The Bollywood Bride (26 page)

“Do you want to sit down? Can I get you some water?”

Ria forced herself to relax, tried to smile. But she had lost her ability to manufacture smiles.

Just as Mina gave up all pretense of being in control of the situation, the doorbell rang. She ran to the door and didn’t even try to hide her relief at seeing DJ. The two of them exchanged a secret glance that wasn’t secret at all. Ria tried to work up some outrage at being treated like she wasn’t right there, but nothing budged inside her. Nothing.

When DJ turned to Ria his face was thunderous. He looked enraged enough for both of them. He helped the trainer pack up her equipment and walked her out of the apartment. He was really great at that, at getting rid of people without letting them know he was doing it. When she left, DJ turned to Ria. “Good thing you’re sitting down,” he said without preamble. No “Hi,” no “Are you okay?”

Relieved, she was so relieved. She sank deeper into the sofa.

He paced around for a few minutes without saying anything, his fingers tightly wrapped around a rolled-up newspaper. Tension rose from the newspaper and traveled up his arm, tying his muscles in knots.

What now?

Ria extended her arm, silently asking him to hand the newspaper over. He hesitated, moving the paper from hand to hand.

“This is bad,” he said. “This is worse than anything you expected.”

Wasn’t everything?

28

R
ia sat slumped on her sofa, her hand extended, while DJ paced the room, and waited for him to hand the newspaper over. For all his quick temper, she had never seen him this upset over anything. Right now, he didn’t seem so much angry as defeated. He looked like a man in a crisis with no means to handle it. And that was someone Ria had never seen Big DJ be before.

He paced restlessly up and down the room one more time and came back to stand in front of her, looking at her with that same pitying look he had taken to throwing at her at regular intervals. She lost her patience and snatched the paper out of his hands.

She didn’t even have to turn to the Celebrity pages—right there on the front page was a picture of her. Not the picture of her surrounded by the hungry mob that had been splattered across papers for the past week. But a picture of her with a crazy gleam in her eye, balanced on the ledge of her balcony with her toes clutching the concrete edge, ready to jump. A picture from another lifetime.

 

MENTALLY UNSTABLE STAR FLIRTS WITH DEATH

 

The headline screamed across the page, and Ria’s sluggish heart kicked itself alive with an excruciating jolt. She sat up. Her eyes flew over the article wrapped around the picture in snaking narrow columns.

In overdramatic, pseudoscientific prose it explained the relationship between suicidal tendencies and fame. Apparently, she was ailing from an exhibitionist syndrome that ailed the pathologically narcissistic. She had shown all the signs over the past decade, but a very forgiving public had ignored it all and bought her Ice Princess cover. The truth was she was sick and the power trip of taking the public for a ride had probably worn off. A public suicide would be the ultimate swan song for someone who fancied themselves the ultimate artist. Or at least an attempted public suicide. Most pathological attention-seekers only went so far, never really intending to kill themselves.

Ria skimmed the bizarre, badly written piece with a mix of irritation and distaste. It was so full of holes it was a wonder the nation’s leading newspaper had printed it, as a front page story, no less. She couldn’t even get herself to read the words. Her eyes swept over them until out of nowhere the words
mental asylum in Bristol
jumped out at her and the room quite literally imploded into a vacuum.

She gasped, struggling for air to force down her constricting windpipe. The paper blurred in front of her. She focused on the page and fought to make sense of the words as they came back into view. This time every tiny etched letter jumped up and grabbed her attention, she absorbed every black newsprint word as it burrowed into her head and twisted inside her brain.

That was it? One question mark and it was done? She wanted to go on reading until it made sense. But there was nothing more.

The numbing fog that had enveloped Ria in Chicago and followed her to Mumbai dissolved and crumbled to the floor around her. Everything inside her came alive in stark, sharp bursts. Dead feelings reared back up, buried memories roared to life. Her convent school with its carved steeples and rafters, Mother Superior’s pitying eyes. All the faces of her past, schoolgirls whispering behind their hands, Ved’s lust fuelled by his ability to hurt her, her father’s hollow eyes, the creature’s tears running down porcelain cheeks. Chitra’s finger wagging in her face.

“Ria?”

She looked up at the sound of DJ’s voice. She had forgotten that he was in the room. Questions shot from his dark eyes like torpedoes.

A storm raged in the deepest part of Ria’s chest and shuddered across her body. She wanted to shake DJ. How had he let the blackmailer pull this off? How? DJ reached out and tried to touch her. She sprang off the couch and ran to the front door. She wanted him out. She held the door open. “Please leave.” It was amazing how quiet her voice sounded.

Inside she was screaming.

Gut-wrenching screams. They filled her ears, her lungs. Even in their silence they tore through her with such violence they gouged out her throat, stretched her vocal cords to breaking point. But she couldn’t stop. They went on and on, and drowned everything else out.

When finally the screaming stopped, Ria found herself sitting on the floor with her back against the front door, her arms wrapped around her knees, her fingers digging into her calves, curled up like a fetus. Only there was no mother to shelter her with her body. Just her and her soul-deep aloneness.

And it made her sick with anger, filled her with so much rage she didn’t know what to do with it. A lifetime of work, gone in an instant. A lifetime of running, and it had taken her nowhere. She was back to being The Girl Who Came From Insanity.
You. Come. From. Insanity.
Even worse, she was the insane girl who came from insanity. What could be funnier?

All the faces in her head burst into laughter. All that pity for the pathetic girl from insanity exploded into a cloud of hysterical laughter.

Her phone rang. It had been ringing for a while, but the screaming and the laughter had drowned out everything. Now the ringing finally cut through it all. Everyone fell silent. All the faces in her head quieted and waited to see what she would do. One of those faces had stolen her secret and sold it. Kicked her because she’d been rolled up in a ball.

She straightened herself out and pulled herself to her full height, unrolling from around a secret that was no longer there to hold, breaking through pain so old, it was like breaking bones and reforming them. But it was time.

The newspaper lay on the floor. She picked it up and carried it to the kitchen. Then she turned on the stove and set it on fire.

29

E
verywhere Ria looked she saw her own face—the TV, newspapers, magazines. So much for a decade of reclusiveness. The police questioned her about the “suicide attempt” and closed the case with nothing more than a knowing chuckle about stars and their publicity stunts. No reporter bothered to report this vital piece of information. No one cared that she had been investigated and that she had come out clean.

All anyone cared about was the insanity—an almost poetic tribute to the rest of her life. No one cared about her father’s murder. All of this digging and no one asked how he had died. Nobody cared that the poor nurse who had taken care of her mother for seventeen years had also died. All these healthy, vital lives lost and all they cared about was the darkness that had destroyed it all.

But the media was indolent as a satiated beast, drunk on the drama. The public had a new cause. Every mental health organization in the country squeezed as much mileage from the story as they could. Every obscure psychiatrist had an opinion.
Why the UK? Are our own mental health facilities not good enough? Isn’t mental health as important as physical health? Shouldn’t the government be doing more to raise awareness? Isn’t it time to erase the stigma? How shameful is shame for a sick relative?
There were bleeding hearts everywhere.

One TV psychiatrist even issued a grandstanding public challenge to Ria over the airwaves, urging her to come to him and accept the help she so badly needed.

“The first step is acceptance,” he goaded from the TV studio dressed in his best three-piece suit with his rimless glasses. “Get past the denial phase. Seeking help is the only path to recovery. You are a role model, take action, show the public how it’s done. I can help you.”

Like hell you can,
Viky would have said.

But the opportunistic bastard was right about one thing. She did need to take action. A horrible weight had sat on her shoulders for ten years and she wanted it off. She had lost control over everything in her life, but there was one thing she did have the ability to do, and now she was finally free to do it.

 

The woman sitting across from Ria in her living room had exceptionally large eyes that made her look perpetually surprised. It was the one thing Ria remembered about the nurse who had cared for her mother. Her daughter had the exact same eyes and an alacrity that spoke of someone entirely at home in her own skin. The last time she had seen the nurse Ria was seven years old. At least that was the last time she’d seen her alive. Dead, there had been nothing left except a charred, swollen mess.

“I’m sorry.” Ria had carried those words for so long, saying them was almost like giving away a piece of herself. But she had been sick with guilt for ten years and saying the words was like taking a step out of thick, heavy sludge.

Tears pooled in the woman’s huge eyes. “Ms. Parkar, please. Please don’t say that. Don’t humiliate me like that. By saying sorry.” She got off the chair she was sitting on and sat down next to Ria on the sofa. “You have nothing to worry about. I will never talk to the media about anything. I swear.”

Shame sliced through Ria. “No. That’s not why I’m saying sorry. Whatever you want to tell the media, it’s your prerogative. If you want people to know what happened to your mother, I completely understand. I . . . I just wanted you to know how sorry I am for what happened.” It had taken her ten years to say it, but she had been sorry every single day.

She stared at her hands clasped together in her lap. Suddenly, reaching out to the woman seemed like a horrible idea. What did her apology even mean? It’s not like she was offering justice. She’d had the chance to tell the police what had happened, and she had lied. Or at least she had supported Baba’s lie and told them the fire had been an accident.

“Ms. Parkar, did you know that my mother was illiterate? She used to clean your parents’ house before your father hired her to care for your mother. I grew up in a slum. My mother’s only dream was that I learn to read and write, that I don’t spend my life washing other people’s toilets. And ten years ago, just before she died, she had to pull me out of school, because she could no longer afford to pay the slumlord to keep a roof over our heads and send me to school instead of have me work.”

She reached out and took Ria’s hands. Her hands were soft, not labor-worn. “Last year I made tenure as Assistant Lecturer in the Chemistry department at Mithibai College.” Her hands shook in Ria’s and without meaning to, Ria squeezed them. “For ten years I have waited to meet you and thank you. For ten years my every prayer has been for your well-being. If you hadn’t paid for my education, for everything, after my mother died, I can’t even imagine where a homeless orphan like me would have ended up.”

Ria pulled her hands away. “I didn’t—”

“Of course I knew it was you. I had seen you at the cremation. When Mr. Veluri came to me, took care of admissions, and sent me checks every month, I knew it wasn’t him. I knew the charity story wasn’t true.” She smiled. “Stupid people don’t become Assistant Lecturer, you know.”

Despite herself, Ria smiled back.

“I recognized you when your first movie poster came out, and I’ve followed your career ever since. You’re only two years older than me, you know. You worked and I went to college.”

Ria’s first paycheck, all the money from selling the land, had been just enough to cover the asylum and the nurse’s daughter’s boarding school fees.

“But you lost your mother.”

“And you lost your father. Life and death aren’t in our hands, are they?”

Ria swallowed. Her throat burned, but she could no longer cry.

“But what you did for me. That was in your hands. You saved my life. All these things people are saying about you. They don’t know anything. They don’t know how much you took on at such a young age. How is putting your mother in the best care facility in the world a bad thing? And the only sick person in all this is the man who took those pictures of you in your home.” She wiped her eyes with her
dupatta
and smiled through her tears, a pure luminous smile so peaceful it didn’t belong to a motherless child yearning for justice.

“My mother never stopped talking about what a kind and generous person your mother was before she got sick. What a wonderful couple your parents were. She talked so much about them, in fact, that I’ve idolized their marriage all my life. I won’t marry until I have a love like that.” She smiled another luminous smile and touched Ria’s hand again. “Someday when I can afford it, I want to go to Bristol and see your mother.”

Ria stood, jerking her hand away, her relief turning suddenly cold in her gut. She backed away, putting as much distance as she could between them. Ria was glad she had met her and had a chance to apologize, but the woman didn’t know what she was talking about, didn’t know what her mother’s murderer was capable of. “I’m sorry, I have another appointment. It was nice meeting you.”

“Of course.” The woman looked a little baffled at the sudden change in Ria, but her only reaction was to reach into her purse and pull out a thick envelope. “I don’t need you to send me money anymore. These are all the checks you sent me after I got a job. I wanted to give them back to you in person.” She put the envelope down on the polished slab of marble that served as a coffee table and joined her palms in a
namaste
. “You are my guardian angel, Ms. Parkar. I fast every Tuesday so Lord Ganesha will fulfill your every desire. And he has never disappointed me.”

With that she was gone, easing guilt off Ria’s shoulders even as she shoved unwanted thoughts into Ria’s mind.
My mother never stopped talking about what a kind and generous person your mother was before she got sick.

Ria slid the French doors open and let herself onto the balcony for the first time since that disastrous night on the ledge. Had it really been just a month? It didn’t even seem like this lifetime. She leaned over the sandstone railing. Press vans and reporters clogged the street outside the building gates. How long were they going to lay siege? What more did they hope to find out? Everything she had ever hidden was out in the open.

Everything except what she had done with Ved. But it was just a matter of time. The pride in Uma’s voice, even now when failure and shame were all Ria had left, felt like just another thing waiting to slip away. Over the past few days Ved had tried several times to call her. She hadn’t spoken to him in years. That first film was all she’d ever done with him and after that he had moved on to newer girls and left her alone. The e-mail he had sent her yesterday still sat unopened in her mailbox. She had almost deleted it a few times. But it was time to stop running. She tapped her phone and his e-mail popped open.

Ria blinked and had the strangest urge to burst out laughing. But if she laughed now, she wouldn’t be able to stop until her laughter turned to tears. Maybe Ved meant it, maybe he would never tell, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Maybe she’d tell Uma herself and then it wouldn’t matter.

She sucked in a long breath. Who could have imagined that Ved would get anything so right? But he had hit at the heart of it all. Her secret was inescapable. She could hide it, but never hide from it.

The secret was out and she no longer had to worry about anyone finding out. But that meant nothing. Hiding her mother had just distracted from what she really wanted to hide from. It was just concealer on her scars. The concealer had been scraped off and the scars were still there. They would always be there. She could hide from the woman in the asylum thousands of miles away, but the woman couldn’t hurt her anymore. What could hurt her, destroy her, what she was really hiding from, was what she carried inside her, where it ripened day after day waiting to emerge full-blown.

The insanity in her genes was her destiny. That was what was inescapable. The only comfort was that the one person whom she needed to protect from it was out of her life.

And that helped her make up her mind.

 

Ria watched the drama of her own life unfold like someone sitting in an audience. She finally told the producers that she couldn’t do the film. She could’ve sworn they were relieved. They issued a statement saying they were dropping her because they were committed to wholesome Indian family values and a star who could so coldly forsake her own mother clearly did not share the vision of the production house.

The publicity was fantastic.
PKGJ
was assured a great opening even before it released. The film she had been dumped from was also assured a great opening even before they had started shooting. All the producers had to do was bring up the story in the media every now and again until release and keep it fresh in the public’s mind. The new girl they signed to replace Ria was DJ’s newest client, so it wasn’t a total loss.

DJ stood by Ria like a rock. He didn’t ask a single question and guarded her privacy like a pit bull. Even after she found her words again, there were no words to fit her gratitude.

When he told her about the new girl, Ria asked him to make sure there were no crazy mothers buried in her closet. DJ assured Ria that she was one of a kind and that scripts like hers weren’t written every day. Ria smiled to herself. He didn’t know the half of it.