The Vibrant Years(85)

Everything else that the camera had given her she locked away with the pain of losing Oscar: freedom, a voice, heady power over her body. She spent her marriage being what her mother had raised her to be: whatever her husband wanted. Rajendra had wanted the oldest adage in the Book of Marriage. A goddess in the drawing room and a concubine in the bedroom.

It had worked out perfectly. An outlet for her rage and heartbreak after Oscar’s betrayal.

Oscar Seth, Bollywood’s conscience, the embodiment of integrity, might have called her his greatest moment, but he’d also called her a slip of the foot, a mistake as trivial as tripping on wet earth.

Oscar’s abandonment, her parents’ shame, Rajendra’s greedy charity: they had all piled one on top of the other to break her. Pulled the skin off her body with ruthless tug after ruthless tug. Exposed her powerlessness so completely she’d had to grow scabs so she could have armor. She’d rewritten herself. Become someone who would never feel that kind of pain again. Buried every desire, every dream. She’d believed herself saved. Been grateful for it. Made up and made up and made up for her youthful recklessness. Atoned and atoned until she was gone from inside herself.

Then again, maybe she had been saved. The world was different then. She might have ended up on the streets, chewed up and spat out just like her mother had predicted. Bindu had believed Aie, because chewed up and spat out was exactly how she’d felt.

Or maybe she could have changed the world. Walked away from the safety of her family even after Oscar left her to fend for herself. She could have chased the light that blazed inside her when the camera turned on.

If only she’d known then that the cycle of belief, which caused the world to work the way it did, could be broken only by disproving one lie at a time. Women were here today, where they had power, where they had a voice, because molecule by molecule, moment by moment, choice by choice, someone had called out the lies peddled as truth. It had been a boulder the size of the earth, and changing the direction of its spin couldn’t happen at one go.

Not when mothers had been enlisted on both sides of the fight.

To have her own mother’s hands wrapped around her throat, trying to strangle the life out of her, was a memory no one could live with. So Bindu had cut it out like the bitter innards of a kingfish and tossed it back into the ocean.

She’d never expected it to find its way back to her on a returning tide, forty-seven years later.

Aie had meant to kill her. That was the realization that came back first. Or maybe it had never gone away, like bloodstains on cotton bales and burn marks on raw wood. You had to destroy the thing to remove the stain, and if you couldn’t, then the stain became part of its identity. Woven into the fibers, altered beyond repair.

Why didn’t you die instead of shaming us like this? Aie screamed into her face.

There can be no shame in this much beauty, Oscar breathed into her ear.

There is only shame if people know, Rajendra whispered into her skin. Then he’d taught her how to hide and to live around what you wanted. A different you in the bedroom—panting over your pleasure, free. A different you in the living room—covered up and protected by domestic modesty.

Far away from the photographs her cousin had stolen from the set and taken to her mother. Proof that her daughter had lost her way. That simple, accidental discovery of the photographs had turned Oscar’s search for beauty into ugliness. Pictures of Bindu’s shame. Of the nakedness she’d slipped into with such ease, because Poornima’s ruin was in her soul and not in her body.

Get out of my house, Aie sobbed as her hands cut off the oxygen to Bindu’s lungs.

Her father had simply collapsed, palsied shaking jerking his body as his eyes took in his wife trying to kill his daughter for destroying their family’s honor.

Unless Aie’s trying to kill her was what had done it. Aie, who had known so little and had wanted to know even less. Because knowledge was dangerous.

When Baba collapsed, pulling with him the dinner laid out on the white tablecloth clutched in his hands, the crash had swallowed the sound of her name on his lips.

Bindu.

She’d been the one to call the ambulance as her mother stood there useless. In the hospital, Bindu had met Dr. Rajendra Desai.

That same day, Oscar’s wife had emptied half a bottle of sleeping pills down her throat. So much destruction over one choice. One she’d made in the heady haze of power and freedom.

For days, Rajendra cared for Baba while Bindu refused to leave Baba’s side, no matter Aie’s silent disdain.

Then one day Rajendra overheard Aie spilling her venom on Bindu and followed Bindu into the stairwell, where she went to spill her tears of shame.

Why she’d told him about Poornima she’d never know. I did a nude scene in a movie.

It had changed everything.

He’d told her he didn’t care. He wanted to marry her. He’d known it from the moment he laid eyes on her. A line she’d heard too many times in her life. But never after she’d told a man the truth about who she was.

He paid Oscar off. Oscar promised to can the film. To destroy all her scenes. To never contact her again.

No one will ever see the film. No one will ever speak of it.

A handshake between men. Both men kept their promise.

Neither asked Bindu what she wanted.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX