be attractive to men, whom they didn’t even seem to like that much. It was hilarious. Then again, life was about doing things you hated for chutiyas you hated even more.

  He thought he had the fucker by the balls, but the last time he had spoken to him he seemed to be up to something, and Asif hadn’t become the biggest bhai in the Mumbai underworld by not staying ten steps ahead of smug chutiyas.

  This beauty parlor was where that nosy doctor bitch had last been seen before her stubborn neck had been snapped in half so her brain would die but her heart would keep beating. All the ceramic tile–covered walls were lined with pictures of foreign bitches with glossy pouty lips and fluffy hair. Some of them were even showing cleavage. Totally fuckable.

  Asif liked foreign maal, so spotless and so shameless. He stroked the boobs on the poster and felt his dick thicken in his pants. Not that it took the bastard much to come to life.

  He turned to the fat old cow who was cowering behind her counter. Naturally, his dick shriveled.

  “Are you the madam of this place?” he asked around the tobacco juicing up his cheek.

  She nodded.

  “Do you have someone less hideous I can talk to?”

  His men guffawed.

/>   “Bhai, look at this!” One of his men had grabbed two pretty young sluts by their arms and dragged them out of a room in the back.

  The girls were shaking and sobbing in their tight dresses.

  Ah, there was that thickening in his pants again. He licked his lips.

  “How can I help you, Bhai?” The fat bitch interrupted his study.

  He snapped his fingers in her direction without looking at her and his men moved at her. She squeaked.

  “Can’t you see Bhai is busy?” He had the best-trained men in the business. Not to mention the most loyal. They would all die for him in a heartbeat. A man didn’t rule Dharavi without an army like that.

  Which reminded him why he was here. When you sat at the top, ten people waited to topple you over. He turned to the sniveling madam.

  “You knew that foreign doctor?”

  She looked blank.

  “The chinky one.” He pulled his eyes into slits and his men guffawed again.

  She didn’t answer. Asif raised an eyebrow, and Laloo, his right-hand man, grabbed her hair and gave it a hard yank, squeezing another satisfying squeak out of her.

  “Jen madam,” one of the girls said behind him.

  He turned around and waited for his man to drag her closer, then patted her cheek. She was all stacked and tight. He was going to have to pat more than just her cheek. It took one sideways glance at Laloo to get a nod of acknowledgment. Oh yes, his men were well trained indeed. No words were needed.

  “Smart girl. Yes, Jen madam. How well did you know her?”

  “What ‘know,’ Bhai?” the fat one said behind him. “She was a fancy doctor. She just came in here to help the girls with checkups and all.”

  “Yes, yes. All these charitable foreign fuckers who show up to clean up our shit and wipe our arses. Did you know her family?”

  “She was by herself, Bhai. Husband was somewhere abroad.”

  Asif was on her in a moment. He slammed her face into the counter. The girls screamed. The fatso sobbed. “Do you know who I am? I didn’t become the king of Dharavi by letting dried-up old bitches fuck me.”

  He pulled her up by her hair and stared into her face. He knew what he looked like. Terror lit up her eyes. “You used to send her husband food when he was here and crying into his sari.”

  She tried to nod. Her cheek was bleeding. He pressed a finger into the gash and dragged blood up her cheek to her eyelid.

  “One more lie and you won’t be able to see out of this eye. Who else came here looking for information? The police?”

  She nodded.

  “Who else?” He must have shouted because the terror in her eyes swelled. His tobacco spittle splattered across her bloodstained face, red mixing with red.

  “No one else, Bhai,” the hot stuff he was going to fuck later said behind him. He was about to slice one across her face for interrupting him when she said, “But there was a girl who came asking for the same color hair dye we used on Jen madam’s hair.”

  He smiled. Forget waiting for later. This one was turning him on so much he wasn’t going to wait.

  “Good girl!” he said and swaggered out of Beauty’s Beauty Parlor like the king he was. Behind him, his men followed, dragging the screaming bitch with them.

  10

  I didn’t believe that entire “eyes are the window to the soul” thing until I met Nic.

  He has this way of looking at you as if he sees you and finds you lacking in nothing. And you believe it. And that lets all sorts of shit out.

  —Dr. Jen Joshi

  “Are you absolutely certain you cannot find me one single flight from Miami to Chicago? Or from any of the surrounding airports?”

  “Yes, sir, I believe that is what I’ve been trying to tell you for the past twenty minutes.” The lady at the airline counter threw another long-suffering glance over her glasses at the line snaking behind Nikhil.

  Other airline employees at other counters had been telling him that for the past few hours as well, but she didn’t need to know that.

  “Sir, this has been the worst blizzard in history to hit the Great Lakes, and no flights are making it into Chicago or into any of the airports within four hours of it. The closest I can get you is Atlanta. But not until tomorrow night. I’m sorry.”

  He thanked her and she almost collapsed in relief when he finally walked away. She’d suffered enough for the fact that he hadn’t watched the news or read the papers recently, and looking out at the sky through the wall of windows, it seemed like all the earth was bathed in sunshine.

  He found Jess leaning against a metallic column, the handles of both their bags clutched tightly in her fist. It reminded him of his mother holding on to their bags at a Mumbai railway station on one of his childhood visits to India.

  “No one is going to run off with our bags,” he said more sharply than he’d intended.

  “How do you know that?” she said as if he hadn’t just snapped her head off. Her newly colored hair framed her face, which was giving away nothing today. She was in full Goddess of Darkness mode.

  He took the bags from her and tossed them on the black leather seats bolted to the floor. This wasn’t fucking India. He sank into the empty chair next to the bags and waited for her to join him. “There are no flights into Chicago until the day after tomorrow.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No. Just a hunch.”

  She looked away, her blasted stillness untouched. But that chin of hers jutted forward a few millimeters. Yay! A reaction.

  “When I asked the travel agent on the cruise ship, she said there were five flights to Chicago from Miami every day.”

  He sank back in his chair and stretched his legs out as if he were lounging on a beach. Except for the beach ball–sized knots in his belly. “Actually, there are twelve. They’re all canceled because Chicago is snowed in.” What were the odds of an April snowstorm? But the one thing you could always count on about his hometown was not being able to count on the weather.

  She stared out the wall of windows at the spotless sky. “Is there another airline we could try?”

  “Oh, I should have thought of that. Wait. I did.” Okay, maybe he needed to dial back the snark a little bit. But when he’d braced himself to get off the ship and onto dry land for the first time in two years, being stranded at an airport was the last thing he’d expected.

  She looked away in that annoyingly serene way of hers without another word, but the skepticism on her face was as clear as the Miami sky.

  “What?” He leaned forward.

  She raised an eyebrow and said nothing.

  “If there is something you want to say, say it.”

  He got another supercilious raise of the brow and another whole lot of silence.

  “Jess, I asked you a question.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t hear it.”

  “If you’re accusing me of something, I should at least know what it is.”

  She lifted her hand and almost patted his hand as if he were a puppy dog who needed to be calmed. But then she put those slender-fingered hands back in her lap, dainty as a fucking ballerina.

  “When was the last time you went home?” She might as well have kicked him, right in the center of his chest, with metal spikes.

  He felt ten years old again . . . when he’d loved to ask questions but had hated the answers he was given. Why did Hitler hate the Jews? Why did the British divide India? Why did Idi Amin slaughter his people? There were tomes filled with answers—as though just because someone listed reasons, things were supposed to make sense—and he hated every single one of them.

  He leaned back in his chair and tried the beach pose again. But the pain in his chest made it impossible. If she said anything about understanding how hard this was, he was leaving her here and going back to the ship. Even if he had to swim to it, given that it had set sail by now.

  She said nothing. Just held her body as still as ever.

  “Are you suggesting I someho
w orchestrated the largest snowstorm in recent history just because I’m a coward?”

  She flinched. “You’re not a coward.”

  “Right, I’m an angel with a halo, I forgot.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you are, Nikhil. What matters is—”

  “Finding the evidence. I know. Bringing those bastards to justice. I know.” She was right, too. He should be burning for redemption. He should be like those action heroes with automatic firearms shooting from both hands, ready to take the world down for justice. Instead, he felt like a slug someone had stepped on.

  Her fingers twitched and lifted again. But he was glad she didn’t try to comfort him. “Is there a train or a bus we can take?” she asked instead.

  He clamped down on all the sarcastic responses that jumped up his throat at once. “I checked. The Greyhound and Amtrak schedule is backed up a few days. That’s the bus and train service,” he added when she looked confused.

  “There has to be something we can do.”

  His preference would be to swim to The Oasis. But that would reinforce her coward theory. “We can wait two days in Miami until a flight becomes available.”

  She stood, picked up her bag, and slung it over her shoulder.

  “You planning to walk there?”

  Again no reaction other than the slightest stiffening of that already-ramrod-straight spine. The woman had absolutely no sense of humor.

  “I don’t know much about America, but I don’t think that’s possible.” Well, he couldn’t argue with that. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” With that she walked away, her huge black sweatshirt floating around her spear-straight body as it weaved through the milling crowd.

  He yanked his duffel off the seat, slung it over his shoulder, and fell in step next to her. They walked past the lines snaking in front of airline counters, dodged wailing babies, running kids, and exhausted people sitting cross-legged on the floor.