* * *
—
The day drifted away from them. She wore the spare dress she’d brought, and Sunny sat on the beach with his T-shirt and pants back on his damp body, staring at the ocean. She sat at the table reading an old copy of The Rough Guide to Goa. Pages had been torn out. People sometimes used them for toilet paper. It was almost five. The sun was sinking toward the ocean, turning amber.
Santosh walked up from the huts. “Where’s Sunny?”
She pointed to the sand.
“What happened?”
She didn’t reply.
Santosh placed his hands on his hips. “He has too much thinking.” He waited for her to respond. When she didn’t, he asked her if she wanted a beer.
“Just water.”
“Sunny wants beer?”
“Wait until sunset.” She offered him a weak smile. “Please. It’s not good for his head.”
* * *
—
She walked up the beach with the setting sun, accompanied by the scruffy dog, who refused to leave her side, and when she returned she walked to Sunny, carrying two burning cigarettes, squatted beside him in the sand.
“The day just went by,” he said.
She handed him one of the cigarettes. “You spent it avoiding me.”
“I don’t know what I was hoping for.”
“Why don’t you just talk to me?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
She brushed the hair out of his face. “No one knows anything.”
“My father knows.” He spoke with such certainty. “He knows the when, the what, the why, the where, the how.”
“You forgot the who.”
“He knows that too.”
“Does he know we’re here now?”
“Probably.”
She thought on that.
“What does he even want from you?”
“Control.” He held a handful of sand. “The perfect son, the one that thinks like him, acts like him. But I don’t know who that is. I don’t know how to be that person. The one he wants.”
“You shouldn’t have to be that person at all.”
“I wanted to please him. I wanted to make him proud. If I could just unlock the code, everything would follow. But I can’t unlock the code.”
“So you have to leave.”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah.”
“Will he let you go?”
He tossed the sand back down. “I don’t know.”
She watched him closely. “Have you stood up to him before?”
“I put those ads out.”
“Sunny . . . That wasn’t you standing up to him. That was spiting him.”
“I told you what happened after that, didn’t I? He sent his men into my apartment, they smashed everything, right in front of me. Furniture, paintings, sculptures.” She watched him reliving it in his head. “Things I’d bought, collected, things that meant something to me, things that had beauty. Only the things that had beauty. Priceless things. Not priceless in money, priceless to me. He stood and watched as his men destroyed them all. He didn’t say a word while it happened, but he was telling me something, sending me a message, I could hear it in my head, like telepathy. There was no room for beauty, no room for mistakes. He was saying I’d forgotten who I was. I’d forgotten that he was the person who made me.”
“But he didn’t make you.”
“He did, Neda. He did. He and Vicky. They made me. How do I escape it?”
“You walk away.”
“I feel like I’m trying to swim to shore all the time, but I’m being pulled farther and farther out by the tide. I’m exhausted.”
“I know that.”
He turned to look at her. “You know you’re the first person to ask me about Vicky. No one ever asked me.”
“People don’t know he exists.”
“They do. They’re just afraid of him.”
“And you?”
He smiled awkwardly. “I used to see him a lot when I was a boy. I remember him, before my mother . . . before my mother, now and then . . . He was . . . exciting and he was kind and he was brave. I think . . . And after she . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to say it. “I saw him less. Once a year. Then after I went to boarding school, I didn’t see him at all.”
He drew shapes in the sand. “He became this legend in my mind. A hero . . . So different from my father. When I left school, I knew my father was a big man. We had this gated, white-walled villa in Meerut, security, important people visiting day and night, coming to him. Ram Singh, coming to him. And I had all the toys I wanted. But he wasn’t a hero to me at all. Maybe he knew that. I don’t know. But he sent me out into the fields, out into Eastern UP, where Vicky lived. To learn to be a man.”