24
Kimi
Present day
Present day
“I’m sorry,” Rahul said after his brother had stormed off and his aie had followed because, as she’d told Kimi earlier, if she didn’t join the spice-grinding mission soon she would lose her share of the spices she had paid good money for. Plus, it would start a storm of gossip in the chawl.
“What exactly are you sorry about?” she asked him, because his apologies were always such complicated beings.
He responded by looking like she had boxed him in his belly. Then went to the kitchen and put his untouched plate of food on the black Kadappa-stone counter next to a shiny stainless-steel sink—one his aie had told her Rahul had installed with his first IPS salary. The kitchen was dark and cool with no windows, and so clean everything gleamed under the single tube light—the cement floor, the steel utensils lining the shelves, the bright white fridge that hummed.
He turned to her and leaned back into the counter. It was a gesture of fatigue. So, naturally, on him all it did was make him look more vibrant, those forearms alone strong enough to tear through any problem, his entire body emanating that restless energy that defined him. It reminded her of the first day she’d seen him, and that first day he’d climbed onto her balcony, his body glistening with sweat, the stained armpits of his shirt, the dirt under his nails, all of it proclaiming his labors like proud badges while his eyes sparkled with energy, fueled by purpose.
“The first available flight into Hong Kong is early tomorrow morning,” he said. “I’ve booked it.”
This time she did throw her arms around him. A quick hug before she could think about it.
He froze, but she didn’t care. “Thank you, Rahul! You won’t regret it. I swear.” She pulled away, relief spreading across her face in a smile. She had known he would do it. And yet the fact that he had done it made this entire disaster turn on its head.
Through all his stiffness she saw a shadow cross his eyes. He was scared. Unless she had lost her ability to read him, he was terrified. “We can’t tell your father.”
“Of course not.” She didn’t need him to tell her that. Papa would have an aneurism if she left the country right now. But Rahul was with her, so she’d be as safe as it was possible to be.
“He wants to talk to you. Use this phone.”
She took the phone from him. It was still warm from his hands. “I mean it, Kimi, you can’t breathe a word of where we are going to Kirit-sir. You can’t tell him where we are right now either. His phone could be bugged.”
She dialed her father’s number.
“Where are you?” Papa snapped the moment she identified herself.
“I’m fine, Papa, how are you?”
He ignored her snark and her question. “You promised me you would keep me posted. You promised to stay safe.”
“I am keeping you posted. And I am safe; I’m with Rahul.” Who stiffened just a tiny bit, so she knew she had used a tone that had emotionally slashed him.
But her tone of trust was lost on Papa. “That’s not good enough for me. I need to know where you are.”
“I can’t tell you that over the phone and still be safe,” she said much more coldly, because Stonewall Savant for all his stoicism looked like he needed a break, and the dismissive distrust for Rahul in Papa’s voice made all sorts of discomfort collect in her gut. “Kimi beta, please don’t do anything rash. Asif Khan is a lunatic. Don’t let him mess with your head.” She had been so focused on Rahul, she hadn’t noticed the raw panic in Papa’s voice. She knew all the signs of panic in her parents. She could map exactly how much worry, hope, and disappointment every vibration of their breath held, but she had never heard her father sound quite like this.
Rahul’s eyes filled with warning. Another thing she had an intimate relationship with—the degree of warning in his eyes. The warning was unnecessary. It wasn’t like she would ever tell Papa that she planned to hunt down her donor. It was something he would never, ever let her do. Her donor’s rights were sacrosanct to Papa. He had made that more than clear. “I won’t let anyone mess with my head, Papa.” She threw Rahul a pointed look. That phase of her life was over. “I love you.” And with that she hung up.
“Thank you.” Rahul had the gall to look relieved. Finally, an emotion he could share.
“I didn’t not tell him because you told me not to.”
Naturally, he didn’t respond.
“He doesn’t understand that this is the only way to get rid of Asif once and for all,” she added.
Rahul looked like he didn’t either. But for him her word had been enough.
She looked around the kitchen. The idea of a shootout in the chawl was unacceptable. All those people, his aie, his Angry Young Man brother. “We’re not staying here. Let’s go wait at the airport.”
“We can’t be at the airport for that long. It’s too public a place,” he said in his DCP Savant tone.
“Well, I don’t want to stay here. And that’s that.”
He winced and that awful shame flashed in his eyes again.
“The reason I don’t want to stay here is that I don’t want to put so many people in danger.”
He rubbed his eyes, all his worry and exhaustion dragging at the gesture. “I know.”
No, he didn’t. And she’d had enough.
“Did you know that my family’s sugarcane farms were mortgaged to the hilt before papa took them over? That the family debt was so large we were bankrupt? Did you know my grandmother had to sell her wedding jewelry when my grandfather was studying medicine so they could feed the family?”
“Why are you telling me all this?” his eyes said, because he was too proud to say the words.
“Wealth comes and goes, Rahul. Coming from adversity and overcoming it makes you better not worse than those who never have to.” Who he was made her burn with pride and she’d be damned if she let him subject her to even one more of those flashes of shame. “Now, are we or are we not putting your family in danger by being here? And don’t lie to me.”
His flinch at the word lie was so minimal she almost missed it. “I don’t lie to you, Kimi. I never have.”
Not too long ago she would have believed him without a single doubt. Now all they seemed to do was wade through lies.
He took a breath as though trying to drag this runaway conversation back on track. “It’s only dangerous if Asif finds out you’re here.”
“What’s going on, Rahul?” His aie walked in, the alert focus in her eyes exactly like her son’s.
“There’s some trouble and Kimi and I need a safe place to stay.”
“What kind of trouble are we talking about?”
“A gangster is after me,” Kimi said. His aie had a right to know, had a right to ask them to leave.
Rahul’s aie dabbed her forehead with her sari. Her fingers were yellow and some of the turmeric rubbed off on the white cotton and turned it yellow too. “Is there any chance he will look for you here?”
Kimi thought about the number of people she had seen as they’d walked down the veranda to get here. She turned to Rahul for an answer.
He studied her in that hooded way that she’d always thought of as him taking her temperature with his eyes. “I don’t think so. Unless he finds out I’m the one watching her. And he doesn’t know that. Plus, officially, I’m supposed to be living in the police housing quarters.”
Aie started to rummage through some shelves. “Well, then, just stay here. There’s the mangalagaur feast at the Ranes’ on the ground floor, so everyone will be too occupied to snoop around too much. If anyone asks, we’ll tell them that you’re my cousin’s daughter from America. You don’t look like you’re from around here anyway.”
Kimi looked down at herself. Had she known she was going to meet Rahul’s aie, she would have dressed with a little more care. But she was wearing a kurti and capris. It’s what everyone wore.
“I’m from the other side of Bandra,” she almost said, but his aie didn’t seem to have meant it as a criticism.
Rahul’s eyes got even more somber. “We can’t stay here,” he said.
Naturally, she said, “Thank you, that sounds perfect,” at the exact same time.
Aie scowled at them, and then brightened when she opened a steel box and found what she had been looking for. She fished out a cloth bag from inside the box and extracted a bundle of plastic bags from inside that. “Decide what you want to do,” she said so calmly they could’ve been discussing what to eat for dinner. “If you’re staying, come and help pack up the spices. Everyone’s gone off to prepare for the feast and left me to the task.” She tucked the bundle of plastic bags under her arm and hurried off.
“I can change if this makes me stand out too much,” Kimi said when Rahul didn’t follow his aie and stood there like a tortured wall of silence. Maybe she shouldn’t have bitten his head off earlier, because her words seemed to have slashed him. “I packed some T-shirts. They have silly stuff written across them, but nothing terribly inappropriate.”
Something like heat flashed in his gaze as it swept her. Naturally, he blanketed it instantly. “I don’t think it’s what you’re wearing, Kimi.”
“You have an alternate plan?” she snapped. Granted that she’d had very little practice with knowing how to behave in public before The Great Escape, but he wasn’t the only one who was a quick study. “Listen, I’ve worked as a journalist for a year now. I won’t embarrass you. I swear.”
This time a slash of pain cracked through that armor of his. He took a step closer. “Kimi—”
“Aie wants to know if you’re coming to help with the spices.” This time Mohit was back, and Rahul stiffened so much it was like watching a lake freeze over in those time-lapse videos.
The stiffening seemed to fan a deep (and very obvious) satisfaction in Mohit. He grinned like a three-year-old who had been handed an ice-cream cone. How did these men not see what was going on here?
“You should come. You’ll get to see how the other half lives.”
Kimi frowned at him even though she knew the jibes weren’t aimed at her. “Why thanks! How can I refuse such an opportunity?” she said and made to follow him without bothering to check with Rahul.
Mohit threw her another one of those rascal grins and touched the deep purple bruise around his eye. “By the way, thank you. That witch hazel thing you gave me is magic. It totally stopped the throbbing.” And then, entirely unnecessarily, he added, “Apparently, if you have enough money you don’t have to feel pain!”
Kimi couldn’t help it. She laughed. It was adorable how people patronized her. Money could do a lot of things. But pain, well, that came in enough shapes and sizes to be heard, no matter what you slathered on it. She would know. She’d had nine heart biopsies in the past two years.
“If I were you I would tread carefully. Kimi isn’t what she looks like,” Rahul said, rising to his full height and inserting himself between Mohit and her.
“And what do I look like?” she wanted to ask him. Instead she glared at him. She could fight her own battles, thank you very much. He could slink back behind his walls and stop looking at her like that, his eyes filling with heat one minute, pain the next.
He rolled his eyes heavenward. For a moment he looked like he couldn’t do this anymore, like he wanted nothing more than to break through those walls.
“Is she a gangster then? Someone you’ve captured to be your witness and are guarding, like in the movies?” Mohit snapped his fingers and tapped his head. The boy literally would do anything to annoy Rahul. “No, wait. Don’t tell me. She’s a cop! She takes bullets for medals, like you!”
Kimi ruffled his hair. “It’s cute that the only pain you can perceive is a few punches and bullet wounds. And you think you’re so tough.”
He patted his hair back in place. But one look at her and he had the good sense not to look so cocky anymore.
“Have you ever had your ribs broken so someone could cut out your heart and replace it? Oh, and do you know what a heart biopsy is? Look it up. It’s when they pluck out little pieces of your heart through a tube inserted into your neck. Oh, and I once had a cut infected for six months. They drained it twenty-eight times. From the same spot.”
Rahul moved closer, but she couldn’t look at him.
Mohit opened his mouth. She cut him off. “Now, I believe you were going to show me how the other half lives?”
He shut his mouth, and Rahul led them out onto the veranda, stopping only when they came to another green door. He held up his phone. “I need to check in with Maney.” His eyes swept their surroundings in that special-ops sort of way that despite herself did funny things to her. “I’ll be a moment.” He started growling instructions into the phone. Those growls didn’t help with the funny things happening inside her, and she turned away from him and caught Mohit watching her.
He looked over her shoulder to check that Rahul wasn’t listening. For once he looked sincere. “Listen, I’m sorry for before. But really, your heart came from someone else?”
She was used to that incredulous expression. It must be pretty wild to run into someone who was a walking, talking medical marvel.
She shrugged, and Mohit walked straight through the front door of someone’s home without even pausing to think about it. She glanced at Rahul again, checking to see if it was okay to follow Mohit. His eyes seemed to lose focus when they met hers. He’d been watching her, and hadn’t expected her to turn around. Color suffused his face, or maybe she was projecting again. Very slowly he tipped his chin, telling her to go on.
Her stomach did another tiny flip, and she forced herself to turn away.
Mohit was waiting for her inside the door and watching her again, that cockiness returning fast.
She put all her irritability into her frown. “I thought you were sorry for being obnoxious before.”
“I am and I like you so I’m going to let you in on a secret. You’re wasting your time. My brother is already married.”
She almost groaned out loud.
And there it was, back in all its glory, the cocky Savant grin. “He’s married to his job. To his advancement. Don’t buy into the tortured act. You don’t know him.”
She couldn’t help it—she laughed again and took in the room. The air was suffused with the smell of turmeric and chili powder piled in yellow and red mounds on white sheets across the floor. “I’m not the one who doesn’t know him. And if you stopped performing for him for one moment, you might actually get to know him too.”
He didn’t like that. His eyes got angry exactly the way Rahul’s did, and she knew how to gauge that look better than anyone. “I don’t perform for anyone,” he said.
Before she could respond, Rahul’s aie came out of the kitchen with the lady Rahul had called Shanta kaku and handed Mohit a stack of plastic bags. “Here, fill these up. We’re sealing them with a candle in the kitchen.”
Mohit sat down next to the mound of turmeric powder and picked up the scoop poking out of it.
Kimi sat down cross-legged next to Mohit, and Shanta kaku giggled.
Aie gave Shanta kaku a look and she stopped giggling, but she didn’t stop smiling behind her hand as the two women went back into the kitchen.
Kimi picked up a plastic bag and held it open so Mohit could scoop a measure into it. “Stop being so judgmental,” she said when he looked impressed, “I am capable of holding bags open.”
They filled the bags in silence for a few moments. “So what do you do? Other than torture your brother for a reaction?”
He didn’t answer. He would be mortified to hear it, but he was so much like Rahul.
“I mean, since you dropped out of engineering college.” She shook another bag open and held it up.
He scooped turmeric into it and she put it on a tray. “I work for a grass roots community organization that trains people.”
“Sounds impressive. What kind of training?” She blew at the next bag to open it.
He studied her again, with that Rahul-like frown folded between his brows. “We help people become employable. People from other states come here and take our jobs, so we make sure local businesses hire our people.”
“So you bully people into hiring underqualified people?”
“They’re not underqualified. They’re good, honest people who refuse to brownnose and sell out.” He dumped turmeric into the bag with such force most of it missed.
She shook it off her hands. “So, you don’t need a degree, you don’t need to be nice, but you’re supposed to have jobs because you’re from around here?”
“We don’t compromise our principles.”
“Right, your principles are why you dropped out of college when your brother has worked his butt off since he was sixteen to pay for your education?”
“Oh, but he wasn’t the one paying for it, see?”
“Do you have any idea who I am?”
He studied her with mock interest, spinning the scoop in a circle around her face. “We’ve already struck off gangster and cop from the list of possibilities. Hmm, I know! You’re a Bollywood starlet who’s supposed to take India by storm anytime now.”
“Funny. I’m Kirit Patil’s daughter.”
She let that sink in. He silently stabbed the turmeric mound with the scoop a few times.
“Do you know what your brother was doing the first time I saw him fourteen years ago? He was perched on top of a fifteen-foot-ladder scrubbing bird shit off the windows of The Mansion you seem to think he somehow went to and lolled about in for all those years.”
He looked up at her. “I’m sure your father is very generous. But you really want me to believe that Kirit Patil paid my brother hundreds of thousands of rupees for cleaning bird shit?”
Kimi tapped his scoop with her plastic bag and looked at the door over her shoulder to make sure Rahul was still on the phone outside. “No, your brother also tutored me and cataloged our library and set up computers and fixed things that broke and worked in the garden. And although he had already worked so much of it off, he paid my father back every penny my father had ever spent on your education in just two years after he got his commission. There isn’t a paisa of debt left.”
“Maybe my brother just made that up to impress you.” But he looked anything but sure.
“Oh, he doesn’t know that I know. I only know because I’m really good at listening at doors and at hacking into my father’s computer.” She lined up the filled bag of turmeric next to the others.
Mohit’s jaw was still set in stubbornness, but in his eyes she could see that she had just upended his life. When she’d first met him barely a few hours ago, she had been amused by how obvious his attention-seeking obnoxiousness was. But maybe it wasn’t so much obvious as it was familiar. If she understood anything, she understood how daunting Rahul’s distantness could be and how damn much it hurt.
“Listen, Mohit, I’m sure your friends do good work, but you can be so much more helpful to them with an education, don’t you think? If your brain is anything like your brother’s, you can employ more people yourself someday than you can bully reluctant employers into hiring for pathetic wages. I’m just a stupid rich girl, but that seems pretty clear to me.”
Rahul walked in and his eyes found her, amusement lighting them up for the barest second as he registered her sitting cross-legged on the floor amid all those yellow packets. In a flash he was serious again and went off to survey the block for threats. Although, if someone had been hiding in an inner room and hadn’t done anything by now, they weren’t that much of a threat in the first place, now, were they? But he was Rahul and he would make sure.
Mohit lowered his voice to a whisper. “So how long has this been going on?” His eyes danced with playfulness again. He glanced between the door Rahul had gone through and Kimi. “How long have you been in love with my brother?”
Kimi looked down at her hands. She didn’t remember touching the turmeric, but her fingers were yellow. “It doesn’t matter,” she said absently, picking up another bag.
“Come on, don’t tell me you don’t see that the fire burns equally on both sides,” he said, using the oldest Bollywood line in the book and clutched his heart dramatically.
She shook the plastic bag at him and tipped her chin at the scoop in his hand. “You misunderstand me, young one,” she said just as dramatically. “I’m not the one who can’t see it.”