One chance.
To bear an heir.
To choose a stranger for seven nights. One week to live.
If she chose someone she knew and the king found out, she’d be punished with death.
But she had one week.
One week to reclaim her love. To gather him up for a lifetime.
She’d walked away from him once when they’d given her to her king. Without a whimper.
Because voice was not among the many privileges princesses were awarded.
He’d moved on too. He claimed to love the wife he’d taken so he too could go on living.
But she was his queen, and she got to choose.
And for that one week she would settle for nothing but him. Nothing but all of him. His golden body. The soul that was the other half of her. All his love. Everything he was. He would never again take another without thinking of her.
And if they found out and beheaded her for it, so be it.
Yes, she’d give her people an heir. But she’d take a fully lived life in return.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I grew up watching Bollywood films. Not just the campy eighties and nineties potboilers but the ones in black and white and early Technicolor from when cinema was a new art and the artists gods who often bought into their own myths. In those old films, I remember being struck by one thing in particular: how the heroines and the vamps / bar girls were unmistakably separate—the modestly clad good girls with the innocent eyes and the sexily dressed cabaret girls with the knowing eyes—and never could the twain meet.
It was probably the first time I noticed how society labeled women in shades of purity and mixed it up with goodness. This realization from way back in my childhood was probably the earliest seed for this story. So, thanks, first and foremost, to those pioneering women of Indian cinema and to my mother for dragging me to the theater and then analyzing stories to within an inch of their lives.
Another seed for this story came from the priceless work Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Teesha Cherian, and my sister-in-law Irawati Harshe Mayadev and the Film Heritage Foundation do to restore and conserve Indian cinema.
The journey from those seeds to the story on these pages would never have happened without the help of my deadline sisters: Jamie Beck, Barbara O’Neal, Liz Talley, Priscilla Oliveras, Tracy Brogan, Sally Kilpatrick, Falguni Kothari, and Virginia Kantra. From plotting and pep talks to brainstorming and critical reads, you held my hand every step of the way, and I could never have done it without you. Thanks also to Clara Kensie, Robin Kuss, and Heather Marshall for your spot-on critical reads. And to my bestie, Gaelyn Almeida, for letting me vomit ideas in your direction all hours of the day.
Thanks also to Manoj, Mihir, Annika, Aie, Mamma, and Papa for sitting patiently by when I shushed you for an entire year so I could write. Fine, it’s been many, many years, every moment of which I’ve been grateful that you are mine.
This story would be barely coherent without the thoughtful and brilliant edits from my editor, Alicia Clancy. I am incredibly grateful that we found our way to each other. And to my badass agent, Alexandra Machinist, for making things happen even when they weren’t easy. Thanks also to Carmen Johnson and Danielle Marshall, Jen Bentham, Brittany Russell, Gabe Dumpit, Adrienne Krogh, Kimberly Glyder, Rachael Clark, and the rest of the team at Amazon Publishing for working tirelessly to get my book in front of readers with such love and generosity. And, of course, my most heartfelt gratitude to the brilliant Mindy Kaling for blazing a trail and changing the landscape for South Asian Americans in media and entertainment. Your love for my book is a shot of adrenaline to my fangirl heart.
And last and most important, thanks to you, dear readers, for coming with me on yet another journey. I hope you laughed and cried and felt my deepest gratitude.