I knew I shouldn’t have come.
The warehouse is packed with sweaty bodies, music thumping, the deep thrum of the live dhol setting off the bass and a trippy, acid undercurrent on the DJ’s pick, a sexed-up Punjabi-inflected throwback from the nineties. The classic is so much better. I listened to it with Ma the other day, so she could “show me,” as usual, as she swung her salwar-kameezed hips and hummed along to it. This version has an overlay of househead synth and a catchy glitch that only feels half on purpose. But the crowd loves it. They’re mostly decked out in traditional white clothing, now doused with all the colors of the rainbow for Holi, just like in those old Bollywood films Ma makes us watch. Handfuls of red, green, magenta, orange, purple powder fly, scattered with glee, a Krishna-approved color war with a down-and-dirty underbelly. Away from the prying eyes of their parents, lithe, young, brown bodies bump and grind in a bhang-laced stupor, the effect of the liquid pot slowing the collective mass down to a sexy sway that follows the racy rhythm of the drumbeat a little too closely.
So not my scene.
I shouldn’t be here. And Ma would completely freak if she knew.
I shiver despite the stifling heat, pulling my denim jacket tighter around me, trying to hide as gooseflesh pops up on my exposed stomach. It’s been unseasonably warm for March—thanks, climate change—but I definitely shouldn’t have worn this teeny-tiny choli, even though the deep turquoise, mirrored skirt of the lengha offers the perfect flare when I spin across the dance floor. In this swirl of brown and white, I stand out like a peacock on an Indian interstate highway, lonely and confused. My best friend, Leela, kept insisting that the old-school Rajasthani tie-dye design of Ma’s old lengha—lifted from that trunk she thinks is still locked away in the attic—was “so nineties.” But when she helped me lace up the corseted blouse, the snaky, golden threads crisscrossing across my bare back like a restless nagini, she gasped.
I’ve seen the pictures of Ma—or the amazing Amrita, as she always says her sahelis called her back then—in this very lengha when she was sixteen, laughing, twirling, dancing, the mischief in her hazy umber eyes so intoxicating, so seductive, I had to see if I could grasp it, to touch some of that power. If I could slip into her skin, just for a night, maybe someone would notice me, too. Just once. Doesn’t every girl have that right? But Ma would kill me if she knew. Because good Indian girls obey. And I’m nothing if not a good Indian girl.
“See, Taara, I told you the DJ was hot,” Leela says, her hands in her thick, dark waves, her body already entranced by the music. Within seconds she’s surrounded by a throbbing crowd, the air thick with spicy cologne and sticky sweat. She gives in to the rhythm without a care, letting curves caress strangers with an easy familiarity. I try to do the same, carving out a bit of space for myself among the undulating mass, trying to indulge in the twirl of my lengha the way I’d imagined it just hours ago. I throw my hands up and shake my hips and pull my hair free from its constraints, letting the heavy, straight length of it tumble down my back like a discarded veil. The record skips a beat, the music shifts, and a new, pulsing bass takes over. The crowd is whooping, loud and joyful, but there’s something mournful underneath this amped-up mix, and it stops me cold for a second. The tinny soprano beckons a lover long lost, telling him that the wail of the night birds and the clink of her bangles keep her from much-needed sleep. Leela grabs my arms, pulling me into the shared rhythm, and I abandon myself to it, the music moving my feet and hips in unfamiliar ways. Then an arm circles the slick of my waist, possessive, strange—almost like it’s a habit.
“Hey!” I spin toward the grasping hands, half expecting to see Ryan, but this is the last place he’d be. The guy—tall, brown, definitely not Ryan—looms over me, grinning down expectantly, as if he’s waiting to be greeted with a kiss. Or at least a smile. He’s getting neither.
“Hands off,” I say, shoving him away as the words “want to dance” skitter across the air.
“Sorry,” he stammers, and I feel like I can hear his heartbeat, even over the thump of the music. “I thought—I thought I knew you.” He’s long and lean, muscles pushing through his close-fitting white kurta, with close-cropped black hair and a strong, clean-shaven jaw. His eyes might be the only interesting thing about him: so dark they’re almost black, the strobe lights flash off them like fireworks. They’d look gorgeous rimmed with a touch of liner, I think, then laugh, which makes him smile again, the corners of his eyes crinkling until they’re nearly closed. It’s sweet. He’s the opposite of what Leela would describe as my type, which is scruffy, scrawny, and a little dirty. Even though I’ve only ever had one boyfriend. She’d be right, though. This guy is way too squeaky clean for me.
But then I notice it. A tattoo, something in Punjabi, scrawled across his right wrist. Before I realize what’s happening, I’ve reached across to grab his hand, pulling it closer so I can read it. The word “Soni” is written in Gurmukhi, which I only know because Ma insisted I take a written Punjabi class at gurdwara school on Sundays as a kid. Precious. It’s a term of endearment, something my mom calls me sometimes. The guy presses his palm to mine, and, even though every logical thought in my head tells me to run, to move, to go right now, I can’t look away.
“Soni,” he says, and I shiver again, despite the heady, sweaty radiance of a thousand overheated bodies, the sultry rhythm of the drums. He takes his other palm and rubs a bit of bright blue powder on my face, then laughs. “I knew it was you.”
I finally get ahold of myself again, and pull my hand away. “I have to go,” I say, and bolt. Leela will have to find her own way home, I think, peering back toward the dance floor for just a second. But I don’t see her. Or him. Maybe he was a figment.
I head to the bar and gulp down a Limca, the sharp effervescence of the lemon fizz cooling me down. But my head still feels sluggish, and I wonder if it was laced with vodka. Or bhang. When I come up for breath, he’s there again. “Sorry, Soni. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just knew.” His hand reaches for mine again, but I’m too quick, heading right out the door and to the parking lot. The cold air hits me hard and fast, and again I regret the skimpiness of this choli. I’ve got to get to the car and get out of here, fast.
I start walking, keys in my hand, my heels clacking on the concrete. The music is far away now, and the night is silent. We got here late, so we’re parked two lots over, and the streetlights flicker, reminding me of the light in his eyes. I can still feel them on me, taking in every inch and seeing me but not: the twirl of turquoise silk, the bare skin of my belly, the curve of the choli, and the gleam of mirrorwork. The allure of something strange and seductive and entirely not me.
I turn the corner toward the lot, and there he is again, a hand combing through his dark spiky hair, that sheepish grin—caught—slowly spreading across his face. Something glitters in his palm, familiar and foreign all at once. “You dropped this,” he says breathlessly. His voice is deeper than I thought it would be, tree bark and honeycomb. He holds it up, smiling again, and his black eyes reflect the gold in his palm.
“No, I didn’t,” I say, and start to walk away, but he steps closer, long brown fingers grazing my bare arm. A flame shoots through me, unexpected and enticing.
“Wait, look,” he says, now just inches away. “Don’t you recognize it?” He takes my hand into his and lays the object in my open palm. It’s heavy and intricate, hundreds of tiny golden bells chasing infinity. A bracelet? No. Payal. Well, one of the pair, anyway. I’ve never seen any like this before, even though Ma keeps dozens of styles at the store. The anklets are usually fashioned in silver—gold at your feet would disgrace the gods, of course. They jingle with every movement, telling me they’re pure and not some cheap, fake, plated knockoffs.
“You’re mistaken,” I say. “They’re not mine.” Even though part of me aches to feel the weight of them on my bare skin, to see how they move with me.
“But they are,” he says. “I made them for you.”
“Taara?” Leela’s voice calls from not far away. “Why did you— Hey.” She looks from me to the guy and back. His hand is still outstretched, the payal sitting delicate and inviting in his palm, his face bemused and hopeful. “I think we should go.” She takes the keys from my hand and gently locks an arm through mine, leading me away. “It’s getting late.”
We don’t wait to see if he walks away.
We sit in silence for a few minutes in my car, the heat blasting, the same haunting song from earlier playing on Leela’s phone. “Will you turn that off?” I say, a little too harshly.
“Who is he?” she asks.
I shrug. “He kept calling me Soni. He thought I was someone else.” And for moment, I wish I was, too.
Leela and I decide to drop into Chaska for a snack before we head home. It’s packed, of course, because the new Shah Rukh Khan film just let out. And that’s what brown people—well, in Little India smack-dab in the middle of Jersey anyway—do on a Saturday night. “How was it?” Leela asks our usual waiter, Shankar, who already knows to bring us two plates of chole bhature, extra pickled onions on the side. “He’s getting too old to carry this shit.”
“No yaar, he’s looking good,” says Shankar, who definitely has a finer appreciation of Shah Rukh. “He’s back to that Om Shanti Om body, because Ranbir is on his tail? I wouldn’t mind being on his tail, too, nah?” Leela and I dissolve into laughter as Shankar sets up our order. We dip hot, crispy-soft pieces of fried dough into the saucy curried chickpeas, and I pile some of the onions high onto the little scoop I’ve made with the bread. Then another group shuffles into the already crammed space, and I can feel him before I see him. The guy from the club.
“Hey, Nick,” Shankar says, clearly pleased to see the guy. “Chole bhature, ek plate?”
“Hey, Shankar,” the guy says, slapping him on the back playfully. “Tight in here tonight, huh?” He pulls at the spare chair at our table, looking down at me intently. “Mind if I join you for a minute?”
Leela stands. “Yeah, we do, actually.” She’s about to wave Nick back when I grab her hand.
“It’s not a big deal,” I say. He sits, that crinkly-eyed grin taking over his face again.
She stands. “Well, I’ll go get the check, then.” She storms off toward the cashier, and I glare after her.
“She doesn’t like me much, does she?” Nick says, a smirk playing on his lips. Shankar brings another steaming plate of chole bhature to the table, and the bread is so blisteringly hot, so round and inviting, that I can’t help but tear into it, even though it’s not mine. “You’ve still got it, don’t you?”
“What?” I say, my mouth full of spicy, chut-putty channa.
“That appetite. I always used to say, ‘Tid eh ki towa?’”
I startle for a second. “What does that mean?”
“‘Do you have a stomach or a well?’” he says, his hands reaching for the bread just as mine do. He dips and scoops, adding extra onions, just like I did. “Maybe it loses something in the translation.”
I watch him eat for a second—big, messy bites, like a farmer’s kid from Punjab. “My mom used to say that to me sometimes, too, though. When I was little.”
“Tid eh ki towa?” He laughs. “I’m not surprised.”
Shankar shows up then with a wary look and a bag of grease. “Leela’s waiting for you in the car—she said to tell you,” he says seriously.
Nick grins at me again, but takes the hint. “Okay, well, guess that means you should go.” He dips more bread into the chole again. “Or you could stay.”
Annoyance flickers. Why does she want to ruin this for me? But I stand anyway.
“No, I should go,” I say, taking the bag from Shankar.
But as I walk away, I kind of wish I hadn’t.
The Sunday bustle has trickled by the time the lunch rush ends. I’m starving, and I’ve got reams of research to do for my science paper, but I promised Ma I’d stay till four. I hum along to the Bollywood song playing on my phone—it’s the same plaintive song I’ve had on repeat since that night a week ago. I can’t get it out of my head.
I tear open a pack of chana chor garam and nibble some of the spicy, crunchy bites. They’re salty and sour and make my tongue tingle. I carefully dust the counter so there’s no trace of my snack.
Ma hates when I eat in the store. Everything here is pristine: gleaming glass cases filled with the most elegant—and expensive—jewels in Little India. All handmade, crafted by artisans at our sister store in Rajouri Garden in Delhi. Papa flies back and forth every month to take care of the shipments, and Ma manages things—a bit obsessively, if you ask me—here in Jersey, under the watchful eyes of my uncles, Kamal and Sunil, her brothers who founded the store nearly twenty years ago. They’re mostly hands-off these days, counting cash in the back while Ma wheels and deals in the front. She’s got this grace about her, quietly directing you to just the right choice with a sleight of hand so swift that it doesn’t even feel like she’s selling you something. It’s the light in the eyes and the curve of her mouth when she smiles just so, the dimples in her cheek and chin so distinctly desi, they’re smitten and pulling out their wallets.
I gaze in the mirror on the counter, holding a small pearl-work choker to my throat, and stare at my own face, which echoes hers, except the umber eyes. Mine are a more standard hazel, so they only go to umber in a certain light, like now. But the mischief in them is missing, drilled away by rules and restrictions and the idea that I must always do the right thing. It makes me want to do exactly the wrong thing. My mind goes back to him, the boy from the other night, and I wonder if I was too cautious, too careful. Why I didn’t let my heart race a little, just for once?
“Again this song!” Ma says as she shuffles in from the back. Startled, I drop the necklace, and it clatters on the glass case. She wiggles her long, lean fingers at me. “Turn it up.”
My uncles have threatened to banish me from the shop because of it, but Ma says this particular song touches her soul every time she hears it.
“That poor girl,” Ma says, humming the words here and there, her hips swaying without permission. “Married off to a stranger and mourning her long-lost love. They always thought she was the villain, that Sahiba.”
“Wasn’t she?” I ask. I mean, she betrayed her one true love.
“She was torn,” Ma says. She’s looking in the mirror, but it’s my reflection that she sees there, the fine lines smoothed, the years slipping away like a misplaced payal. “She had to decide between Mirza and her family, and in those days, it’s not like it is now, where you just go running off at the first blink of love-wove pyar-shar. In those days, if you left your family, you left everyone—the whole world as you know it.”
“Yeah,” I say with a smile. “But that was the kind of love that meant you’d be immortalized forever.”
“A love very few people truly know.” There’s something in the way she says it, so quiet, so faraway, like she’s speaking to herself and not to me. Like she knows what that love, that loss, might feel like.
“Then it must have been one worth fighting for, right?”
“You don’t know, Bebo, what you’ll do,” my mother says, a sudden anger simmering under her words. “You don’t know how to choose until you’re right there, on the precipice, giving away your everything for something that may be real or may be a shadow, a ghost you’re chasing.”
But what I wouldn’t give to find out. This song is just one of hundreds that tell the story of the lovelorn Sahiba, who betrayed her lover, Mirza, to preserve her family’s honor—but when it was already far too late. While the others are all remembered for their boundless love, their soul connections, she’s reviled as a traitor to both sides. “Sahiba had something most people only ever dream of, Ma,” I say, putting more bangles onto their racks. “She gave it up. It’s her own fault. But I don’t quite buy it anyway. It’s just a folktale, right?”
“How can you say that, Taara? That kind of love is something to aspire to—something very few people get to experience.” Her voice goes faraway again when she says, “And maybe truly something worth risking everything for.” Her eyes brighten and she laughs. “But so few would, hena? Anyway, these days, you kids don’t know anything about love.” She pushes another stack of velvet boxes toward me. “All this swipe right, swipe left. True love is in the eyes, in the reuniting of two souls.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, and begin unpacking the boxes she’s placed on the counter.
“How was the dance, Bebo?” she asks me suddenly, a curious smirk traveling all the way to her eyes. She pokes my cheek. “Oh, you think I don’t know where you go? You think I haven’t done everything you’ve done, first and better?” She laughs. “Anything interesting?”
“Ma!”
“Well, you’ve been listening to this song with no end. Must be something.” Her eyes shine, newly polished stones, and I wonder if she really believes those words: the reuniting of two souls. “This is the time, Bebo. Have your fun—but keep it clean, and let no one be the wiser.”
“Sure, Ma,” I say, laughing. “As if.”
“Kya as if?” she says, incredulous. “You really think I didn’t have any fun when I was your age?”
“Yeah, Ma, I’m sure you did.” But my grin betrays me. I can see an endless row of dewanae falling for those eyes, but the amazing Amrita? She could never have loved them back. Right?
“You think you know,” she says. “But I have my secrets.”
“What secrets?” I’m curious now, and my mind keeps flashing back to Nick, to the familiarity of his touch, the spark of his skin. Maybe it was nothing. But maybe it was something.
“Before your papa, there was another boy. Sunder Singh. He’d just come from India—and Patiala at that!—and used to work at the chole-bhature shop across the street from the jewelers. Yes, Mahi’s. But back then, it was called Sabrawal’s. In those days, there weren’t so many of us, and everybody knew everybody. I’d go in with some of the girls, and he’d always pile my plate the highest with greasy, puffy bhature. Then, when I ate them all up, he’d laugh and say, ‘Tid eh ki towa?’”
When I look at her, startled, she explains. “‘Do you have a stomach or a well?’ Just like I used to say to you,” she says, frowning. “Anyway, it all happened very fast, from laughing over chole bhature to . . .”
“Where’d he go?” I ask. “Sunder Singh?”
“He was killed. A gash to the head. My brothers . . .” She trails off then, lost someplace I can’t quite reach. “I tried, but it was too late. I still can’t believe he’s gone.”
“Wait, what?” I say, the necklace I’m arranging clattering on the glass case. “He was killed. Killed?”
“They were never charged. . . .” Her voice trails again. “It was ruled an accident. Then his family packed up and moved back to Ludhiana.”
“Mom!”
She’s there, but already gone, humming the words to the song again, about a love long lost and the pain she’ll always carry.
“Ma,” I say, touching her hand.
She pulls it away, surprised. “Acche, tho, you finish up, teek hai, Bebo? Then Sunil Mamu will drop you off; I know, science paper.” She bustles out the back in a hurry, a palm pressed to her cheek, as if remembering a familiar touch.
I turn back to the counter, the stack of jewel boxes laid out in front of me. In them sit another dozen gold sets, soldered and shaped with all the beauty of an India I’ve never seen—more peacocks dancing, lions roaring, the sinister slither of the nagin, with ruby eyes beckoning. The last bin is filled with the heavy jingle of payal, the anklets all tangled in a mess, every pair wrought in gleaming silver. Not a golden one in sight. I think about asking her then, but something stops me. Instead I just unwind pair after pair, lining them up on the velvet spread below, thinking about moments missed.
I’m polishing some of the new sets—wrought gold bangles painted the deep blues and greens of the peacock—when the door buzzes. I press Open without thinking, the way I always do, even though Ma is forever telling me to look first. The chimes tinkle as the door opens, and my heart drops when I see him. Nick.
I don’t know how he found me, and I half thought I’d never see him again, though I sort of wished I would.
But there he is, grinning that doofy grin, his pristine black wool coat buttoned up, a Burberry plaid scarf laid against it, a few scattered drops of March rain making his hair slick. His hands are in his pockets, affable and unintimidating. Except totally not. “I knew I’d find you,” he says, and in that moment I want to run to him and run away, all at once.
“How did you find me?”
“You’re exactly where I knew you’d be.” He walks up to the counter and pulls one hand from his pocket. “I knew this was yours, and I wanted you to have it.” He lays the gold payal carefully across the silken ruby velvet of one of the cases, and it feels alive, like a snake, reluctant but seduced to dance to the charmer’s tune. “It needs to be with you.”
“It’s not mine,” I say.
“Oh, but it is.” His smile is lopsided, optimistic. There’s a small scar across his forehead, just above his right eyebrow, that I didn’t see in the flash of the holi party; thin and barely noticeable. The only flaw on his face. Before I can stop myself, I’m reaching toward it. A gash to the head. Just like my mother said.
“Soni,” he says, taking my hand. His touch is cold. “I know it’s you. But I’ll give you all the time you need.”
With that, he turns, and walks out the door.
It’s only when he’s gone that I realize he’s left the payal behind. That’s when Ma comes bustling back in, no doubt eager to beguile another customer.
“Khon tha?” Ma says, looking at the empty space in front of the counter. “They’ve gone already?” She’s disappointed for a second—I’ll never be her star salesgirl—but holds out her hand, her fist practically bursting with a secret. “I have to show you,” she says breathlessly. “Remember I was saying, about Sunder. You didn’t believe me. But this, he made for me.” She opens her palm and reveals a gleaming serpent of a thing, a charmed talisman, one that makes my blood run cold. A golden payal, intricately wrought, a perfect match for the one that Nick left behind.