My Last Love Story

by Falguni Kothari

  “Dad, something’s happened. Can you meet us at Zai’s house in ten minutes? Yeah. It’s fucking urgent. Great. And get money.” He shut the phone and floored the accelerator. “Don’t worry, yaar. Dad will take care of everything. You take care of your dad, okay? Okay?”

  I swallowed, feeling Zayaan’s horror and pain as my own.

  Khodai, please let Zai’s abu be all right. He’s a good man.

  Rizvaan was a punk, always getting into trouble, always creating trouble for his family. But I didn’t wish bad on him either.

  The guys debated on whether to drop me home first, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Zayaan needed me.

  We parked the car on the street outside his house. The Jamaat Khana rose behind his house on a parallel street. The two matching buildings were connected by a narrow well-kept garden. The building complex Nirvaan and I lived in was just down the street.

  We rushed into the house. There were so many people there. The Mukhi Saheb was a popular man in the community, always there for people in need. It seemed the community was returning the favor. We waded through relatives, neighbors, and friends to get to Zayaan’s mother.

  She sat on a sofa, stiff and unyielding, her sobbing daughters on either side, but when she saw Zayaan, she broke apart. He fell to his knees before her and gathered her up tight in his arms. He kissed her forehead, murmuring assurances over and over.

  I stopped short, watching them. It was the first time I’d seen Gulzar Auntie’s head covered. Her face was unveiled, but the way she’d wrapped the long, dark scarf around her head, neck, and shoulders made my stomach lurch. It occurred to me that I’d have to cover my head, too, once Zayaan and I married.

  Then, Kamlesh Desai walked in, and within half an hour, the house emptied of people. Zayaan’s mother was dispatched to the hospital with a relative and a chunk of money, and Zayaan, Nirvaan, and his dad set off for the police station to find out how best they could help Rizvaan. It didn’t look good. The police had accused him of planning extremist activities. And he’d absconded.

  I took charge of Zayaan’s sisters and the house phone, which rang ceaselessly. People kept dropping in with news or to ask for news, and it got exhausting, explaining the same things over and over.

  By midnight, the bustle began to taper down, and a couple of matronly neighbors offered to man the fort, coaxing Sofia, Sana, and me to have dinner and go to bed. Relieved, I sat with Zayaan’s sisters until they cried themselves to sleep, the poor girls. I left their room door ajar and went down the hall into Zayaan’s room to lie down myself.

  I’d been in his room only a handful of times. Mostly, it was Zayaan who’d come over to my house, or we’d hang out in different places or at Nirvaan’s when he was around. So, I looked about in shy curiosity.

  I tried to picture myself living here once we were married. The room was big and messy. It had two of everything—beds, desks, cupboards, windows. I knew he shared the room with his brother, but one side didn’t look lived in at all. Rizvaan was rarely home these days, Zayaan had mentioned. Rizvaan wouldn’t even come home at night, and it’d worried their father—justifiably, it would seem.

  There was an old picture of Zayaan and his siblings on his desk hutch—two brothers, standing strong, shoulder to shoulder, their hands resting on the shoulders of their younger sisters. The brothers, being only sixteen months apart, seemed liked mirror images. These days, Rizvaan looked much older than his nineteen years with his full beard and mustache and hateful eyes—nothing whatsoever like his handsome, scholarly brother.

  Zayaan had been awarded scholarships to several universities in India, the UK, and the US. Nirvaan wanted him to accept the Stanford scholarship. But I wanted him not to leave me behind. I wasn’t clever enough to be offered scholarships, and my brothers couldn’t afford to send me abroad to study. And no matter how much I was tempted to race after the guys to the US, I wasn’t going to let Nirvaan’s dad fund my education.

  I was jealous. I admitted it. I was green with envy that the guys would live it up dorm-style for the next four years. Would they even remember my name after those drunken college adventures Nirvaan had vowed they’d have? Would Zayaan fall in love with a smarter, bustier college girl in Stanford? Would he keep his promise to come back and marry me, or would California snare him in her shiny web forever?

  I laughed at myself for having such silly doubts. Of course, he would come back for me, for his parents, for his sisters. Maybe even his brother. Zayaan understood responsibility and was a man of his word. Nirvaan, I wasn’t so sure of.

  I picked up another photo frame from the desk. It was from a picnic last year. The guys carried me like a hammock between them. They were laughing as I was screaming. Moments after it’d been taken, they’d flung me into the Tapi River and dived in after me.

  I yawned, blinking at the alarm clock on Zayaan’s desk. My birthday was way past over. And from what I could tell, the guys’ birthdays would be spent shuttling between the police station, hospital, and search parties. So, we’d unwrap our presents a few days late this year. No biggie. Family came first.

  Yawning again, I got under the blanket on Zayaan’s bed with the photo. One way or another, I was sleeping with my guys tonight, I decided with a smile.

  I didn’t think I’d fall asleep. And I couldn’t have slept for long. When I woke, I was still clutching the frame to my chest. The ceiling lights were bright in my eyes. Even so, Rizvaan looked positively menacing as he loomed over me. He was such a creep.

  I sat up and swung my legs off the bed, arranging my skirt beneath the blanket. I looked at the wide open doors of the room and his cupboard with relief. There was a half-filled duffel bag open on his bed.

  Is he running away or surrendering?

  He smirked, like he knew I was uncomfortable with him in the room, but he turned his back on me without saying a word and resumed stuffing his clothes in the bag. He didn’t even zing me with some jaundiced comment about sleeping in Zayaan’s bed, and for a moment, I was nonplussed.

  I stood up, thinking he must be too stressed about jail or whatever to be nasty to me. “It’s good you came home,” I said, setting the picture back on the desk. “Everyone is so worried. Abu is in the hospital and—”

  “Abu?” he cut me off, his mockery making my back stiffen. “Ah, yes, my dear abu, who has blessed the union of my little brother and his little slut.” He chuckled, as if greatly amused. “You’ve fooled everyone, haven’t you, with your good-girl act?”

  A door clicked shut, and I prayed it was the cupboard I’d heard.

  Before I even turned from the desk, I knew how much trouble I was in. Blood began to pound through me. The veins in my wrists, my temple, my neck throbbed. My heart started hammering against my chest, and I wondered if it would break my rib cage and leap out.

  I wanted to run and pound on the door till someone opened it. I should’ve screamed the house down.

  But I couldn’t move. I’d frozen at the sight of the gun in his hand.

  “Let me out of the room, Rizvaan. You’re in enough trouble as it is.” I hoped I sounded bolder than I felt.

  He nodded, many times. “Yes, I am.”

  The solid sincerity in his words jarred me. In that moment, I realized there was nothing I could do or say to stop what was going to happen next. Rizvaan knew he was doomed. Tonight, he’d either be locked away or be ostracized forever. He wasn’t going to go down alone. That, too, was clear on his face.

  He wanted someone to blame, and he’d found me.

  Yet I appealed to him. I begged him to care about his father, his mother, and his sisters, who were sleeping just down the hall. I begged him to think of his brother, of his family’s reputation. I warned him of the women in the living room who’d hear the gun go off.

  Please, Khodai, let him shoot me fast.

  He laughed.

  “Those aunties were snoring like whales,” he said, “when I walked past them.”

  He was entertained by the
idea of them startling awake and screaming at the gunshot. He estimated, by the time they labored their fat bodies up the stairs and succeeded in breaking down the door, he’d be long gone out the window. The only hitch in the scenario was, he didn’t want to shoot me. It was too easy a sentence for the countless times I’d snubbed him.

  When he told me point-blank what he intended, I threw up.

  “Tcha, tcha, tcha. None of that now. Think of it as a bargain—your life in exchange for your virtue. As for your reputation, it’ll be our secret. You’re good at keeping secrets, aren’t you? You and your Romeos…you think you’ve been so clever, fooling everyone. But I know. I’ve always known about you. What’s one more Romeo between those beautiful thighs, hmm?”

  It happened fast. One second, he was debating on how to exact my pound of flesh, and the next, he was on me. I didn’t know how he’d come close enough to press the gun to my forehead.

  “Lie down.”

  I was numb. I felt such terror and disbelief and revulsion that I couldn’t breathe. My throat closed up, and I didn’t think I could’ve screamed even if I’d tried.

  I didn’t try. I could only beg.

  He pushed me down on Zayaan’s bed. I believe he did that on purpose. He straddled me when I struggled, caught my jaw in a bruising grip when I tried to bite him. He reminded me that if I didn’t care to be a good girl, there would be hell to pay—and not just for me.

  He tore my flimsy panties off with one hand. The hand pressing the gun to my cheek didn’t even tremble. He fumbled with his jeans and pulled his cock out. I didn’t know why I was watching.

  I cried when he penetrated me—not because it hurt though it did. I cried because he was surprised I was a virgin. He called it a bonus. He didn’t smirk. He wasn’t cruel. He looked so much like Zayaan that my heart shattered.

  I closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear to look at him then.

  But I snapped them open when I smelled him. He’d sprayed Zayaan’s cologne on himself. I dry-heaved, sobbing uncontrollably. When he finished, he thanked me for my cooperation and spit on my face.

  I’d always known evil existed in the world. That night, I realized it lived inside me.

  I sat on the deck for a long time, staring at the horizon.

  I wondered at which point the ocean blended into the sky or night started masquerading as day or what happened when life bled into death.

  Zayaan theorized such questions were the constructs of an active imagination, of man’s inability to remain undefined. Because some things had no definition, we made them precious and beautiful, abstract and blurred.

  It’s the horizon. It’s twilight. This is a soul, and that’s heaven.

  My mother had disliked whiskey, and my father would drink nothing else.

  “One man’s Ohrmazd is another man’s Ahriman,” had been Daddy’s way of explaining the inexplicable.

  The same was true of sex. The same act of penetration but without consent and love became rape.

  Eventually, my thoughts stopped bouncing from horizon to sky to shore and went quiet. It was so quiet that I once again became aware that I lived at the edge of an ocean and far, far away from Surat. The neighbor’s dogs were out chasing the seagulls for their morning meal. The few people strolling along the beach were in jackets. The sun was out, and the air was blue.

  I was dressed for hospital cold. I wore a long-sleeved T-shirt and a mohair sweater with my jeans. My hair was brushed, and my face was creamed with tinted sunblock. I was dressed with nowhere to go—just like that night twelve years ago.

  I shuddered out a sigh. Let it go.

  A crisp breeze shook the clump of Monterey cypress demarcating our property from the neighbors’ on our left. Below, hardy ice plants grew out of sand and rocks. They weren’t in bloom yet, not like the Japanese camellias. Hither and tither were bursts of purple flowers and waxy green foliage. It was a pretty house we lived in with a pretty view.

  And I was a slut.

  I’d known better than to say that over the phone. Asha Auntie would’ve taken the words as a personal failure, not to mention been disappointed in me for regressing to victim-blaming. My head knew how stupid the thought was, but that broken, shriveled up thing hiding inside me refused to agree.

  If only I hadn’t teased Rizvaan or flaunted my convent-school English in his face.

  If only I hadn’t worn strapless dresses or paraded about in shorts.

  If only I hadn’t fallen asleep in Zayaan’s room.

  If only I’d stayed asleep or kept my mouth shut.

  If only I hadn’t loved two boys…

  I stood up. I wouldn’t let my idle mind become the devil Ahriman’s workshop. I needed to do something physical, exhausting.

  It was too cold and windy to walk on the beach. I thought about setting the house to rights, but I’d cleaned and mopped and dusted and wiped only yesterday.

  As promised, Zayaan texted me with an update. This one was accompanied with a video clip of Nirvaan getting fitted with the head brace. Anticipating the removal of tiny patches of hair on his head where he’d be injected with local anesthesia before the pins were screwed in, Nirvaan had buzzed off most of his hair in a short military cut. We’d also been warned that his hair would probably fall from those sections in the next two weeks and might not grow back at all.

  Nirvaan blew me a kiss and said he was trying on his Halloween outfit. “Call me Gamma Ray Hornet. Muahahaha.” He pestered the radiologist who was intently screwing a pin into his left temple to blow me a kiss, too.

  That decided it.

  I went into the house, my spine uncurling with determination. I got ready for a long, brisk walk, locked up the house, and set off toward the hospital. It was barely five minutes away in a car. It took me a good twenty to walk there.

  I would not allow Nirvaan to shut me out of his life. He could protect me all he wanted. He could take care of my future, even force me to abide by his nonsensical Titanic Wish List, but he had no right to shelter me from the wicked. He couldn’t anyway, as Khodai had proven over and over.

  I never used to be weak. And, frankly, I was tired of feeling helpless. It was time this turtle broke out of her shell.

  Once I reached the hospital, slightly sweaty but not out of breath, I checked in at the front desk and slapped a visitor’s sticker over my heart. I didn’t look at Nirvaan or Zayaan as I stalked into radiology and plunked myself down on a seat next to my husband in the waiting area. He wore a hospital gown with his arm connected to an IV drip and earphones plugged into his ears beneath the head brace. He was watching The Godfather on the tablet.

  I imagined he was surprised. Though, when I finally met his eyes, he looked more thoughtful than curious. Zayaan, on the other hand, had his lower lip caught between his teeth, as if he was trying hard not to smile. His nostrils flared, and his eyes fairly danced with humor.

  “Everything we do, we do together,” I repeated the Awesome Threesome’s mantra. I felt as if a tremendous burden had lifted off my chest. I shot them both a narrow-eyed look. “Within reason, okay?”

  Then, I laced my fingers with my husband’s and settled in to wait for the MRI results.

  The ringmaster of Nirvaan’s team of doctors gave him a two thumbs-up approval to go hiking on the weekend.

  After the Gamma Knife procedure, Nirvaan slept for a total of twenty-eight hours, getting up only to eat and use the loo.

  By Friday evening, he was his usual intractable self although he admitted to feeling tender and itchy in the spots the pins had been poked into his head. That was normal—one of the few normal happenings in this house. And by then, the bandages the nurse had dressed his head in had to be taken off anyway. He complained of a headache but nothing he couldn’t stand, he assured the oncologist and me. The headache being the only reason he was home on a Friday night, he added, affecting a martyr’s moue worthy of Bhagat Singh, India’s illustrious freedom fighter.

  So, late Saturday morning, we loaded the Jeep
with camping equipment and drove south to the Los Padres National Forest in the Big Sur Valley. We met up with Sarvar and his party of five at the campground’s designated parking lot, and from there, we set off on an easy five-mile hike to our reserved campsite.

  The nature trail meandered through the forest, jumping over a stream, bridging a gorge, leading to a clearing at the edge of a cliff that dropped fifty feet down to a rocky cove. The campsite had a single cabin with a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a separate toilet—the only reason I’d agreed to go camping. I wasn’t about to let Nirvaan sleep in a tent where insects and Khodai knew what else could bite him. Even though his nervous system had been pumped full of intravenous antibiotics the other day, I worried. I’d disinfected the puncture sites and sealed them with fresh waterproof bandages and a knit cap, making him swear on his mother that he wouldn’t take it off for the whole trip.

  Hour after hour passed in the midst of nature without any mishaps, and I began to relax, even enjoy myself. Name one girl who wouldn’t bask in the attentions of seven clever, cute, and courteous guys.

  Sarvar had brought his best bud, Zeus, an American-born Parsi whom I knew very well. Zeus was a great grizzly bear of a man with a voice to match. He was an intellectual property lawyer in the IT industry and was doing pretty well for himself. I loved him like a brother. I especially loved his quirky bawaji ways that he held on to for dear life even though he’d never stepped foot in India.

  Physically, my brother couldn’t have been more different than his best friend. Sarvar was soft-spoken and almost dainty in appearance. He was short, like me. I guessed my family had patented the petite gene, as even Surin wasn’t a big man.

  But where it counted most, Sarvar and Zeus were like two peas in a pod. They both loved Parsi food, especially dhansaak. They both were passionate about work and old black-and-white films—an acquired taste, to be sure. And they both were self-professed bachelors. They wouldn’t marry unless and until lightning struck them stupid.

  And here I was, a woman whom lightning had struck twice, doubling my stupid quotient. Stupid and confused—that was what I felt around Zayaan and around Nirvaan, too, sometimes.