I wanted to scream at him for being such a bully, but I couldn’t because I had promised, and I’d never broken a promise to him in my life. I might lie to him—had lied to him many times about many things. I wouldn’t deny manipulating him, but I’d never broken a promise.
When the parish church loomed up like a stone beacon on the right, I eased my foot off the accelerator and took the exit onto the local roads, driving around the church building. A backlit signpost stood, water smudged, on the front lawn. Every single day, the pastor—an austere-faced though jolly man—would put up a new adage for the world to pontificate on.
Today, it simply read, “Trust in God. He knows what He’s doing.”
My face tightened at the patently false advertisement. Khodai didn’t know what He was doing any more than Nirvaan and I did.
Trust in God? The God who’d inflicted cancer on a fun-loving young man? The God who’d orphaned children and would leave a wife as a widow? The impotent God who’d done nothing while my eighteenth birthday turned into my worst nightmare?
Thank you, but no. I could never trust God as His executive decisions had failed to impress me so far.
And Nirvaan wanted to produce another soul for Him to torture.
The rain began to pelt down in fat musical drops as I zigzagged through the streets, filling the obstinate silence inside the Jeep. I was glad for the sound. It allowed me a reprieve from all words, emblazoned or spoken or thought.
At the tip of a quiet long road with nowhere left to go, I eased the car over a pebbled driveway and parked as close to our slate-blue craftsman-style home as I could. Ahead of us, a strange black truck with monster tires blocked the front of the detached carriage house, the rear covered in blue tarpaulin.
Before I could utter a word, Nirvaan chortled, “He’s back,” in a bizarre falsetto.
“So I gathered. But what’s he brought back?”
Instead of answering the question, Nirvaan unbuckled his seat belt in one fluid motion, grabbed my face between his hands and smooched my lips, as if our recent tense moments had never happened.
It was typical of him. Nirvaan stubbornly refused to let bad moods win. I approved of the quirk with great gulps of gratitude, as one moody bitch per household was quite enough.
“Happy birthday to us, baby.” He grinned from ear to ear as our noses eskimo-kissed.
I squinted at my husband. Our birthdays weren’t for another three weeks. Mine fell on May 31, and Nirvaan’s was on June 1. I wondered what kind of present had gotten him even more excited than the visit to the fertility doctor.
Nirvaan spilled out of the Jeep before leaping up the three steps onto the thick wraparound deck where our longtime friend, the third Musketeer of our pack, Zayaan Mohammed Ali Khan, stood under the aegis of the front porch. He, too, grinned like the Cheshire cat high on cream.
I’d steeled my nerves before looking at him, but even then a gasping ache speared my heart. Zayaan was the living reminder of all that was wrong in my life, all Khodai had taken from me as part of His grand plan to keep me in line.
Astoundingly, Zayaan and Nirvaan shared their birthdays. The fact was the deciding factor in their friendship that had been founded one summer on the streets of Surat, the year they—we—turned fifteen. Same birthday, same street address, same damn-the-world temperaments, where could they—we—go wrong, really?
But we’d gone wrong. Like a roller coaster plunging off its tracks, our world had splintered apart one awful night, and I’d been left bleeding and alone, as always.
Stop wallowing in self-pity. Control yourself, and get out of the car.
Nirvaan gestured at the truck and said something. Zayaan nodded in reply, still grinning. He held a nonalcoholic beer in one hand, a hand towel in the other. His thick mop of poker-straight hair stood up in glossy spikes, like he’d vigorously rubbed it with the towel, while the rest of him was drenched from shoulders to sandaled feet. His cotton shirt was soaked through and plastered against his torso, delineating every muscle beneath it.
My throat went dry. I was a sucker for broad shoulders and washboard abs, and Zayaan’s were quite deliciously on display right now.
Cursing the paradox of emotions he always spawned inside me, I pulled the red hood of my raincoat over my head, as much to serve as blinkers for my wayward vision as to protect my hair from the rain. With a tight grip on my nerves and my purse and the tote bulging with a dozen medical files, I got out of the car and dashed up the wet whitewashed steps.
Nirvaan grabbed the towel from Zayaan to mop the splashes of water from his own face and arms. Not so long ago, those arms had been thicker than Zayaan’s, the shoulders broader, the bulk of Nirvaan’s body heavier and stunningly sculpted. I’d not lied when I compared Nirvaan to Michelangelo’s David during our monthlong honeymoon in Italy.
I dropped my burdens on a rickety porch bench. Then I removed my raincoat and hooked it over a rocking chair to dry. I wished that my anxiety could be stripped off as easily as the raincoat.
“Those had better not be the death traps I expressly forbade you to ride.” I flicked a telling glance at the truck.
Nirvaan might not care if he died today or a year from now, but I bloody well did.
“Damn it, Zai. You don’t have to give in to every harebrained idea he jots down on that stupid Titanic Wish List. He’s not supposed to drive a car even, much less ride a motorbike.” It felt good to blast someone even if he wasn’t the target of my anger or worry.
For a second, it seemed Zayaan would chuck me under the chin, like he used to when I shrieked. My voice had an unfortunate nasal quality to it and a tendency to become shrill when I got excited or upset. But the hand moving toward me changed direction and gripped the banister instead.
Zayaan did not touch me anymore, not if he could help it. Zayaan had stopped touching me the day I asked Nirvaan to marry me.
Shattered Dreams was the title of an oil painting I’d seen in an art gallery in Mumbai once. The artist had rendered a perfectly featured, golden-hued portrait of a person. It was androgynous in composition, as you couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman staring out of the canvas. What had struck me—the observer—the most about the painting was that the artist had worked in a tornado through the beautifully daubed face, as if one had birthed the other.
Zayaan’s face had been a tornado of shattered dreams when Nirvaan and I had told him of our engagement on Skype, more than seven years ago.
It should’ve brought me relief, his aversion to touch me even after all this time. Instead, his solicitude left me empty and cold and slightly afraid.
“They’re not what you think, Simi.” Languid dark eyes snared me in their net, wary but not without humor beneath a fringe of sooty thick lashes.
I wanted to look away, but I didn’t. Take control. “Really? Those aren’t motorbikes?”
For years, I’d zoomed around Surat in a yellow Vespa scooter, and I felt confident that the vague T-bar shape under the tarpaulin was a bike. Two massive bikes, in fact.
“Last week, I physically barred you from walking into a Harley-Davidson showroom, so you enlisted his help?” I groused at Nirvaan.
How things had changed. When had I turned into a party pooper? A dozen years ago, I would’ve hurdled over the guys and staked my claim on the biggest, baddest bike available. Now I couldn’t even address my deepest fears to myself, much less voice them to my husband.
Zayaan’s lips curved upward in a smile that still had the power to devastate me. He looked at Nirvaan, and the smile broadened, turned wicked. My breath soughed out in a huff.
“Not bikes. Jet Skis!” the guys hollered in unison, slapping high fives above my head.
“Fucking