The Vibrant Years(49)

Radha nodded, accepting that without question. “Drink?” They often made their way to Hobnobs for a drink and some truffle chips after their walks.

“I wish,” Aly said forlornly. “But no time before the date.”

“Well, don’t sound so excited,” Radha deadpanned. “If you’re going to show Ashish up, at least show him up with some enthusiasm.”





CHAPTER SIXTEEN


BINDU


The way she smelled was incomparable. When I told her that, she brought me the parijat flowers she wore in her hair. I wrote that into the script. Just like Bhanu, Poornima would be indistinguishable from the ethereal scent of parijat. And the audience would smell her across the screen.

From the journal of Oscar Seth

It had been years since Bindu had experienced trouble falling asleep. As a young girl, she’d burned with too much wildness—wild yearnings, wild imaginings, wild hope—to sleep. And when she did, her dreams were so vibrant they’d felt like flames consuming her, a fever. Adventure and romance had played on the screens of her closed lids like Technicolor projections.

Then those impostors had been beaten out of her by the battering ram of consequences (as her mother had so neatly summed up her disastrous youth). She’d made a fortuitous escape from having to walk the streets selling her body (as her mother had so ominously predicted) and landed instead in the safety of matrimony (which her mother had so graciously taken credit for).

All through her marriage Bindu had worked hard to force her nights into dreamlessness. The practice had served her well, bringing her peace where restlessness could have corroded her mind. In widowhood it had helped her keep her mind where she was instead of letting it get lost in the past or wander off into the future.

Now her restless dreams were back, with a vengeance over forty years in the making. Ever since she’d heard the ghost of Oscar’s voice on the phone, ever since his grandson’s obvious affection for him had filled her heart with unreasonable warmth, even as the boy threatened to destroy everything she’d built, all of it was back. Subterranean lava that had been nudging for fissures too long.

What she’d felt for Oscar Seth had been volcanic. Untempered, destructive. What she’d felt for herself when the camera turned on had fanned her very being into an inferno. Oscar had used that, then abandoned her. Left her burning in those flames.

Bindu had not pulled herself out and rebuilt herself to let someone shove her into it again.

Nothing would touch the life she’d built. It wasn’t a lie. Her family wasn’t a lie. She watched as her granddaughter pushed a piece of chocolate painted with twenty-four-karat gold into her mouth.

Between Cullie and Bindu, they’d made their way through half the too-large, too-ornate box of assortments. Alisha, on the other hand, had allowed herself only one.

“So, you and I went on dates from hell, and Binji met a man who sent her flowers that look like they were harvested in paradise by celestial beings.” Cullie made a pleasured sound even as she glowered affectionately at Bindu. “And chocolate that was definitely crafted by celestial beings, probably from the organs of magical creatures.”

She was not wrong. Bindu had never tasted anything quite so delicious. Cullie reached across the table to pluck the card from the flowers that took up more than half the dining table. It was even more elaborate than the flower arrangements in the clubhouse run by the coven.

Alisha tried not to smile as Cullie mimed a gag reflex and skimmed the words on the card. Love so strong it was almost painful tightened around Bindu’s heart for these two. The world would never see them like this, entirely comfortable in their skin. This was a world they had created, the three of them, because of who they were. This belonged to her, to this version of Bindu.

Since the Richard tragedy, the tension between Bindu and Alisha had receded to the background. Bindu could only hope that it would disappear entirely from there.

It had been weeks since Jane and Connie had been able to make their weekly wine o’clocks or pickleball. It wasn’t just their fault. Bindu had canceled first, the day after Richard’s death. Truth be told, with Cullie and Ashish here and everything she had going on, she’d been more than a little preoccupied. The fact that neither of her Sunny Widows had reached out much had barely registered.

Now, if only Weaselly Leslie would stop hounding her about Richard’s will, they could just leave the entire incident behind. Bindu had stopped taking his calls or answering his texts after he’d refused to let her sign away the inheritance. At least Rishi Seth had left her alone since the phone call.

Then there was Cullie’s app. It had given the three of them a joint purpose. Alisha had come over after work, and it was just the three of them for the first time since Ashish’s return.

He had left town to meet with some concert organizers in Miami. When Alisha arrived and saw that he wasn’t here, her relief had been loud enough that she might as well have smashed another bottle on the floor.

Cullie was still rolling her eyes at the card. “How I pity these flowers. For I expect them to survive not a day in the shadow of your beauty,” she read out loud.

Alisha laughed.

“Does he work for Hallmark?” Cullie asked.

“If Hallmark existed in the seventeenth century,” Alisha said. “For who starts sentences with prepositions but the most pretentious.”