“But why?”
Why did everyone keep asking her that? Why was it so hard to understand?
“Because I don’t even know why he did it!”
Unlike Oscar. She knew exactly why he had.
Whore.
Leave me alone, Aie.
That shame she’d just felt, it had nothing to do with Richard. With Richard she felt nothing but the sadness of an acquaintance. The names his children called her, that was just their greed talking. What did she care?
Ashish squeezed her shoulder. “That’s totally fine, Ma. It’s your call.”
“It is. And I want you to respect that.” If the sharpness in her tone surprised him, he took it well.
“Of course I do. How can I not respect anything about you, Ma?” With that he gave her another hug and left to go about his day.
A half hour after Ashish left, Bindu’s front door buzzed. Lee.
He’d taken to coming over for chai every morning, after confirming that she was alone. Turns out he lived in the building next to hers.
“Morning,” he said in his gravelly voice. He was freshly showered, hair still damp. Even this early in the morning, his golf shirt and shorts were ironed to perfection. And his eyes shone with that something that made him him.
Heart skipping in the most intoxicating manner, Bindu handed him a cup, and they stepped out to the lanai and settled into the rattan couch next to each other. He leaned over and dropped a kiss on her lips. His lips were smooth, moisturized. He cared for himself, his own mechanic. The crisp, clean taste of him was like the first drizzle of the monsoon. Every time.
She smiled against his lips.
The comfort of friendship, with some but not all benefits.
She’d never had this before. No pressure. No need to serve. No desperation to hold on to anything. They’d decided to be friends. Then they’d decided to be the kind of friends who slipped into each other’s condos in the light of day and kissed.
It had never been this way for her.
Being able to talk. Being able to be silent. She wanted nothing from him but how he made her feel.
She told him about her cooking plans, and he leaned over and kissed her again. It had been a while since she’d been so excited about anything.
“He’s coming over tomorrow. Why are we cooking today?”
“Two days of cooking time is the minimum for a respectable meal.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Not counting the two days I’ve been prepping.”
“Will the poor boy be able to walk after how much you’re planning to feed him?”
“He’d better. He’s going to have to prove himself. It’s the way to an Indian grandma’s heart. And the way to Cullie’s heart is through me.”
“If the reverse is also true, I’m in trouble, because I’m still traumatized by the scolding Cullie gave me.”
Bindu wasn’t ready to label their relationship or discuss it with anyone, not yet. “You are Weaselly Leslie after all.” She laughed. He could handle Cullie. She had no doubt.
“I’ve been called worse.”
“As a lawyer?”
“As the secretary of the HOA.”
They laughed together and took their cups into the kitchen.
“You need to sign the papers soon, Bindu,” he said quietly, and she thought about him interrogating clients. Soft, lulling you into trust.
“I don’t understand why it’s a problem that I don’t want Richard’s money,” Bindu said, putting the shredded coconut into the food processor. “Weren’t you the one who accused me of having an ulterior motive in dating him?”
He wrapped his arms around her and laid his chin on her head. “I never said that. I said his children suspect that. I’m only interested in doing what Rich wanted me to do with his money. He trusted me with it for a reason.”
The racket the food processor made as it ground the coconut gave them pause.
“What about what I want? Does that not count for anything?” she asked when silence returned.
“Once you have the money, you can do what you want with it. The money was his to give.”
“But I don’t want to be stuck in a legal battle with someone who has more right to the money than me.”
Taking the spatula from her, he started to spoon the ground coconut into the bowl she handed him. “Do you know how Rich and I became friends?”
She waited for him to tell her, amazed that the conversation—not the first time they’d had it—was so equanimous. She didn’t feel attacked. It didn’t feel like she had to prove anything. He was listening to her, but not as though she made him feel silenced or angry.
They moved around the kitchen, he looking to her for directions and she giving them, even though she’d had to force herself to do it at first.
“I met him when Mary—the receptionist at the HOA office—invited me over for Thanksgiving dinner, because Sally and Jake were traveling that year and I didn’t go to Michigan. Richard spent the last five Thanksgivings with Mary. Do you know when the last time he saw his children was?”
She waited; the bitterness in Richard’s eyes had been so sad. Now she saw clearly that it was loneliness.
“It had been more than twenty years.”
“So you want to use me to get retribution on his behalf?”
He thought about that. Taken aback. He barely saw his daughter and son-in-law twice a year. He seemed okay with it. They talked on the phone every week.
She started grinding the next batch of masalas, and the whirring of the food processor forced them into silence again.
What Bindu had was rare and precious. It was her wealth, what she’d worked her whole life for. To love her family wholeheartedly, that had been her choice. Hers. She’d been lucky to have her love returned. But she had also created that luck with her choices.
Other people’s choices had guided most of her life, but this she had done herself.
Her parents had chosen honor over her.
Oscar had chosen his family. Oscar had chosen his name.
Rajendra had chosen to save her so he could have her. He’d almost bankrupted himself to pay Oscar off. To keep him from releasing Poornima. To hide her obsceneness away from the public eye.
The heat of the lights on her naked body as she threw herself open for the camera burned her skin in another flash of memory.
She had let their choices tear her in half. But her choice to do what she’d done as Poornima had never felt like a choice at all.
All that mattered now was that she was here. In a place neither Rajendra nor Oscar could ever have imagined. In a home that belonged to no one but her, wrapped in ocean and sunshine, in the most free country in the world. With her heels and her dresses. Bindu in all her glory. Not trouble, just because she loved herself.
It had taken her long enough to get here. Where the “society” whose opinion her mother and Rajendra, and even Oscar, had lived for—had forced Bindu to live for—meant nothing. Society’s opinions were not rules or sentencing, because there was no jury but herself. The realization wasn’t a lightning bolt. No, it had been a leak. A slow trickle that had taken years to drain her belief system and reverse it.
Lee was waiting to answer the question she’d asked. Lee, who deliberated everything and took nothing for granted.