The only time Oscar had ever meant to touch Bindu was when the camera was rolling. He’d been honest with her from the start. So, she’d known it would be the only opportunity they’d have to unleash their feelings, the fevered arousal, the uncontainable yearning. The hungry lens was meant to be the curtain protecting the relief of their coupling, containing their release.
Oscar being Oscar, he’d done every scene in one take, never making a mistake, never botching his lines just so he could touch her again.
When her disappointment had colored her cheeks and wet her eyes, he’d explained himself: Film is too expensive. It’s someone else’s money.
He’d always explained himself. He’d always treated her like she was worthy of that, worthy of his thoughts. He’d understood the demands she’d felt worthy enough to make.
How could I make mistakes when the scene involved laying myself bare to you? The mistakes I make are when I have to hide how you make me feel. His hands had trembled as he shoved them into his pockets as she threw herself at him.
How can you make me live without you? Why is that your decision? Why? She’d been insensate with the injustice of it. Back when she’d still believed that life might be fair, that desire and love might be enough.
Because I have children not that much younger than you.
Your daughter is six. I’m seventeen. You’re leaping a bit, aren’t you? You’re barely thirty. My baba is older than my aie by thirteen years.
What you want is impossible, Bhanu.
Why?
Because I’m married. Because I’m Oscar Seth, and the world will never let us live this down without scandal and ugliness. But it’s not just them. I’ve lived and breathed my work for a decade. All these years I’ve looked on with disdain as bastards slept with actresses so they could have the roles that would change their lives. Now I see myself in their faces. I see my own face in that ugly currency.
I don’t want a role that will change my life. I only want you. How reckless she’d been. How out of control of her treacherous heart. How fearless in asking, begging, for what she wanted.
That, of all things, had broken his heart. You should want more. Claim this, Bhanu. What you can do in front of a camera, I’ve never seen anything like it.
His love of cinema had felt like competition, stealing the love she wanted for herself.
I don’t care. She’d said it over and over, believing she would always have the camera, hating the impossibility of having him.
You are the only woman with whom I let my foot slip. I’m married to a woman who struggles with depression. I’m a father. I can’t expose them to the kind of public humiliation that will come with this. I just can’t. I can be nothing more than your director, your costar.
Their bodies they’d controlled, kept them from burning away in passion. But their hearts, those were unbiddable. The flames fed what bloomed there. Over that winter, they’d become so much more than a slipped foot. They’d been a tumble down the Sahyadri peak. A landslide. A mountain collapsed into an ocean. She’d known this in the deepest part of her heart.
So she told him it was enough, he being her director, her on-screen hero. And she gave him the only thing he felt he could take from her. Her all in front of the camera. Her heart and her body. She became the story he wanted to tell, the colors on his film, the light and shadow in his lens. She let herself dissolve into his celluloid and disappeared into his voice as he sang the love song that had been raging in his soul his whole life.
It was watching on a screen what he’d done to her, with her, in those Eastmancolor tones that had broken him, brought him to his knees. The rush from the climax scene had been so heady, so intense, it had vibrated through their beings, tied them together in a way no force on earth could untangle.
He’d pushed into her changing room in a trance. She’d fallen into his arms in one of her own. Their joining had been fast and hard, months of foreplay released in one blinding explosion.
Everything after that had been pure pain.
Nothing had hurt more than his apology. All the beauty I’ve ever wanted to create. You gave me that. And I have nothing to offer you in return.
But she’d had him. In those moments, on that hard cotton mattress, on that timeless celluloid, she had him in a way no one else would ever have him. And she had the camera. It had shown her what being alive meant. Two loves too big to fit in her young heart that she lost in one ruthless swoop.
Deep in the throes of his betrayal, she would take years to grasp what he’d sacrificed too. He had offered her everything in return.
He’d shelved the film. Erased his moment of genius. Destroyed the work that he was never again able to create, even though he spent the rest of his life chasing it. This too she knew, because even as he gave her up along with all of that, she followed him. Through the pages of film magazines. Through the movie-theater screen. From the distance of a fan. Her obsession hidden behind the veil of a generalized obsession with cinema. Her one rebellion against Rajendra.
Everything else that the camera had given her she locked away with the pain of losing Oscar: freedom, a voice, heady power over her body. She spent her marriage being what her mother had raised her to be: whatever her husband wanted. Rajendra had wanted the oldest adage in the Book of Marriage. A goddess in the drawing room and a concubine in the bedroom.
It had worked out perfectly. An outlet for her rage and heartbreak after Oscar’s betrayal.
Oscar Seth, Bollywood’s conscience, the embodiment of integrity, might have called her his greatest moment, but he’d also called her a slip of the foot, a mistake as trivial as tripping on wet earth.
Oscar’s abandonment, her parents’ shame, Rajendra’s greedy charity: they had all piled one on top of the other to break her. Pulled the skin off her body with ruthless tug after ruthless tug. Exposed her powerlessness so completely she’d had to grow scabs so she could have armor. She’d rewritten herself. Become someone who would never feel that kind of pain again. Buried every desire, every dream. She’d believed herself saved. Been grateful for it. Made up and made up and made up for her youthful recklessness. Atoned and atoned until she was gone from inside herself.
Then again, maybe she had been saved. The world was different then. She might have ended up on the streets, chewed up and spat out just like her mother had predicted. Bindu had believed Aie, because chewed up and spat out was exactly how she’d felt.
Or maybe she could have changed the world. Walked away from the safety of her family even after Oscar left her to fend for herself. She could have chased the light that blazed inside her when the camera turned on.
If only she’d known then that the cycle of belief, which caused the world to work the way it did, could be broken only by disproving one lie at a time. Women were here today, where they had power, where they had a voice, because molecule by molecule, moment by moment, choice by choice, someone had called out the lies peddled as truth. It had been a boulder the size of the earth, and changing the direction of its spin couldn’t happen at one go.
Not when mothers had been enlisted on both sides of the fight.
To have her own mother’s hands wrapped around her throat, trying to strangle the life out of her, was a memory no one could live with. So Bindu had cut it out like the bitter innards of a kingfish and tossed it back into the ocean.