A Change of Heart

by Sonali Dev

  How had she allowed this to happen?

  He reached for her, his fingers wrapping around her arm. Sensation sparkled up and down her skin. But all he sought was balance, a little grounding, refuge from all the memories that had to be attacking him like locusts. Her shoulders squared. Her spine straightened. A wave of insane protectiveness surged through her, and she pressed closer to him.

  They stopped in the doorway of a room filled with boxes. “Vic said all the boxes are in the guest room,” he said, so close to her his breath blew her hair. “This is it.”

  They stood there for an age. She didn’t remember moving, didn’t remember walking to the boxes or watching Nikhil rip them open. But the next thing she knew, it was pitch-dark outside and they were sitting amid a carnage of cardboard and packaging in a pool of lamplight, Nikhil’s face expressionless.

  The boxes were filled mostly with medical textbooks and files. There was one box filled with CDs. They would have to go through each and every one of those CDs. Each and every one of those files.

  “Tell me about Joy,” Nikhil said next to her. “Tell me how it felt to have him.”

  She turned to him, wanting again to touch his face, to smooth away the grief. Instead, she gave him what he wanted: her words. “From the moment I knew he was inside me, I had this fullness. As if I was tight with purpose. As if my skin enclosed hope. You know that feeling you have where you wonder why you’re here? On this earth? What the point of all this is? Where everything seems like just particles dancing around you, meaningless and purposeless. When Joy was inside me, it all fell into place. It made sense. I made sense. Do you know what I mean?”

  He kissed her then. Again. A ragged, soft kiss on a sob.

  Just like this, she thought.

  He pulled away. “I really should stop doing that. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m sorry.”

  He looked so tortured, she had to say it. “I don’t think Jen would have wanted you to be miserable, Nikhil.”

  “If she didn’t want me to be miserable, she shouldn’t have left me.”

  “She didn’t choose to leave you.”

  “She chose to go to that godforsaken place. To get involved in something that was dangerous. She chose that, when she had me. When she had our baby.”

  “You chose that too. You chose to go to those godforsaken places. You put yourself in danger too. You have people who love you, people who would never survive your loss in one piece either.” But he wasn’t listening to her, his eyes were glazed over with the pain of his memories.

  “Once she got pregnant, how did that not change her mind? Why didn’t she want to protect our baby?”

  “Of course she wanted to protect the baby. Don’t you think she was careful?”

  “Careful?” Anger sparkled in his eyes again. And indignation. As if he knew something she didn’t. As if she didn’t understand. “Jen knew what monsters these people were. She knew what they were capable of. Then why? Why? You don’t know what they did. You didn’t see it. I, I couldn’t even . . . How could she?”

  “I don’t believe you.” She shoved away from him. Anger crashed through her, building tenfold from the anger she saw in his eyes. Anger so huge it made her arms and legs unsteady as she pushed off the floor, killing all the warmth inside her. “You think this happened to Jen because she wasn’t careful? You think what those monsters did to her was her fault?” She backed away from him. His nearness, so soothing a moment ago, fanned her into an inferno.

  Maybe she was shouting, but she couldn’t tell. “What could she have done differently, Nikhil? What? Stayed home? Stayed in places where you could have taken care of her, where you could have done with her as you pleased?” Sold her, starved her, told her who could and could not touch her.

  She spun around, shaking so hard she could barely manage it. She couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. Her skin felt too tight around her. Her scar felt like it would split at the seams, unable to contain the rage inside her. In all they’d done to her, she’d never questioned the colossal injustice of it. Of walking down the streets of her town and needing to wrap herself in her own arms, behind books, under layers and layers of clothes. She had done every single thing she could. Always.

  And she had never, not for one moment, thought it was her fault.

  She’d never for one moment not known it was them. The bastards who had taken everything. Her uncle who had taken her home by never giving her one. The man who’d bought her and taken her childhood. Those monsters who had taken her body. She’d never blamed herself. She’d felt only anger. ANGER. Such intense anger it had seared the wounds shut. Cauterized them.

  But to hear Nikhil blame Jen for what those bastards did to her, to watch him be what she told herself every day all men couldn’t possibly be, someone who shoved all responsibility on women because he could, someone who stood apart and took comfort in not bothering to understand—it made the anger unbearable. Because there was Joy. And he would never be this. Because how could she stand it if he were?

  “You okay?” Nikhil said behind her.

  She was standing at the kitchen counter. The hard concrete clutched in her fingers. She hadn’t noticed herself move. That level of anger was unacceptable. It took away her awareness, her control. She tried to loosen her grip but couldn’t.

  “I didn’t mean it was her fault,” he said behind her.

  Actually, that’s exactly what he had meant.

  It was easy to blame Jen. So he did. It wasn’t just him. The rest of the world did it too. All the time. Blame those who had been hurt. So they could live in the world that didn’t know how to stop those who did heinous things. In a world that let them get away with it.

  You should have protected yourself better, the bastard’s secretary had said to her when he paid her off and cleaned up his boss’s mess. I’m telling you this for your own good. Be careful, it’s a brutal world out there for a woman who’s by herself.

  Yes. She’d needed the bastard to tell her that. With her body as torn up as her mind, her womanhood bleeding into the endless supply of sanitary pads she slapped on. Yes, she needed the bastard to tell her to take responsibility for being a woman. For existing with breasts and something they could plunder between her legs.

  But for Nikhil to be one of them. It made him common, kicked the pedestal from under him. And that made her want to break something.

  “I want you to say what you’re thinking.”

  She laughed. Yes. She should tell him what she was thinking.

  Nikhil spun her around. “Tell me what you’re thinking. Please.”

  She yanked her arm away, not wanting to be touched by him. Wanting to burn him with the fire that flared inside her. “I was thinking how you were so right. Of course it was Jen’s fault that she wanted to help people who were most in need of her medicine. I mean, a doctor who wanted to serve people who had no one else. A doctor who wanted to stop someone from stealing organs and killing people. What was she thinking? And her walking home from dinner with her husband. How dare she! What those bastards did to her, how didn’t she think that was going to happen?”

  “I didn’t mean it was her fault like that.”

  “Yes, you did.” She shoved him away and walked to the wall of windows.

  He followed her, looking distraught, horrified at what he’d said, what he’d believed, but she didn’t care anymore.

  She turned on him. “Look at you. You’re angry with her for leaving. Angry. You’re angry, Nikhil. So much so, that you don’t even want to catch those bastards. You don’t care who’s really at fault. Because this is easier. Blaming someone who has no voice is easier. And it makes you as much of a bastard as them. Jen was wrong when she said you were the strongest man she knew. She was wrong when she said no one was more fair. She was wrong to believe—”

  “Stop it. Don’t tell me what Jen thought. Don’t fucking act like you know what was between us. Angry at her? At her? You have no idea what they did to h
er. Just because she talks to you, you think you know what she went through? You weren’t there. I was there. You have no idea what it was like.”

  * * *

  “Which part?” The question was so soft. Nikhil wasn’t even sure he had heard it. But he knew it was going to change his life.

  She was pressed into the windows behind her, her sweatshirt a blot of black against the black outside. The anger inside her, inside them, raged around the dead apartment, like fire charring what was already burned.

  He slammed his hand into his hair, surprised to find it scraping his palm. Her eyes, they were in flames. Something horrible moved inside him. He tried to turn away from her, but her voice trapped him in place, slid a plastic bag around his head and cut off his breath.

  “Which part do you believe I don’t understand?”

  Why had he started this? Why couldn’t he look away from her eyes? Those eyes. He wanted her to stop, wanted to take back ever wanting to know. But those eyes were so filled with the need to have someone not turn away, to have someone see and not turn away, he couldn’t turn away from them.

  “Which part, Nikhil?” One sharp, blinding explosion of pain popped in her eyes before the words slipped past barely moving lips.

  “I was raped.”

  The ground slipped from under him.

  “By two men.”

  An incoherent sound escaped his lips. But she didn’t seem to hear it.

  “You know how you accused me of not knowing who Joy’s father is? You were right. I don’t know. It could be either one of them.” Her voice dipped then. Falling from sound to pure pain. “Except he looks exactly like one of them.”

  “Jess.”

  She didn’t register his voice, and he knew she was somewhere else. Not here with him.

  “But you’re right. That’s the only thing Jen and I had in common.”

  “Jess. Please.” He knew not to touch her. Not to move closer.

  “I was seventeen. And no one cared what happened to me. No one crumbled to pieces on my behalf. Oh, and there was one more thing we had in common. We both didn’t expect to get pregnant. I didn’t even know I was pregnant until six months into the pregnancy. I didn’t even know such a thing could result in a baby. How could it?” She looked at him with those seventeen-year-old eyes that had frozen in time, pain fossilized inside amber.

  She laughed, a spit bubble forming at the center of her barely parted lips. “Until the moment I found out, I relived it every day. But when I saw my baby on the ultrasound machine, everything changed. Joy, from that instant that I knew he was inside me, took everything away. Everything. The only thing I knew was that he was mine. Mine. I had never expected to live again. But he gave me life. I was never exposing him to my horrors. So they stopped.”

  Not for the first time, he wanted to go down on his knees in front of her.

  Seventeen years old.

  How fragile, how delicate, how easily breakable she seemed now. He had seen her slight body under those huge sweatshirts she wore.

  Seventeen.

  His heart hurt so bad he wanted to hold her, erase what warred inside her, wipe at it until it was gone.

  Seventeen.

  What kind of monsters walked the earth? He couldn’t bring himself to call them animals. Because animals never took what wasn’t theirs. Never took something only because it was vulnerable, never destroyed what was beautiful simply because they could.

  “Can I touch you?” The words made her blink. As though he’d shaken her.

  She didn’t move. Didn’t move away, so he reached out and his hand hovered over her cheeks, over the rivers that slid down that infinitely delicate skin.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and moved into his touch. All of her moved. All of him, the world around them, everything moved until she was in his arms. Their touching so tentative there had to be another word for it. What did you call holding a baby shed from the womb so early she had no hope? And yet she breathed, and you, all you could do was hold her so her skin and all those half-formed organs that caused her to be alive just barely held together. You had to become her shell, grow around her, be her cocoon. Because she had to live. No matter what. She had to live.

  Once she had shifted into him, into his hold, letting her go was unthinkable. She was deep inside herself, barely aware of him, inside her pain because she trusted him to keep her safe while she was gone.

  Tears streamed from her closed eyes and wet him. Drenched him. Unformed him and then formed him again. Silent sobs vibrated from her and through him. For hours, for eons, she wept in his arms. And all he could do was give her sorrow a place to fall.

  Finally, when he scooped her up, she barely moved. Didn’t press into him. Didn’t pull away. The nothingness of her actions told him what to do. When he took her with him to the guest bedroom, he might have floated there. He didn’t know. All he knew was he couldn’t do anything other than what he was doing.

  He couldn’t not lay down with her, couldn’t not tuck her against him, couldn’t not wrap his body around hers and close his eyes against her hair. And hold her and hold her. Until she drifted away in his arms. Fell out of her pain and into sleep. It was then that he let himself drift away too. His sleep wrapped around hers. Their joint collapse into a nothingness so absolute the morning light had to be rebirth.

  30

  When I was too young to know better, I dreamed of a white knight. Someone who’d rescue me, protect me, keep me from harm. By the time I found him, all I wanted was for him to know I didn’t need protecting.

  —Dr. Jen Joshi

  She thought the prickly jacket of thorns she wore would keep out the predators.

  Ignore them. That’s what Aama had always told her.

  She did.

  When her aunt left all the dishes for her to clean in the washing area in the backyard, and she squatted over the pile and scrubbed and scrubbed in the freezing cold, she ignored that her cousins sat huddled around the fire pit in the kitchen sipping hot milk.

  When her mother coughed up blood and smiled at her through her gasps for breath, and her aunt and uncle went about their business as if she were already dead, she ignored them. When the schoolteacher stood too close, and the smoke on his breath made her gag, she ignored him. When that shanty-store owner pushed her up against the side of his shop and tried to shove his fat fingers into her panties, she ignored him. Well, she kicked him in the nuts first, then she ignored him.

  But the film set was harder. Everyone seemed to think it was okay to stare at her as if she had no clothes on. Everyone from the fifteen-year-old spot boy to the sixty-five-year-old cameraman leered at all the girls as if they were naked. The rest of the girls didn’t seem to mind. But it made her skin crawl and her stomach turn.

  She wrapped herself in her dupatta and hugged her schoolbooks to her breasts, which just would not stop growing. Her kurta was several sizes too large. At least three of her could fit in it with ease. And yet, even when she got out of her dancer’s clothes, they watched her as if she were still in them, her belly exposed, her chest spilling out of the obscenely low-cut choli.

  She had asked them for a larger size, but they’d told her if she wanted a larger one, she could find it on a different film set. And roles for untrained chorus dancers didn’t exactly grow on trees, so she put it on and ignored what it didn’t cover.

  She ignored the looks and the licked lips. But their eyes always knew exactly how to find every inch of skin that her dupatta would not cover, no matter how tightly she wrapped it around herself.

  She thought about leaving the film. But if she left a film halfway, there would be no more Junior Artist roles, and Sister Mary had pulled a lot of strings to get her this job. And dancing was better than scrubbing utensils in someone’s house. At least on set she could study between shots and there were a lot of people here and she wasn’t locked up in someone’s house all by herself and at their mercy.

  But ignoring Rajsir’s shamelessly lusty eyes was
becoming harder and harder. He was the star of the film. Calcutta’s brightest rising star. With his large, brooding eyes and the silky flick of hair falling over one eye, the public was desperately in love with him. Several of the girls on set were too. He had no problem pulling them into his trailer. No one ever talked about it after, which for some reason had scared her more than anything.

  For two weeks she had done everything she could to avoid his lecherous gaze. But then they’d moved her to the front of the formation, and she found herself dancing with him, a step where he got to run his hand up and down her waist. When he took fifteen takes to get the shot right, she knew without a doubt that she had to quit the film. Even if it meant finding another way to keep herself fed and in school.

  But those fifteen takes, those three hours when he got to touch her as if she were his to touch, changed her life. Destroyed every chance she had at ever being safe again. By the end of those hours, he was panting in her face, his lust glinting like madness in his eyes.

  She knew she had to run. Get off the set as soon as she could. She ran to the bathroom, needing somewhere safe, panic beating in her chest like a drum.

  He followed her into the bathroom. She was the only one there, but he didn’t even check before backing her against a wall. “I’ll make you a heroine,” he said. “With those eyes, that body, all of Calcutta will be hard for you. The way I am.”

  “Please leave me alone.” She tried to slip past him. But he moved to block her in. Her heart thundered in her ears. She had to keep her head.

  Don’t look scared. Don’t look angry. Don’t show any emotion. It will only excite him.

  “Oh, look at the princess’s style,” he said. “So cool. You really know how to work it, don’t you? It’s working. You’ve driven me crazy. My madness, it’s your fault.” He grabbed her around the waist and thrust his mouth into hers. His breath tasted of alcohol and stale fish. His hips pushed her into the cold, sticky tiles behind her. A horrible pressure jabbed into her belly, and she gagged on the bitter bile that rose up her gullet.