Spice and Smoke

by Suleikha Snyder

  He turned and walked away.

  Chapter Eight

  Harsh could mark his work days with Michael by how many times they ended up in an Ambassador car. At last count, it was four. The first after the muhurat; the two after that being the far more mundane matter of being ferried from the location back to their hotel. But this, the fourth time, did not feel the same. It wasn’t just another drive after a long day’s shooting that would end in the hotel bar or the gym.

  Michael’s pale skin was sickly, fevered. There were circles under his eyes, and the arm he was resting against the window was tensed, as though at any moment he could turn and give Harsh a punch. He looked like someone had backed over him with a lorry. Not once, but thrice. “We’re on a dangerous road, yaar. A very, very dangerous road,” he’d warned Harsh…sounding so wise and arrogant at the same time…and yet it was clear he’d forgotten to step off the path himself. The traffic had mowed him down. Avinash Kumar had run him down.

  “Sab tik tho hai? Are you okay, yaar?” It was a stupid question. A hollow one. But it was better than gazing down at the screen of his mobile and acting as if nothing was askew.

  The only answer he was given was a laugh. Tired and beaten. Michael rubbed at his forehead with his fingertips, hunching his shoulders. It was not a model’s confident pose, daring a camera to find any imperfection.

  “You look like shit, man.”

  Michael glanced at the driver—Madan was a local; his English was restricted to “yes, sir” and “good morning”—before he made a reply. “You think I look bad? You should see the other bloke.”

  “I have.” Very soon, Avi and Michael would be matching pictures of misery. “This is eating at you like acid. It is killing you. Is it really so important to be noble? To stay away? Kya faidha? What is the point, yaar? Why not just go to him and save the pain?”

  Michael’s laughter turned into a choked noise of anger. “It would certainly make things easier for you, wouldn’t it? It took you, what, ten years to say something to Trishna? Also, if I take Avi, then you have really had to do nothing. You just wait and catch her after the fall. The Mighty Harsh Mathur…you come out of all of this with your sainted reputation intact.”

  That was absurd. “Is that what you think? That I am waiting for you to take all the risks so I can be her hero?” What nonsense.

  “Oh, of course not.” The acid that was eating him now flowed from Michael’s tongue. “Trishna has loved you for ten years. I feel like I haven’t even known Avinash for ten minutes. But you are not taking the easy path, no. You would never, ever be that dishonest, would you? You would never look to everyone else to make your love story come true. Nahin. You’re content to suffer in silence until she is free to come to you on her own. You are such a good man, Harsh. Kitna mahaan admi. Such a king of self-denial.”

  If he were anyone else, Harsh would’ve hit him for such a horrible accusation. But he knew all too well where Michael was sitting. Right beside him on a road to Hell that they’d paved with their good intentions. “I think we are both ruling that kingdom. Saath saath. Together.”

  “So, what’s stopping you from going to Trishna?” Michael turned his own question back to him. “Is it really so important to be noble? Why not save yourself the pain?”

  Because he’d been stupidly noble for entirely too long already? Because it was a habit? Mathur the Monk, Mathur the Mighty…Mathur the Goddamn Martyr? He laughed, smothering the sound against his palm and rocking forward in his seat. Michael was right. At least in part. He had not intended to bide his time while Michael and Avinash played out their version of Dostana Part Two. But he had been a coward. For too long. It was time for Harsh to fight for the role he wanted more than any other: that of Trishna’s real-life leading man.

  The first few weeks of the shoot had flown by as expected. Lots of dialogue-heavy scenes between the men. One mournful love song picturization between her and Harsh—too mournful for comfort. A few more arguments between Avi and Michael. The resentment resulting from Avi’s bruised ego had made their scenes electric. Watching from the side, she had been amazed, believing fully that Varun, the bold Bihari revolutionary, and Mr. Austin, the East India Company man who longed to go back to England, hated each other. Varun’s village Hindi was thickly accented, and Austin looked so very, very British in his starched suits. When the cameras stopped rolling, it was another story. Then…then they were simply her husband and Michael Gill again, and she knew it wasn’t hate, but unfulfilled desire, that coursed between them.

  It was a feeling she knew all too well. Something she could not shake. Every time her character gazed at Harsh’s it was like being run through with a saber. Harsh looked unbearably good in his white kurta and dhoti; she didn’t have to fake Alok and Nishta’s forbidden longing.

  What she did have to fake was Nishta’s innocence. Because her own emotions were so tangled and ugly. Because she couldn’t look at Harsh and not want, not be consumed with need that left her trembling and cursing the bed that her husband left empty. Every moment on camera was torture, and every second moment was more.

  Then Joshi or his AD would yell “Cut!” and “Print!” and they would wrap for the day…each going back to their separate rooms instead of bullshitting with the crew at a local tea stall or going to the hotel lounge with Joshi and whatever producers were visiting. Only, instead of taking dinner with her and going to bed, Avi vanished for hours at a time, returning smelling of smoke and liquor and looking like he’d been trampled by a parade of donkey carts.

  The sound of the TV blared across their suite, filling the silence so that Trish didn’t have to concentrate on where he might be at three in the morning. He had a seven AM call time most days, but she wasn’t his keeper. “I am not his keeper,” she repeated aloud, as though that would make it true.

  But they had kept each other for seven years, na? Kept each other’s secrets, kept each other sane. Kept each other standing when they otherwise might have stumbled.

  A knock at the door shook Trish out of her thoughts. Probably Avi had forgotten his key again. Or he couldn’t fit it in the lock, thanks to all the Johnnie Walker Black in his veins. She shrugged on her thin silk robe, perversely hoping he’d fall face-first over the threshold. But it wasn’t a drunken Avinash looking back at her when she yanked open the door. She wasn’t quite that lucky.

  “Trishna.” In the dim light of the hallway, Harsh’s green eyes seemed to shine like a cat’s. “May I come in?”

  Nahin, she thought. “Haan,” she said, turning away to switch off the television and ignoring the click of the door behind him. “By all means, make yourself at home.” She gestured carelessly towards the sofa before crossing to the bar and busying herself pouring him a gin and tonic. The rattle of the ice was the only indication that she was trembling; she was certain of it.

  “Tehr, chhoro,” Harsh chided. Stop. Let it go. “I’m not here to drink.”

  “Then why are you here?” Since he wasn’t going to partake, she helped herself to the cocktail…and choked, eyes watering from the strength of the gin. She hadn’t used enough tonic. Harsh would probably say that the mistake stemmed from years of having other people serve her. That she was spoiled, willful, used to getting her way.

  “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  Damn his honesty. Haram zaada. Bastard.

  Her glass almost slipped from her fingers. She held tight as she moved imperiously towards a chair and sat down. She was cool; she reminded herself of the role she must play. She was the ice queen he could not touch.

  “You and millions of men all over the world.” She shrugged, crossing her legs. The motion made her robe and nightshirt slide up, revealing entirely too much bare thigh. Harsh’s gaze was drawn there, and his throat convulsed as he swallowed hard. She smiled, watching him marshal his control…his oh-so important control.

  “Millions of men don’t know you like I do.” Harsh looked away from her, but it clearly took some effort. “They
don’t remember you in specs and horsetails, writing our names in the margins of scripts, with drawings of hearts.”

  “Those millions of men have also not treated me like a stranger for ten years,” she countered, refusing to acknowledge the lump in her throat, “like those sweet memories meant nothing and I am poison.”

  Harsh looked like she’d slapped him again. Stunned. His beautiful lips parted in shock. “Tum zaher nahin ho, Trishna…” You are not poison. “Tum amrita ho.” You are nectar.

  God save her from men whose dialogues had been written by some of the nation’s finest poets. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she slammed the gin tumbler down on the coffee table so hard that she was sure it would shatter. But it didn’t. Like her, it could withstand infinite pressures.

  “Stop it,” she begged. “For God’s sake, just stop it, Harsh. What do you want from me? If you want to fuck me, then just tell me, don’t torture me…staring at me with your big, sad eyes all day…showing up here and spouting pretty poetry.”

  He flinched. “I don’t want to torture you…” he began, but then abruptly switched gears, asking her, “Do you know where Avinash is tonight?”

  “Jehennam main?” He could be in Hell for all she knew. Both literal and figurative. There was nothing she could do about it. “He’s taking lessons from you, you see. Denying himself what he wants…making everyone miserable in the process.”

  “Only I’m not gay,” Harsh pointed out. “I’m not living a lie…trying to fool the world into thinking I’m happy.”

  “Go to Hell. You don’t get to judge us,” she cried. “I could have been your wife all these years, but you chose to turn your back on me. So Avi and I made a life together. He tried to fix what you broke. I tried to give him what he needed. Ek samjhota hain. It’s a compromise.”

  “Is this how you want to live? Sach? Really?” Harsh’s features were so stricken, they were deserving of a close-up. Perhaps that was why he rose from the sofa and came to kneel at her feet. “You deserve more than a compromise. You deserved better than me,” he whispered. “That, and only that, is why I didn’t propose the day I met you. Because I came from nothing. Because I was no one until A Handful of Stars. Until Chaudhury-saab got me my first film role. Main kaun tha? Who was I? Nobody. Until your father built me up into someone good enough. By the time I realized it…it was too late. You took the pheras and married him.”

  “What do you mean you were not good enough?” Trishna stared at him as though he’d sprung horns from the top of his beautiful head. “Tum paagal ho kya, Harsh? Have you gone mad? There is no one better than you. You are a saint among men. You don’t belong in cinema, you belong in a goddamn monastery or performing miracles for the poor in Benares.” Her laughter was hysterical. She’d gone from ice queen to lunatic in mere minutes. “The skies rain flowers when you walk down the street. Choirs sing. Rivers fill with fish and fields with crops. Whores become virgins. God knows…I feel like a virgin—”

  “Trishna.”

  He chased her name with a very non-saintly word. Then he closed his fingers around her wrist and tugged her down onto his lap. It was so swift that she didn’t have time to react, to even stop describing more evidence of his holiness, before his mouth was closing over hers.

  Trish couldn’t think, she couldn’t breathe. But she could move, and her hands found an anchor in his hair as she kissed him back. Years of frustration, of heartbreak, of want and denial were wrapped up in this first kiss. And the second one. And the one after that. The taste of him, male and strong and safe, replaced the burn of alcohol, and she slid down so her knees girded his hips and the juncture of her thighs met the hard ridge of his erection. Silk molded against denim, and it wasn’t enough.

  He pulled back, lips trailing across her cheek and breath ragged in her ear. She fisted her fingers in the hair at his nape, hard enough to elicit a gasp of pain. “Don’t you dare stop now. Main jaan se mar daloongee. I will kill you, you son of a bitch.”

  “Just breathing, sweetheart. I am just breathing.” He laughed before reaching between them to stroke beneath the waistband of her panties, finding where she was so needy for him.

  His fingers slid through her slick folds, and Trishna was overcome with sensation, riding his hand and feeling stars explode behind her eyelids with each bit of glorious friction. Then he was unzipping his jeans, breaking apart from her only long enough to help her kick off her underwear, rid himself of his own and produce a condom from his wallet.

  “I’m not a saint,” he murmured, as he stretched out on the floor with her in his arms, covering her with his body. “I’m an idiot.”

  He wouldn’t find any disagreement from her there. Trishna chuckled against his throat, letting her hands roam up and down the muscled expanse of his back. Then, he was pushing into her, sinking deep…uniting them with nothing but a thin layer of latex between them…and she was crying out his name, over and over, like the prayers she had uttered so many times as a girl.

  She wanted to be closer. She wanted to be skin to skin. She wanted everything with him. Children and a future and spectacles and plaits. She wanted to come a thousand more times.

  She was not Avi’s keeper, she reminded herself. After this…Harsh was hers for keeps.

  Chapter Nine

  The air was oppressively thick with humidity, and his shirt stuck to his skin. The monsoons were coming, and Avi knew that Joshi hoped to get all his exteriors done before the rain began in earnest. But the carefully maintained lawns in the hotel’s back gardens already felt damp. The mango trees hung heavy with both fruit and dew. The man couldn’t have picked the dry deserts of Rajasthan to film in, no…he’d had to pick Bihar, because it was cheaper and because “of authenticity”. Also, he had not chosen Patna, which was urban and business traveler-friendly, but Middle of Nowhere, Bihar.

  Fuck authenticity, Avi thought, taking another swig from the bottle he’d commandeered from the lounge. Fuck, but he’d been stupid for booking this film. They were a month in, and he already knew he’d have another FilmStar award with his name on it…and that The Raj was a huge mistake.

  Before now, Avi had the perfect life, the perfect arrangement. He and Trishna had never needed anything more. Maybe he’d pick up a guy in a club or on a shoot, and they’d fuck for a while…but it would quiet the beast inside him, quell the hunger, and that was that. Baas. Khatam. Done and over. This…this bullshit with Michael, it was different. There was nothing about it finished. It hadn’t even begun.

  Maybe it was better. Not like J.T. Where it had begun, only to end in the worst of ways. With a check and a goodbye and his father taking him halfway across the world to become…this.

  A hero. A hero who was the villain of his own life’s movie.

  He lay back in the grass, letting the near-empty fifth of Johnnie Walker slip from his fingers as he closed his eyes. Only a few moments ticked by until he heard footsteps and the telltale hiss of someone lighting a match followed by the scent of cigarette smoke. He felt the shift of weight on the ground next to him, and looked to see Michael stretching out. “Fernando at the bar told me this is where you’ve been running off to. Private party, or may anyone join?”

  “If I said ‘no’, would you listen?”

  “Yeah, mate. I actually take direction,” Michael pointed out, grasping his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger so he could exhale concentric smoke circles into the air. “A little too well, I expect. I’m not like you…coloring outside the lines, breaking every rule, the fourth wall, and someone’s face all in the same minute. Hell, I have to be told to lie, or else the cameras see my truth in my eyes. Can you imagine working across from someone like Aishwarya and having the audience know I really want to shag her husband instead? It’d be bloody pathetic.”

  Nothing about Michael Gill could ever be pathetic. Avi couldn’t imagine him ever taking a payoff to leave someone. Ever turning his back on a person he cared for. Ever being anything other than exactly who he was: beautiful, i
nside and out. The man really did bleed milk and honey…

  “…and I really do love my wife,” Avi said softly. “Main Trishna se pyar kartha hoon. That’s not a lie, yaar.”

  “Didn’t say it was.” Michael smoked in silence for a few more moments, and then he was reaching between them, for where Avi had tucked the bottle. “That’s great that you love her. I’m bloody thrilled for you. But my definition of love isn’t like yours. I believe in the real thing. Complete with hearts and flowers and two hundred backup dancers in a field. When I shag someone, it means they’re mine and nobody else’s. So stop staring at me across the set. Stop touching me like foreplay. Stop sodding coming out here and brooding like your heart’s broken, because this is your choice, Avinash. Yours and nobody else’s.”

  “You want me to leave her. For you. For something that isn’t even a sure bet,” he accused, rolling to his side, propping his head up on his hand…trying twice before he got it right, thanks to a bit too much whiskey.

  Michael didn’t blink, didn’t look pitying and certainly didn’t move to help him. “I’m a sure bet, Avi. Don’t mistake me. But you need to leave her for you, because living this way is going to hurt you both in the long run. Because she’s in love with somebody else, and you’re going to be dating Johnnie sodding Walker and missing your call times.” He tipped back his head and drained what was left of the whiskey, and then finished off the last centimeters of his cigarette. He flicked the still-burning butt into the bottle before tossing it aside for the gardeners to find. “Hell,” he swore. “I sound like a psychoanalyst. This…this is why I don’t do married men.”

  Avi stared down at him, at his ridiculously handsome face. This face had been plaguing him for days. Worse, for nights. “You haven’t done me yet,” he pointed out roughly.

  Then, before Michael could make further analysis, he leaned down and kissed him. Not in that painfully slow way that Michael had kissed him, but fiercely, with whiskey and teeth and frustration. He tangled his fingers in Michael’s hair, moving till he practically lay on top of him. Their cocks thrust together, straining against their jeans like they were two idiot boys trying to get each other off in the back room of a Delhi discotheque. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t going to be enough. Not this time. “Last chance for an attack of conscience,” he warned, before taking another go at Michael’s fuckable mouth.