It was my turn to cringe in the spotlight.
After a final thump on Zayaan’s back, Nirvaan turned to me. His jolly mask was back in place. The guys might have composed themselves, but I was ready to shoot off to the moon, colonize it, and never come back to Earth.
“You’ll have the baby,” Nirvaan said, like it was a fact.
“Didn’t you leave it up to me?” I retaliated, my breath coming in bursts.
I hated the bones sticking out on his face, the hollowness of his cheeks, the unnatural whiteness of his skin.
“If I left things up to you, nothing would ever get done.” My husband was not a pleasant man when he was crossed.
I could’ve brushed the words aside with a shrug had he meant them in jest. But Nirvaan’s tongue was coated with bitterness, and they pierced my soul, spreading their poison.
“Leave her alone, fucker.”
I didn’t need Zayaan to defend me. I didn’t want him to.
“I won’t,” Nirvaan said, refusing to relent. “And neither should you. Grow a pair of balls, chodu, and go after what you’ve always wanted.”
I sucked in a breath and fisted my hands, so I wouldn’t hit my husband. I’d had enough. “Why are you doing this? Why are you pushing me…us together? Are you testing us? How many times do I have to tell you that we don’t want each other? We don’t want to live in some version of a life you’ve dreamed up, however wonderful you might think it is. I don’t want him. I don’t want to be with him. I can’t be with him,” I blurted out.
“Why not?” asked Nirvaan, his head cocked to one side.
Why not? Why had he asked that question and in that tone and with that strange light in his eyes? What did he know? No! No, he couldn’t know, could he? Had he guessed? When had he guessed? I stared at my husband, but his face was an enigma.
“Aside from the fact that you’re not dead yet, your ghost will always come between us. Zayaan is not you. He won’t be able to accept me loving you. It’s against his nature. Then, there’s Marjaneh. And I can’t stand his mother. And I’m not a Muslim, and I will never convert. Should I go on?” I’d given a good laundry list of the basic reasons why Zayaan and I could never work. I’d had years to come up with it, perfect it, add to it, subtract from it, for my own sanity. The thing was, none of those reasons mattered but for one. The one I still hadn’t had the courage to voice.
Denial was a handy thing. It fooled oneself into believing that pumpkins were carriages.
Zayaan walked out of the house before I even finished spewing my venom. He shoved open the patio doors, letting in a gust of wind that blew his papers all over the kitchen floor. I dashed to save them. Nirvaan dashed out onto the deck, shouting at Zayaan to come back in and hash this out. It was unsafe out on the beach. Zayaan ignored all warnings and disappeared into the night.
Nirvaan stood out on the deck, watching him go. Letting him go at last.
So, there, I’d broken the Awesome Threesome once and for all. We weren’t even a triangle anymore. We were just three people stuck together in a really bad situation.
Finally, Nirvaan slid the doors closed but didn’t lock them and came to help me with the papers. Once collected and weighted down on the coffee table, he pulled me down to sit on the sofa. His mask had slipped into a frown, a desperate confusion. I smoothed his eyebrows, clearing it away. Then, I looked into his eyes. They used to be big and round and black as night. Now, the right one was smaller than the left, and the skin around them—where his lashes should be—was perpetually rimmed in red.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, seeing the truth of his knowing in his eyes for the first time. Had it always been there? Had I willfully denied my instincts to serve my own purpose? He knew about the rape. How? “Why didn’t you ever tell me that you knew what Rizvaan had done?” Why had he allowed me to lie to him all these years?
With a last frown directed at the spot where Zayaan had disappeared, Nirvaan relaxed into the sofa, tucking me under his arm so that my face rested in the nook of his neck. I kissed the underside of his jaw.
“I figured you’d tell me when you were ready. I waited for you to tell me, but you never did,” he said, chuckling self-deprecatingly. He began fiddling with my hair, twisting it around his finger. “I should’ve known you wouldn’t trust me with anything serious.”
I placed my hand over my husband’s heart. “I started to tell you a thousand times, but the timing always sucked.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Something in the way he agreed made me push back and look at him. “You think I don’t trust you?”
He heaved a sigh, letting my hair go like a spring. “If the situation had been different, would you have told Zayaan?” I started to deny it by reflex, but he cut me off, “Don’t lie to me, Simi. God, we should be so past glossing things over by now.”
“I don’t know,” I said. But because he deserved my honesty, I added, “I probably would’ve told him. He just deals with things differently than you. You’re volatile. I can’t predict how you’ll react. Zai is…I don’t know…solid. Sober.”
“Sober.” Nirvaan crumpled his face as if the word was without flavor or favor.
“Well, he is…in all ways.” I couldn’t help but smile.
“Where’s the fun in sober?”
I didn’t allow him to distract me with meaningless discussions. I asked him who’d spilled the beans—my brothers obviously—but which one and why, so I wouldn’t guillotine them both. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be neither.
The night of the rape, Nirvaan and Zayaan had come back to Zayaan’s residence and caught Rizvaan sneaking out the back of the house. They’d caught him in the garden in front of the Jamaat Khana, toting a duffel bag and a gun. Kamlesh Uncle was still with the police, forming a game plan on how to best help Rizvaan.
“Zai confronted him. Told him to come to the police station and sort things out. He didn’t listen. He threatened to blow our brains out or his. We let him go. But he said something before he left, and it didn’t click until the next morning when I came to see you and found you gone.”
I forced myself not to think of the gun. “What did he say?”
“Wasn’t what he said, but the way he said it. He wished Zayaan and you bliss in your future nuptials. He had this smirk on his face when he said nuptials. I thought he was jerking Zayaan’s chain, like he always did where you were concerned. He left then, after threatening to shoot us if we followed him. We called Daddy, who informed the police, who, in turn, were preparing to raid the warehouse where all the shit exploded.”
The police had surrounded the warehouse at the docks where Rizvaan and the rest of his cronies had holed up, waiting for a boat to take them out of India. There’d been a shoot-out, and Rizvaan had become one of the casualties.
“We waited with Daddy several yards away and heard the gunfire clearly. When it was over, Zayaan didn’t want to go back to his house or the hospital. He was a mess that night, Simi. He didn’t know how to tell his mother. He felt…” Nirvaan choked, cutting off the story.
I twisted toward the deck, half-expecting Zayaan to be standing there, watching us through the glass doors, listening. He wasn’t.
Turning back, I finished Nirvaan’s story for him. “Zayaan felt shitty for turning Rizvaan in, right? He would’ve wanted to save his brother.”
No matter what nasty things Rizvaan had done, Zayaan would’ve felt like he’d betrayed his brother and his family. That was Zayaan in a nutshell—overly responsible, overly protective, overly possessive.
Nirvaan cupped my face between his hands. “He wasn’t thinking straight. He didn’t hear the insult in Rizvaan’s words. If he’d known…if we’d known what that bastard had done to you, we’d have gutted him. Castrated him and fed his dick to him. Roasted his balls and fed them to the street dogs while he watched.”
“I know.” I tried to smile, but Nirvaan was squishing my cheeks. I probably looked like a chipmunk.
“I know,” I said again, tears blurring my vision. “That’s why I left. I didn’t know he’d died. I didn’t want to…” I stopped talking, wondering how to explain the aftermath of that night. “I wanted him punished in worse ways than you’ve described, but I realized that to punish him, to expose him, would’ve shamed Zayaan, too. It would have destroyed Zayaan, no?” I wanted Nirvaan to validate my reasons. I needed him to tell me that I’d done the right thing by running away. “He wouldn’t have been able to get past it. He would’ve let his scholarships rot. Wouldn’t he have?”
Zayaan would’ve married me, not for love but out of responsibility and horror and shame, and we would’ve ended up hating each other.
I started crying when Nirvaan agreed with me. It was proof positive that my exile hadn’t been in vain. My husband gathered me in his arms and let me weep, giving me all the comfort I’d craved for twelve years but denied myself.
When I calmed some, he reached for the tissues on the coffee table and helped me blow my nose.
“Tell me the rest.” I wanted to know everything.
Nirvaan had come looking for me first thing in the morning but found my apartment locked. He’d tracked Sarvar down and gotten an earful for his effort.
“That’s when I realized the bastard had done something really bad for your brother to have spoken to me like that. Really bad.” He wiped my tears away with a fresh tissue. “He threatened you…with the gun?”
“Yes.”
It was my turn to come clean. Every three words I said, Nirvaan interrupted me with a foul curse. It sounded so invigorating that I envied his flair with cussing. I left nothing out or almost nothing. I left out Gulzar Auntie’s part in it. I didn’t know how Nirvaan would react to a living, breathing nemesis, and I didn’t want to find out. Besides, I reserved the pleasure of her destruction for myself. And I knew, as surely as I knew the sun rose every day, that the day would come when I’d have my revenge.
“I have another confession to make,” Nirvaan sheepishly said.
I smiled encouragingly, unburdened of my secret at last. I’d done it. I’d told my husband the truth, and the sky hadn’t fallen down.
“Asha Ambani is a distant cousin of Daddy’s. I’ve been in touch with her all along.”
My jaw dropped, and I gaped at my husband. “You know Asha Auntie? What? But that’s impossible. My cousin recommended her…right? Or did you tell my brother about her?”
“No. It was a coincidence. Can you believe it?” he said, looking as incredulous as I felt.
At this point, I was ready to believe anything. So, he told me the rest.
Ignoring Sarvar’s and Surin’s decrees to stay away from me, Nirvaan had finagled information of my whereabouts out of Surin’s secretary. He’d fully intended on following me to Mumbai the very next day.
“But it struck me that you might be scared, and if I barged in, demanding answers, I’d upset you even more. I called Asha Auntie, the famous psychologist in the family, and asked for advice. She didn’t know I’d asked her about you; this was before you were her patient. We didn’t put two and two together until much later—a couple of years later. She told me to give you time to heal. That I should leave you alone until you initiated contact again. But I ignored that bit of advice. It didn’t feel right, letting you vanish from my life. It didn’t feel right, Simi, for you to suffer this alone.”
I kissed him once, twice, long and deep, with love brimming over. “I’m glad you ignored Asha Auntie and me. I’m so glad you didn’t give up on me.”
“I’ll never give you up. I want you to know, I’d have stepped forward, if you were pregnant, and married you. Zai would’ve, too,” he said gruffly.
“I know.” I sighed. I’d never doubted them. I’d doubted my own worthiness but never them. “My cousin is a gynecologist in Mumbai. She immediately put me on the pill. There was no danger of a child.”
“Is that why you don’t want children?” Nirvaan asked softly.
I laughed at my husband. I couldn’t help it. “Now, you ask? After seven plus years of marriage and fights and drama? No, Nirvaan. I don’t know if I don’t want a baby.” I closed my eyes and then opened them again. My thoughts were beyond muddled about this topic. “I only know that I don’t want another person I love to die on me.”
Life held no guarantees. Sometimes, children would die before their parents did, like my brother Sam. Like Nirvaan. Did I have the strength to bear another cross on my soul?
A bone-deep remorse clouded Nirvaan’s eyes and his face was a canvas of shattered dreams. “I’m sorry for putting you through this. So fucking sorry for getting fucking cancer. I would sell my soul to change it all. You know I would. That’s why I want—”
The patio door slid open, cutting off Nirvaan’s words, and Zayaan whooshed into the house along with the wind.
That’s why I want you to have a baby? Or have Zai? If I had to guess what my husband had been about to say, I’d pick the latter.
Without acknowledging us, Zayaan strode past us and went into the hall bathroom, shutting the door with a smack. No, life hadn’t been and wasn’t going to be easy for any of us. Not ever again.
“Zayaan is not yours to give, Nirvaan. He’s his own person and makes his own choices. And believe me when I tell you, I. Do. Not. Want. Him,” I said, making my stand very clear. But was I convincing Nirvaan or myself?
“You did before. You chose him before. I was a fluke, Simi. Had that night not happened—”
I pressed my fingers against his mouth to shut him up. “But it did happen. And I don’t want to discuss this anymore.”
We went to bed, exhausted by our talk, and I fell into a dream-filled sleep. I dreamed of horses galloping on the beach, of gods and goddesses brandishing thunderbolts and tridents and lovers and swans, of humans cowering in fear under their wrath, of the first scene in the movie Troy in which Brad Pitt roused between two naked bodies.
I bolted up in bed, my heart pounding. I looked about for naked bodies and thunderbolts but found only my pajama-clad husband beside me. I pressed a hand to my racing heart, not sure if I was relieved or disappointed. I slid off the bed and padded into the bathroom where I took care of my morning business. I brushed my teeth and my hair and went to wake up my own Brad Pitt.
I blew into his ear. No reaction.
Nirvaan used to be ticklish around his neck and ears. Now, parts of his body weren’t exactly desensitized so much as slow to react to stimuli.
I bit his earlobe and got the reaction I wanted.
In one smooth motion, he started awake, pulled me down, rolled, and had me pinned to the bed. I squealed with laughter. His muscles might be weaker than before, but they were still harder and larger than mine. He completely trapped me beneath his sleep-warm body.
“You want to play, huh?” he asked, sleep deepening his voice into a growl.
“I woke you up to watch the sunrise, but since you asked so cutely…yes,” I replied before licking a path across his collarbone.
He rolled off and sat up on the edge of the bed, his back to me. I tried not to feel rejected.
Oh, to hell with it. I knelt behind him, wrapping my arms about him. “Please don’t say no today.”
He stood up, and giving me a slanted smile, he stepped toward the drawer where his little blue pills were. He took one out, popped it into his mouth, and dry-swallowed it.
“Open the curtains, Wife. I want to watch the sunrise, too,” he commanded as he strode into the bathroom, scratching his bum.
I gave a triumphant, “Whoop!” and danced to the windows to draw the curtains open. Back I danced into the bathroom to watch Nirvaan race through his morning ablutions.
I admired the turn of his wrist as he brushed his teeth and gargled and spit. The way his pecs—softer now than a few months ago—jumped when he splashed water on his face. At the last minute, he detoured into the shower and thoroughly washed himse
lf. I smiled, guessing what he wanted from me.
I made him sit on the closed commode as I dried him. I rubbed him down, dabbing water from inside his ears, under his armpits, between his legs. He was as naked as the day he was born. And I was still in pajamas.
He took my hand and led me back to our bed. He sat down on the edge, drawing me between the V of his legs. I stood, looking down at my handsome husband. I drew my fingers over the arch of his forehead, down his cheekbone, and rasped the rough skin on his jaw and lip with my thumb. I leaned in to lick his lips, but his eyes shifted to the damask curtain posing as our bedroom door.
I turned my head, knowing Zayaan would be standing there. It was time to watch the sunrise, wasn’t it? I closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear the thought of him watching us now. I used to love him watching us before when I had no fear or inhibitions or guilt or shame. I had no words for what I felt right now. The past and the present collided inside me. A simple yes from me, and they would merge.
I opened my eyes, and the curtain was drawn closed, swaying slightly, as if a breeze and not a gentle hand had trifled with it. I sighed, wishing Khodai would stop playing games with me.
Nirvaan caught my hand and brought it to his lips. He firmly held me to him, as if he expected me to bolt.
Bolt where? Out there? To Zayaan? Ha.
“When you came back to Surat after three years in Mumbai, I thought…I hoped you were ready to let go of the past. I called Zayaan and told him we should go to India to see you. He booked his ticket before we’d hung up the phone. But his mother fell ill, and he had to cancel at the last minute. He didn’t even get a refund on the ticket. He wanted to come, Simi. He doesn’t know about the rest. I haven’t told him. He believed Surin. He thinks your brother was correct in trying to protect you from gossip. He stayed away to save your reputation. His family was tainted by scandal, and he wanted to make something of himself before he came for you. So, you could be proud of him. He was going to ask you to wait for him, to marry him as soon as he was on his feet. He loves you, Simi. So very much. He loves you more than I do.”
My Last Love Story Page 21
