A Bollywood Affair (8 page)

“That’s not true.” She shook her head and her mad curls danced about her shoulders.

“No, seriously, there’s a lot you don’t know about me. But that’s one thing you should know. And while I’m not a decent guy, even I know that leaving you like that was an awful thing to do. And I truly am sorry.”

Her clear-as-morning-sunshine gaze shimmered with moisture. She gave the food he had cooked another worshipful glance. Her words made her lips tremble before she spoke them. “Samir, it’s not the fact that you left that’s important. What matters is that you came back and made it right.”

10

T
he only movement Mili allowed herself was to crack open one eyelid. Just enough to see that Samir was still slamming away at his laptop as if he were pounding his heart into those words the way he’d done almost nonstop for over a week. She couldn’t believe she was lying on a mattress on the floor a few feet from a man she barely knew. A man who looked like
that.
If her
naani
ever found out, there was no avoiding that heart attack she kept threatening. And yet Mili felt, if not entirely comfortable, utterly safe. Especially now that he knocked and diligently announced himself every time he came over.

“How long have you been up?” He only half looked up from his laptop, that one-part-amused, two-parts-arrogant smile diffusing the concentration on his face.

“What are you writing?”

Both amusement and arrogance dissolved behind a wall. “Just something.”

“That’s a long something you’ve been writing. I thought you said your workshop didn’t start for a few weeks?” He’d told her he was here for some sort of special month-long writing workshop.

He stared at the screen, a frown crinkling his forehead. “It doesn’t. But I came in early to finish up my script before it starts.”

“Script?” She tried to sit up. “Like a movie script?”

He moved his laptop aside and helped her up. “You don’t read film magazines or watch much TV, do you?” The arrogance was back full force.

Much as she loved movies, those film magazines made her sick to her stomach and she had never found the time to go out and buy a TV. “Why? Are you some sort of big, famous star?” she teased.

He gave a sheepish shrug and went back to typing.

Oh God, was he really famous? And she hadn’t even recognized him.

“Don’t look so embarrassed. I’m not that famous. I am a director. But I write my own stories and I’ve always wanted to take a screenwriting workshop. So here I am.”

“Seriously? You’re a director? Like a real director director? What have you directed? Anything I’ve watched?”

“I don’t know. Do you watch films?”

 

“Do I watch films?” Mili flattened an outraged palm against her chest as if he’d just accused her of stripping for cash in her spare time. “I’ll have you know I watched every single movie they showed at the Balpur theater—first day, first show.” Her eyes went all nostalgic and Samir found himself hungry for a glance at the memories flashing through her mind.

“I mean
hello!
Doesn’t the name Mili sound familiar? I’m even named after a Hindi film.
Mili
was my mother’s favorite film.”

“Your mother named you after a girl who dies of cancer?”

“She does
not
die!” She looked so appalled he had to force himself not to smile. “The love of her life takes her to America at the end and vows to fight for her recovery. Did you even watch the film?” Were those tears in her eyes?

“You mean the nasty drunk who’s horrible to her throughout the film?”

She gasped and narrowed her teary eyes to slits. “He is not nasty! He’s hurt and disillusioned. His heart is as sick as her body is. And they heal each other.” She waved her hands about, making healing sound as simple as making rotis, a few swipes of the rolling pin and you had nice, perfectly round dough circles.

“Have you watched anything that was made in this decade?”

She pulled a face at him—one that told him exactly how much of an arrogant jerk he was. “I watched whatever our Balpur theater showed. After I moved to Jaipur, I never had much time to go to the theater. Pandey, the theater wallah in Balpur, was an Amitabh Bachan and Shah Rukh Khan fan, so that’s mostly what we watched. My favorite is
Sholay,
and I’ve watched
Chandni
eight times and
Darr
five times.”

None of those films were made in this decade, but she looked so excited he didn’t correct her. Plus, if she hadn’t watched movies in the past few years the chances of her knowing who he was were slim. And that was a stroke of luck he wasn’t about to question.

“You don’t like these films?” she asked as if she were asking if he had a soul and any taste at all.

“No, they’re great films.
Sholay
’s one of my favorites too.” God, he’d die for a script like that. “But the other two, well, they aren’t exactly the kind of films I make.”

Ah,
so he made those artsy-fartsy films. Pandey had shown one of those once, about this honest cop who goes around killing all the corrupt politicians. It was all so dark and depressing the public had started shouting in the middle of the show and beaten the projection man so badly he had to be taken to a hospital in Jaipur. After that it was only Amitabh and Shah Rukh again.

She stuck out her hand and beckoned with her fingers. “Come on, give me some names. Let’s see if I’ve heard of any of your films. And, you know, so I can name drop.”

He smiled. “Have you watched
Boss
? It’s about the clash between the boss of the Mumbai underworld and the head of the Mumbai police and how they destroy each other.” Pride shone in his eyes, as if he were a parent bragging about a favorite child, and she wished they had let Pandey show those
off
films once in a while.

She shook her head.

“Love Lights?”
Another proud, expectant look. “It’s a dark love story.”

She crinkled her nose. “How can love be dark?”

He raised a patronizing eyebrow at her. As though he couldn’t believe anyone could be naïve enough to ask such a question. “Well, it’s set in Kashmir. They get separated and she gets involved in a terrorist group and when he finds her again she’s training to be a human bomb.”

“Good Lord, that
is
dark.” Maybe it was a good thing she hadn’t watched his movies. They sounded positively morose.

He smiled and picked up his laptop again.

“What are you working on now?” Although after what she’d just heard she was afraid to ask.

He searched her face for a few moments. Just when she thought he wasn’t going to talk about it, he spoke. “It’s the story of this boy from a small village who comes to Mumbai and makes a name for himself.”

“You’re writing about yourself?”

“Myself?” He looked startled. “You think I’m from a village?”

“Aren’t you from near Balpur?”

All the color drained from his face.

“Don’t worry,” she said quickly, laying a soothing hand on his arm, “you’re a very authentic city boy. It’s just your Rajasthani dialect. You sound like you’re from near my village.” She’d never forget how amazing it had felt to hear that perfect accent of his that first time they’d met. “Have you ever visited your uncle in Balpur?”

His already clenched jaw tightened some more. “A long time ago. When I was very young.”

 

It had been close to twenty years since Samir had been back. You couldn’t drag him back to that hellhole with a crane. None of them had ever gone back. Not Baiji. Not Virat. Not even for the sadistic old bastard’s funeral. Samir tamped down on the reflex to reach behind him and touch the welts that were no longer visible on his back. He willed the swish of the belt not to sound in his head. But it did.

“Samir, are you all right?” Mili moved closer to him, her eyes wide and limpid with concern.

“I’m fine.” What the fuck was it with all these flashbacks suddenly? He lifted Mili’s hand off his arm, meaning to remove it, but her fingers were so soft, so warm, he hung on.

She pulled her hand away and didn’t push for more. “Tell me about this boy,” she said instead, her voice so gentle his heartbeat calmed.

“He has a gift. He can see the future. Only when he uses his gift for his own gain something catastrophic happens to someone he loves.”

“That’s awful.” She looked horrified again. “Are all your stories this sad?”

“Not all of it is sad. It’s set against the backdrop of the Mumbai bomb blasts. And he’s able to save thousands of lives.”

“But he loses someone he loves? Forever?”

“Yes, but he learns to use his gift to benefit others, learns how that’s a gift in itself.”

She pushed her mass of curls back with both hands and didn’t say more. But she didn’t meet his eyes.

“What?” Something was bothering her and, idiot that he was, he had to know what.

She let her hair go and it sprang back around her face. “You can’t learn anything from losing someone you love. Any lesson you learn from that isn’t a lesson. It’s a compromise with life. A lie you tell yourself.”

“Our mistakes cost us those we love all the time. We can’t stop living, can we? We have to find meaning in something else and keep going.”

“See, that’s cynicism. Not growth. If you wanted him to truly learn that helping others is a gift in itself then he has to lose things he thought were important, not things that
are
important, like someone he loves.” Her brows drew together over eyes that shone with sincerity and idealism. Which in his book was no different from stupidity.

“It’s not cynicism. It’s reality. What you’re talking about is a tidy little happy ending. Have you ever known life to be like that?”

She met his eyes, in that way she had. As if there was nothing separating them, as if there was nothing in the world to be afraid of. “It doesn’t matter what my life has been like, Samir. What matters is hope. If you don’t believe in a happy ending, what are you living for?” The hope that sparkled in her onyx eyes was so intense, so absolute that dread clamped around Samir’s heart, and squeezed.

“I’m sorry,” she said after he had been silent too long, and lay back down. “It’s your story. I shouldn’t have said anything.” She turned on her side and closed her eyes.

He stared at the words he’d spent a week pounding out. Damn straight it was his story. And he was determined to write it his way.

 

Samir had never rewritten a script in his life. Stories came to him whole and he wrote them down. But once Mili got inside his hero’s head the bastard started to do all sorts of weird shit and rebel until Samir had to capitulate and let him have his way. But that just meant less sleep and more watching Mili sleep while he worked.

In her waking hours, they talked. Mostly about her school and her years in Jaipur and the women she worked with, at the Institute where they provided a safe house to abused women and trained them in skills to make them independent. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who lost himself when he worked. Watching Mili talk about her work was like experiencing the power of a tiny tornado—she became hungry and focused. It consumed all of her, made her lose track of time.

Made him lose track of time.

So much so that when Samir knocked on Mili’s door and turned the key to let himself in, the two weeks he’d spent with her felt like a moment that had sped by too fast.

“Come in,” Mili shouted from behind the door and beamed at him as he entered and put his laptop down on the mattress. She chugged down the contents of her teacup with a bandaged hand. The doctor had changed the cast on her wrist to a crepe bandage yesterday and she was able to use both hands now. Her ankle cast would take another week to come off but she had talked them into letting her carry a cane instead of those crutches she hated so much.

“What are you doing?” Samir asked as she hobbled to the kitchen on her cane. Her wet hair was all scrunched up and even curlier than usual. The water dripping from it painted midnight stains on her blue cap-sleeved tee. The only clothes she seemed to own were that exact T-shirt in all sorts of colors, and jeans. That’s all he’d ever seen her wear. She was also probably the only woman on earth who looked so distracting in an ill-fitting T-shirt.

She leaned over the counter and poured another cup of tea. Okay, so the T-shirts weren’t all that ill-fitting. She hobbled back to him with a cup in her hand. Something about the way the cotton clung to her curves gave the impression of poetry, of softness and strength threaded together in perfect cadence. The kind of perfect melding you had to witness, to feel to believe. Only he wasn’t going to be doing any feeling anytime soon. Not anytime ever.

She pushed the teacup at him and flicked her chin up as if to ask him what he was thinking.

Yeah, right, like she needed to share in that cesspool of thoughts. “Thanks,” he said and took the tea from her. “You going somewhere?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact I am. It’s this thing called school, and this other thing called work. Missed both for two weeks, so I’m hoping they’ll both still have me. And you heard the doctor yesterday. I need to get back on my feet now. Otherwise awful things could happen to my body.”

“Oh, we could never allow awful things to happen to that body,” he said before he could stop himself.

Her eyes turned to saucers again and he wanted to whack himself upside the head.

He took a long sip of the tea. “Are you going to walk to college then?” he asked lazily.

She unfroze. “Nope. You’re driving me.” She smiled and pushed the teacup to his lips to hurry him up. The moment he was done, she snatched the cup away, put it in the sink, and dragged him out of her apartment.

“Hold on, Mili, my laptop’s still in your apartment.”

“Don’t you want to write in there?”

“Well. Yes. But—”

“Drop me off and then come back here and write.” She handed him her cane and let him help her into the car. “You get your writing done in my apartment so you might as well just do it there, right?”

“Right.” He gunned the engine. “And this has nothing to do with the hot rotis or dal you might find waiting for you when you return.”

“
Oy,
what kind of girl do you think I am?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. How far are you willing to go for hot rotis?” Seriously, what the fuck was wrong with him?