The silence that gripped them as they walked back to Bindu’s condo was a potent thing. However easy it might have seemed that Rishi was waiting, with all his resources and passion, to open a portal into the past for Bindu, walking through that portal would take courage.
Aly had told Bindu that her anger was standing in her way. But Aly was angry too. She’d been angry with Ashish for having his dream right there waiting for him when he decided to reach for it. But he’d had to break conditioning too. Coming home to her might have seemed convenient, but that too had taken courage. It had taken the love he felt for her.
Aly was angry because her mountain had proved to be the harder one to climb. But it was the mountain of her choosing, and each mountain came with its own incline. She’d chosen a tough one, maybe an impossible one. But it was the one that called to her. She just had to keep climbing and get as far up as she could.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
BINDU
It had been years since my wife had fallen into mutism, since she had talked to or looked at me or our children. She never left the house she’d cloistered herself in. I did all I could to take care of her, to be there for her. But I’d never been lonely until I met Bhanu. After Bhanu, the loneliness was brutal.
From the journal of Oscar Seth
Watching the film was like having her skin ripped off. But it was also like coming home, falling into her body, into feelings that were at once too stark and too distant. Bindu sat there watching as Poornima stripped down to her soul and Oscar resisted and failed to keep it from destroying him. She felt rage the likes of which she’d never known. And grief. For Oscar and herself and all the many things that might have been. But for Poornima most of all, and what she’d borne.
And hatred for a world that had crushed her like the parijat flowers in Oscar’s letter.
Oscar was right. This was the best work of his life.
This time when Bindu opened the envelope, she slid the thick paper out, letting memories slide out with it. They were a flood, a dam burst, a torrential downpour, now that she’d let her eyes soak herself up across a screen, across time. There was no stopping the memories, so she let herself drown.
The shock of Oscar’s handwriting was another length of fabric that slid over and around her and wrapped her in coils. He’d been in the habit of making a million notes on her script in that deliberate penmanship. Her copy with all his annotations was impeccably preserved in the box Rishi had handed her.
You can do it, she told herself. She’d watched the film, and she was still standing. She was more than standing. She was filled with fire.
Letter in hand, she went to her lanai and faced the ocean. The tide was coming in, the waves rolling gleefully as they swelled over the shore, utterly certain that no force on earth could stop them.
She started reading.
Dear Bhanu, or should I say Bindu （that suits you so much better），
I write this letter now when I know definitively that there remains no hope of ever seeing you again. Yes, I’d hoped. For the past forty-five years I’d hoped for a glance. For catching up like old friends. Talking about our children and grandchildren. Sharing all the things that happened after us. I’d imagined listening to you talk, the way only you do, with every part of your body.
I missed it. I missed you.
There, I said it. The confessions of a dying man. You already know by now that I tried to keep my promise. I tried to burn Poornima. But as it took up the flames, I couldn’t let it go. This was the child we made, the love of our lives. I know that it was yours too. The moment in which we were both more alive than most people ever get to be, and I couldn’t let it go. I’m sorry.
Over the years, I’ve had a million conversations with you in my head, and I wish I could put them all down here, but you’d probably grow bored and bounce on your feet. Or maybe I’m afraid you’d read every word and spend too much precious time on things gone by. There is one thing, however, that I must get off my chest. In leaving you the money, I wasn’t claiming you, as I know you think I was.
Before I found out that your baba had a stroke, I had already decided I wouldn’t release the film. I knew it even as we shot that scene, that it would be too much. No audience would ever see past the eroticism to the truth beneath it. No censor board would ever allow it, and I wouldn’t release the film without that scene.
Isn’t it wonderful how far the world has come?
But I digress. I knew all this when Rajendra Desai came to me with his life’s savings to buy your freedom, to erase what he saw as your youthful mistake and my predatory exploitation, because he was so smitten with you. I recognized his feelings only too well. But I wasn’t sure I liked what I thought the man would do with them. Not that I had done any better.
It was always your money. I added your actor’s fee to it and put it away in your name and let it grow. If you needed it during your marriage and if it would have given you freedom, then I’m sorry I didn’t tell you it was there. I didn’t know how to. Not without breaking my promise to you that I’d stay out of your life.
It makes me happy that it’s yours now. I hope you were able to do something wonderful for yourself with it. I suspect you’ve lived a life that was every bit as beautiful and honest as you. I imagine the kind of mother you are, the kind of grandmother, and I ache with envy for those who got to be around you.
But I would not change what happened between us. You are and always were my Poornima. I would not exchange a second of the time I spent with you for all the wealth in the world. I would not part with the fullness of one of those moments when you let me into your limitless heart. I don’t know if what we had was love, but if it wasn’t, then I’ve never felt love in my life.
Thank you for showing me.
Eternally yours,
Ashishchandra
He’d signed it as Ashishchandra, the love of Poornima’s life. The man he’d played when he was hers.
Could your whole body hurt from regret? Could your tears parch you but also wash away a lifetime of grief? She put away the letter and stroked the paper-thin fossils of her past in those parijat petals. Fire blooms. Then she went to the bathroom and splashed her face until the sore throbbing had washed from her swollen eyes.
She’d asked everyone to leave her alone in the condo when she watched the film. She’d promised she would call after. Ashish had gone home with Alisha, Cullie with Rishi. Her family, complete in this moment of happiness. So what if it was fleeting? All we have is now anyway.
Her finger hovered over Lee’s number on her phone. The need to talk to him burned softly in her heart, to tell him, to bounce her feelings off him to give them form and weight, to have him listen and color them in with his insight. He’d told her he loved her a few nights ago. She hadn’t been able to say it back, but she suspected that she did love him.
The three men who had claimed to love her before this, their love had been about them. She’d brought Oscar’s art to fruition. She’d given Rajendra an outlet for his sexual fantasies. She’d given Richard his muse back—for the umpteenth time in his life, if his five ex-wives were to be believed.
It was strange to count Richard with Oscar and Rajendra, but the fool had left her all his money. Even if it was only to use her as a giant raised middle finger for his family. A smile spread across her face. Well, he had come to the right place. She had gotten him retribution, all right.