26
Kimi
A long time ago
A long time ago
Kimi had it on good authority that she could not live without Rahul. She had tried. She’d been so angry with him when he hadn’t come to the hospital, when he had turned all combative when she refused to leave her room. But she knew that wasn’t the real him. The real him wanted the same things she wanted. The real him wanted to be with her. She knew that and she would bring him around. How could she not? Sometimes the people you loved didn’t know what was best for them and you had to be their good sense. Wasn’t that what Mamma used to say to her?
Some days she missed her mother’s aphorisms so terribly she wanted to storm into the temple room and steal her away from her gods. Not for too long, because Mamma needed what she needed, but only until she could give Kimi a few more stories, a few more of her lines to live by. The ones Kimi had collected years ago—before her vibrant, loving mother had disappeared behind her meditative shell—didn’t feel like they were enough anymore.
But Kimi couldn’t bring herself to enter the temple room. She didn’t know why. Maybe because it belonged so definitively to Mamma. Maybe because the one time she had peeked in there, Mamma had seemed so far away that Kimi hadn’t recognized her and it had been terrifying.
“She needs her Krishna,” Papa used to tell her years ago.
Kimi understood. Mamma needed to hold Krishna accountable for this one child he had left her with after taking away seven. Krishna himself had been the eighth child of his parents and the only one to survive after his evil uncle Kamsa murdered the first seven to reverse the prophecy of his own death. The fact that Kimi, her eighth child, had lived was a sign. So, yes, Kimi understood her wanting to make sure that he did not rescind that sign and withdraw his gift even though it only left the tinkling of prayer bells as her daughter’s share of her.
Kimi realized what a selfish thought this was. The fact that she was judging her mother’s love was wrong. She knew that.
Especially since she wasn’t blameless in what had happened to her parents.
Papa was no different. His days were spent maintaining his power, multiplying his money, so he could do the monetary part of her parents’ joint life’s work: Project KAKA. There was a time when Papa used to endlessly explain Mamma’s actions—she is doing all this for you, for the babies she lost. But somewhere along the way it had stopped. Her parents hadn’t just stopped referring to themselves as a single unit, but they had stopped referring to each other at all. They had become individuals isolated in their obsession with their vastly different methods toward achieving a joint cause.
Truly, she was grateful for their love, but sometimes the weight of their fears piled on top of her own isolation became unbearable.
How easily Rahul had said, “Just leave the house and come with me to the beach.”
Over the years, she’d seen the hordes at the beach grow from her bedroom window. All those people, all those germs. She saw the pathogens in the air the way the doctors had drawn them in their PowerPoint presentations. She saw them in her nightmares where they bit pieces out of her until she was mutilated beyond recognition.
Even so, Rahul had been right to push her. What was the point of losing your heart to your freedom—she chuckled at her cleverness—if you didn’t have the courage to claim that freedom?
It was time to claim it.
She checked her watch as she paced her room. Rahul was coming over today. He had been on some super-secret mission in some remote part of the country for the past few months. The idea of him running around with a gun trying to hunt down criminals who also had guns made her stomach cramp, but the last thing she wanted him to see when he got here was worry or fear. Especially after he had found it so repulsive.
She checked her watch again. He should be here in five minutes. Rahul had always been punctual, but now he was never, ever late. Ever since he’d become a cop, he’d taken on this new avatar. As though he’d taken all the extra-virtuous things about him and honed them into this near-robotic person in terms of precision.
He’d always talked minimally, which worked well for her because he was a great listener, but now he was precise to a point of monosyllables. He’d always taken himself rather too seriously, but now he was downright severe in his worry about the world and all that was wrong with it. He’d always been punctual and dependable, never agreeing to do something if he wasn’t one hundred percent sure he could deliver. Now, well, right now it was seven fourteen and he’d told her he’d be here by seven fifteen, and she could count down the seconds . . . and there it was, the doorbell.
She steeled herself to execute her plan. First, she would be all breezy and friendly and not obsessed and desperate the way she sometimes felt around him these days when he went all distant. Ever since she had seen him in that uniform, he made her go all gooey inside. How did one deal with that when it was your best friend? Okay, truthfully, it had been long before the uniform.
She would deal with it. If all he wanted right now was to be friends, that’s all she would demand. Because sooner or later he was going to come around and see that she was the one—because she was, she just knew she was. Second, she would prove to him that she was brave, that she was done being locked inside the house. She could just see his face when he found out what she had done, how very ready she was to “blow this joint,” as they said in Hollywood movies.
It had been a tough decision, but she had to do the hard thing and go away for two years. God alone knew how she was going to convince her parents, but Rahul would help with that.
She stepped outside her room and watched him run up the stairs. The main stairs. She couldn’t believe they had made him take the servants’ stairs all these years. She had put a stop to that, and she didn’t care that Sarika tai had given her the silent treatment for a good month for it.
His vitality was a living force. His eyes smiled when he saw her, although he didn’t yet give her the pleasure of a full-blown smile. It was his way. He made you work for that smile.
He stopped short, his eyes turning a strange kind of intense for just a second. She was standing at the railing, outside the door to the waiting area of her room. It was a first for them, her greeting him this way. She walked around the house and the grounds now. Another thing she had to be grateful to him for. If he hadn’t goaded her to use her freedom, it would have taken her much longer to leave the confines of her room. Sometimes she didn’t understand herself. Why was the one thing she had wanted so badly so hard to claim?
“Exactly on time,” she said, leaning into the railing and watching him. He was still in uniform. Which meant he had gotten off the plane and come straight here. He hadn’t had a chance to go home and change as he’d like to have done. But he’d committed to a time and he wouldn’t be late. If there weren’t these things, these parts where he understood that she waited, understood what waiting meant to her in a way no one else understood. If there weren’t these parts where she saw so clearly how much he cared, she would have let him go, would have believed what he wanted her to believe.
“Always.” He walked up to her, and she held out her hand feeling like Emma greeting Mr. Knightley, when she wanted to be Lydia and throw herself at Mr. Wickham, giggling madly.
He smiled and took her hand, and she got the full-faced smile she’d been hungering for. “You’re thinking of literary comparisons to how we’re greeting each other, aren’t you?”
Did she need to prove her “he loves me” theory anymore?
Ah, but all in good time, right?
She tugged him into the room. “Certainly not Cathy and Heathcliff, not even Mercedes and the Count,” he said, his eyes doing that searching thing.
Thank God for that. Those were not love stories to aspire to.
“You didn’t stiff-curtsy, so it isn’t your usual Elizabeth and Darcy.”
Getting warmer.
“Ah, Emma and Knightley, of course.” He looked jubilant at having solved it. But it was she who felt all the jubilation, all the way down her arms to her fingertips.
He looked away from her face, suddenly not as jubilant. She couldn’t let tension creep between them today.
“Okay, so guess what’s happening today?” she asked, trying not to bounce on her toes.
He relaxed and smiled again. “You’re going to let me take you to the beach?”
She balked—tongue-hanging-out-all-agog, eyeballs-popping-out-like-a-cartoon-film balked, making him laugh out loud like the Rahul he was inside.
“Seriously? Because I was being sarcastic.”
Did he really believe her such a coward? She must’ve pouted, because he said, “Okay, okay, sorry, I should not have said that.”
Good, he was in a let’s-not-fight mood. Which meant they were on the same page. She picked up his hand again and dragged him toward the stairs.
“What, we’re leaving right now?”
If she thought about it she would chicken out. “Let’s at least leave the house. That much I’ve been doing.”
He gave her his “I’m so proud of you” look, and she took it without telling him about the knee-shaking, clammy-palm reaction she had every time the front door opened. At first it had happened every time she stepped out of her bedroom. While that had slowly reduced in intensity, the front door was still a little nerve-racking. But the very thought of the gate made all of her nerves turn into twanging rubber bands at once.
But not today.
Rahul and she headed down the corridor. The prayer room was silent. So, Mamma was still at the temple. Sarika tai stepped out of the kitchen. She still worked at the house part-time, just in case Kimi got sick and needed a hand. “Baby, everything okay?” she asked, her concern turning to alarm when she saw Rahul next to Kimi.
“Yes, thanks, Sarika tai, just going to walk around the back lawn with Rahul.” The last thing she needed was another conversation in which Sarika dropped as many references to all the work Rahul had done in the house. Kimi had long stopped kidding herself that any of that had been praise for Rahul’s hard work, and she was getting tired of having to point to all of Rahul’s achievements without provoking any real admiration.
If Rahul thought it was strange she had lied about where they were going, his face didn’t give anything away.
Then Mahesh the doorman jumped up when he saw her and studied his watch, even though there was a floor-to-ceiling teakwood grandfather clock salvaged from the palace of Kolhapur sitting right across the entrance lobby from him. “It’s a little late for Baby’s walk?” he said without moving to open the door.
“Yes, a little late today, kaka,” she said. “But it’s still light outside.”
Rahul watched silently as Mahesh did a quick bow and nod and opened the door. “I lighted all the mosquito lamps earlier, so Baby should be safe from bites.”
“Thank you, kaka,” she said, and Rahul followed her out, where they were stopped by mali kaka, the gardener, who also started when he saw her out at this time of day. Unless it was because she was with Rahul. But no, that wasn’t it this time, because pride shone in Mali kaka’s rheumy eyes when they fell on Rahul’s uniform, and he straightened and saluted him. Instead of smiling at him or being embarrassed, Rahul saluted back, a quick, smart flick of hand against forehead that flashed a whole different Rahul at her.
For a minute her absolute belief that she knew him, all of him, inside and out, teetered. But he walked to the gate and she followed him, her heart hammering at the thought of what lay beyond those high wood-and-brass gates. This was where she had first seen him, standing right by the gate, the storm inside him too large to be dwarfed by her vantage point on top of the gatehouse.
“Wait a minute, Rahul,” she said, breathing hard. “Why don’t we walk for a bit on the back lawn?”
He came back to her, leaned into her ear, and pointed at the gatehouse. “Remember that girl, Kimi? You know what struck me most about her that day?”
“That she had freakishly large eyes. I know, you’ve told me a million times.”
He smiled like that boy he’d been. Storm Boy.
“She still has freakishly large eyes. But back then her eyes held adventure.”
She swallowed. Then took the hand he proffered and her feet began to move.
It had been exactly what she needed to hear. Adventure—she had craved it with a mad, childish wanting. It used to make her want to skip. It used to make her feel like she was bursting out of her skin.
Twelve years and it was gone without a trace, and she couldn’t backtrack to the moment when it had disappeared.
She ran past him and stopped when Bhola smiled widely at her. “Hello, Kimi-baby,” he said, pulling the gate open. “Saying bye-bye to Rahul? Very good,” he said in careful English. And it made her smile even wider.
“Baby’s not just here to say bye-bye, Bholaji,” Rahul said, his tone weirdly light and excited, as though by running past him she had let something loose inside him too.
Bhola didn’t look happy, but before he could say more, Rahul dragged Kimi out the gate, letting Bhola’s protestations fall on deaf ears. As they stepped out onto the street, the street took a dive down a slope. She stumbled and clutched Rahul’s hand tighter.
He stopped and let her steady herself. This was her home—she had lived here all her life, and she had forgotten that stepping out of the gate led to a street that resembled a slide and that it was lined on both sides by stone walls overflowing with bougainvillea.
She looked around her, taking it all in, and laughter bubbled out of her. It was beautiful, and she would never forget again.
Rahul let her go and straddled something that looked an awful lot like something the gang in Dhoom had driven. “Is that a motorcycle?” she asked incredulously.
He beamed—and Rahul never beamed these days. “Let me introduce you. Kimi, this is Tina. Tina, meet Kimi. And she’s a Bullet. She doesn’t like to be called a—” He lowered his voice to a whisper in Kimi’s ear. “Motorcycle.”
That made her laugh even more, which made him beam even more. He touched Tina almost carefully, as though he were petting a precious but temperamental pet, and handed Kimi a helmet.
“What about you?” she asked, but she took it and put it on her head.
“There’s only one and it’s your first time, so you get it.”
“You’re protecting my virginity, how gallant!” she said, and his beaming smile tipped over into a laugh. “Now I know why they call a condom a helmet.”
He snapped the clasp under her chin, his fingers against her skin making gooseflesh skitter down her arms. “Your first ride and you’re already making phallic biker jokes. I’m impressed.” Best part was he looked impressed, and she already felt like she was flying on a motorcycle—or rather, on Tina!
Of course she was wrong. Because flying down the street on Tina was like nothing she could have imagined. For one, they started out on a slope. Which basically meant that no matter how gingerly she placed her hands on his shoulders (she had no idea why she suddenly felt shy straddling the seat behind him), gravity made it impossible not to press down hard on them. And hello-wow! Was this how all shoulders felt beneath your hands? Because omergadabove! His were firm and undulating and filled her hands in a way she felt everywhere.
Then he started the bike, and as he twisted around those shoulder muscles did even more bulgy business under her palms, sending an unholy buzz zinging through her.
“Ready?” he asked, and as soon as she nodded, they started moving. Which meant the bike went from a twenty-degree incline to a sixty-degree incline, and every curve of her body went flush with his. The V of her legs clamped around the V of his legs, her nether regions settled into his butt, and her entire front basically splattered against his back like a jacket.
Her physical being that had orbited him for so long, too afraid to touch, in one instant was transposed on his, like a second skin. And it was so much sensation, despite the sum total of inertia and gravity acting on her near-horizontal body, she wiggled back, using those shoulders of his to find her balance, to reclaim her senses. But all those novels she’d read, all those things that were supposed to warm between your legs and tingle across your breasts, they weren’t an exaggeration. She was feeling every one of those things pulsing inside her.
What a stroke of luck that he couldn’t see her face, that they couldn’t talk, that she didn’t have to let him go.
Within minutes the steep slope was gone and the street flattened out. Reluctantly, she put just a hair of distance between them. Thankfully, momentum didn’t make it easy to pull away. When she could think again over all those buzzing body parts, she realized that the ocean was at most a minute from her home and it had been more than a few minutes. They weren’t headed for the Carter Road beach.
She leaned into him again. Doing it consciously was even better than being accidentally slammed into him (which, she wouldn’t lie, was rather amazing too). Those beating parts warmed again, but this time they didn’t embarrass her. He slowed, and she automatically reached up and shouted into his ear, “I thought we were going to the beach.”
She had no idea how he heard her but he did. Because he leaned back into her and said, “We are.”
She felt something then, something she had only ever felt with Rahul. It had taken her all these years to be able to name it. It was trust. For whatever reason, she had never once in her life doubted that she would get what she needed from him. Not always what she wanted, but what she really needed. It was why she was able to tell him to leave, to never darken her door again. It was why she could push him away and pull him to her whenever the fancy struck, because she trusted that he would always come back, and as long as he was there, everything always turned out okay.
She settled into him. Feeling not just warm between her legs but warm in her heart. Feeling oddly powerful with the purring bike beneath her. Feeling those shoulders and absorbing every dip and flex that commanded motion and surrendered to it. Somehow it all gathered together inside her like a force, like harmony, like movement that took her out of herself and placed her into herself all at once. She could ride like this for hours, being speed, being an amalgam of particles flying in the wind. Flying with a force that righted everything as though it had never been wrong.
“Where are we?” she asked, when they slowed to a stop after what had to have been an hour but felt like a heartbeat.
“You feeling okay?” he asked, twisting around.
She nodded and let him examine her with eyes she couldn’t see because of the reflective Ray-Bans she had given him for his twenty-first birthday. She had sent them to him from London, which was probably why he had accepted them, because it was too much of a bother to send them back. The fact that he actually wore them made her already too-full heart wobble like a water-filled balloon. She struggled between removing them so she could see his eyes and leaving them on his face because she loved that he was wearing them so much.
His thick hair was slicked back from the ride, making him look like a cross between a film star on the red carpet and a mobster out on a hit. But he was wearing his uniform with golden stars shining on his epaulets. It was the oddest combination and it reflected everything she was feeling perfectly.
As they made their way down the lane toward the beach, he reached into his pocket and pulled out something. Even without seeing his eyes her heart sped up. It was a face mask. One of those white fabric ones that hooked over your ears.
Wordlessly, she took it from him, realizing suddenly that she was out in the open with people. It was terrifying, but she only let it be for a moment. Her body was supposedly doing its job with this new drug, so Rahul was right, she had to trust it.
She tucked the mask into the pocket of her jeans. “Do you carry it around just in case you run into a sick girl?”
“I carry it around in case my friend needs it.” He took her hand as they came upon the ocean, which was in full-frothing churn. There was barely a soul around. How far out had he driven? The tide was coming in. She knew it well. She had watched it from her window almost every day of her life. Up close the swelling was different. More violent yet still somehow smaller in scale.
They walked, her ponytail flapping in the wind and slapping her cheeks. They talked, their words soaking up the sunshine and dancing in the ocean breeze.
He told her about the cases he was working on.
He was beautiful when he talked about his work. His eyes got a little darker, his mouth just a little more animated, the timbre of his voice just a little deeper. She was entirely lost in him when suddenly he stopped and pointed at the ocean. She turned away from him and faced it. The sky and sea had gone a brilliant pink, like the bougainvillea that spilled from the walls around her home seen through the yellow lenses of her childhood sunglasses. A sunrise and a sunset were the only time you could stare the sun in the face as though it were nothing more powerful than a vibrantly painted ball.
It was impossible to look away. They stood there rooted, fingers interlaced, as it descended before their eyes from its brilliant perch and sank smoothly into the fast-darkening water.
“Thanks,” she said when only an orange cap remained at the edge of a pink tinged ocean.
“For?”
“For forcing me to come out.”
He didn’t answer, just sank down into the sand taking her with him.
After they had stared at the darkening waves for a while longer, he removed the Ray-Bans and turned to her again. “I’m sorry.”
“For?”
“For what I said about you not leaving home being cowardly. That’s not true.”
“It was true. I’m glad you shook me out of my cowardice.” And then quickly, before she lost her nerve, “I got into a university in America.”
His entire body went still. “America?”
“I’ve always wanted to be a journalist, remember?” She wrapped her arms around her knees and pressed her cheek against them, watching him.
His eyes crinkled with amusement.
“What?” she asked.
“So you went straight from not wanting to come to the beach with me to applying to a college in America?”
“The point is that I did come to the beach with you. And now you have to go with me to Columbia.” But she was smiling, so he knew she wasn’t serious. He wouldn’t leave his job if someone held a gun to his head. Well, someone did all the time and still he didn’t. “And if you can’t, will you at least help me talk to Papa?”
Rahul laughed. “Why would he listen to me?”
“Because, haven’t you noticed, he listens to you about me. You’re the only one he listens to, because he knows.”
He didn’t ask what it was exactly that Papa knew. It was the thing she wasn’t allowed to mention no matter how much the setting sun made her want to mention it. Because she knew he wasn’t ready to admit he felt that way too. But it kept growing bigger and bigger inside her and harder and harder to hold in.
“I don’t think he’ll let you go—your mother most certainly won’t. But I’ll try to convince him only on one condition—you have to come back.”
It wasn’t an admission exactly, but she would take it.
She sat up. “Of course I’ll come back. You’re here, Rahul.” She leaned in and gave him a kiss on his cheek.
He didn’t stiffen, so she put her head on his shoulder and he wrapped his arm around her. Naturally, it wasn’t to hold on to her, it was to pull her away. “Come on, college girl, time to get home before they send out a search party.”
But when she didn’t move he stayed there with his arm around her, watching the waves until she was ready to go back.