She’d never expected it to find its way back to her on a returning tide, forty-seven years later.
Aie had meant to kill her. That was the realization that came back first. Or maybe it had never gone away, like bloodstains on cotton bales and burn marks on raw wood. You had to destroy the thing to remove the stain, and if you couldn’t, then the stain became part of its identity. Woven into the fibers, altered beyond repair.
Why didn’t you die instead of shaming us like this? Aie screamed into her face.
There can be no shame in this much beauty, Oscar breathed into her ear.
There is only shame if people know, Rajendra whispered into her skin. Then he’d taught her how to hide and to live around what you wanted. A different you in the bedroom—panting over your pleasure, free. A different you in the living room—covered up and protected by domestic modesty.
Far away from the photographs her cousin had stolen from the set and taken to her mother. Proof that her daughter had lost her way. That simple, accidental discovery of the photographs had turned Oscar’s search for beauty into ugliness. Pictures of Bindu’s shame. Of the nakedness she’d slipped into with such ease, because Poornima’s ruin was in her soul and not in her body.
Get out of my house, Aie sobbed as her hands cut off the oxygen to Bindu’s lungs.
Her father had simply collapsed, palsied shaking jerking his body as his eyes took in his wife trying to kill his daughter for destroying their family’s honor.
Unless Aie’s trying to kill her was what had done it. Aie, who had known so little and had wanted to know even less. Because knowledge was dangerous.
When Baba collapsed, pulling with him the dinner laid out on the white tablecloth clutched in his hands, the crash had swallowed the sound of her name on his lips.
Bindu.
She’d been the one to call the ambulance as her mother stood there useless. In the hospital, Bindu had met Dr. Rajendra Desai.
That same day, Oscar’s wife had emptied half a bottle of sleeping pills down her throat. So much destruction over one choice. One she’d made in the heady haze of power and freedom.
For days, Rajendra cared for Baba while Bindu refused to leave Baba’s side, no matter Aie’s silent disdain.
Then one day Rajendra overheard Aie spilling her venom on Bindu and followed Bindu into the stairwell, where she went to spill her tears of shame.
Why she’d told him about Poornima she’d never know. I did a nude scene in a movie.
It had changed everything.
He’d told her he didn’t care. He wanted to marry her. He’d known it from the moment he laid eyes on her. A line she’d heard too many times in her life. But never after she’d told a man the truth about who she was.
He paid Oscar off. Oscar promised to can the film. To destroy all her scenes. To never contact her again.
No one will ever see the film. No one will ever speak of it.
A handshake between men. Both men kept their promise.
Neither asked Bindu what she wanted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CULLIE
Bhanu had given me a fake name. I never suspected this. But I can imagine her trying on a new name as she might try on a pilfered bikini.
From the journal of Oscar Seth
What kind of idiot regrets never having kissed a man who betrayed her, who tried to destroy her family?
Cullie shoved a few layers of bebinca into her mouth. She refused to be one of those people who lost her appetite over heartbreak.
Heartbreak.
Yuck. What an ugly, pathetic word.
Heartache. Heartsick. Heartless.
What a bad rep the poor unsuspecting organ got. All day it pumped away, contract release contract release contract release. Sped up when the brain and other organs needed more oxygen. Slowed down when the body needed rest. So much work. So much being on top of all the other organs’ needs.
Sucker.
Sucker!
The accusation started repeating in her head in an endless loop.
Her Neuroband worked tirelessly on her wrist. The only way out is through, she repeated to herself every time a spiral started in her head. The feeling that she was going to be swallowed whole loomed close. But she went through it. Feeling and feeling and feeling.
She’d grown roots into Binji’s bed, where she’d been coding nonstop for two days. Stopping her fingers, leaving her computer: it felt inconceivable. It hurt too much to stop. Even making a trip to the restroom meant letting her brain think about something other than the code her fingers were spitting out like rage-y vomits.
How had she not figured this out sooner?
She was coding an app that measured the body’s reaction to heartbreak on the Neuroband and matched it with an activity that would raise adrenaline and dopamine levels. Yes, she was writing an app that would help people become a heroine from a rom-com. But instead of forcing you to take solace in tubs of ice cream, this would customize your healing binge.
The way Shloka matched you with chants, Appiness matched you with an activity. Go for a walk, eat a piece of candy, meditate, watch TV, dance, talk to a friend. Even your most-loved ones didn’t know what you needed when you felt like shit. Maybe your own body did. Just the way your own body was what told you that your mind needed to calm down, which is what Shloka used.
They had been barking up the wrong tree all along. An app telling you how to find someone who made you feel seen and precious and right might be impossible, but it was also less useful than an app that held your hand through the battering this love business put you through.
Thinking the word love made Cullie’s heart do the most ghastly twist, and she wanted to kick herself.
Appiness kept telling her that she needed to keep coding and eat more of Binji’s food. She had worked her way through all the deliciousness Binji had cooked. Every ugly thought stopped when Binji’s familiar flavors hit her tongue.
You don’t get this, loser. And it’s delicious.
One did not hold mental conversations with a man who’d cheated you into thinking you mattered to him.
That was the definition of being pathetic. But Rohan, or Rishi, or whatever the hell his name was, kept making shattered eyes inside her head, and she couldn’t care less about being pathetic. She was dehydrated from weeping, so, well, the pathos train had chugged away from the dignity platform long ago.
Cullie stared at her laptop. Endless thumbnail images of his face tiled the screen. She’d googled him. Without meaning to.
She started clicking through. One after another after another. Long hair, short hair, shaved head. Bearded, stubbled, clean jawed. Lean and young, buff and bulky. Head thrown back in laughter, eyes hollow with grief. It was like his entire life was documented right there, and he’d been forever changing. Unlike her, Cullie, who couldn’t even bring herself to change her haircut or the color of the clothes she wore.
Rishi Seth.
Director. Producer. Actor. Writer.
Feminist. Activist. Film preservationist.
He was wrapped up in more labels than she’d ever known anyone to have.
She clicked and read. Clicked and read.
All of it. Every word. A bigger hunger than she’d ever known gripped her.
Her fingers stopped on a piece about his grandfather’s funeral. Clad in a white mourning kurta, eyes swollen. His Bollywood face broken with Bollywood tears reached into her rib cage and squeezed her heart.
Heir apparent to Seth Films. The only Indian to have studied film preservation under the Swiss grand master Bijou. Responsible for restoring some twenty destroyed films, slices of history that might have been lost to the human race if not for him. Apparently a Herculean accomplishment.