The Vibrant Years(86)

CULLIE


Bhanu had given me a fake name. I never suspected this. But I can imagine her trying on a new name as she might try on a pilfered bikini.

From the journal of Oscar Seth

What kind of idiot regrets never having kissed a man who betrayed her, who tried to destroy her family?

Cullie shoved a few layers of bebinca into her mouth. She refused to be one of those people who lost her appetite over heartbreak.

Heartbreak.

Yuck. What an ugly, pathetic word.

Heartache. Heartsick. Heartless.

What a bad rep the poor unsuspecting organ got. All day it pumped away, contract release contract release contract release. Sped up when the brain and other organs needed more oxygen. Slowed down when the body needed rest. So much work. So much being on top of all the other organs’ needs.

Sucker.

Sucker!

The accusation started repeating in her head in an endless loop.

Her Neuroband worked tirelessly on her wrist. The only way out is through, she repeated to herself every time a spiral started in her head. The feeling that she was going to be swallowed whole loomed close. But she went through it. Feeling and feeling and feeling.

She’d grown roots into Binji’s bed, where she’d been coding nonstop for two days. Stopping her fingers, leaving her computer: it felt inconceivable. It hurt too much to stop. Even making a trip to the restroom meant letting her brain think about something other than the code her fingers were spitting out like rage-y vomits.

How had she not figured this out sooner?

She was coding an app that measured the body’s reaction to heartbreak on the Neuroband and matched it with an activity that would raise adrenaline and dopamine levels. Yes, she was writing an app that would help people become a heroine from a rom-com. But instead of forcing you to take solace in tubs of ice cream, this would customize your healing binge.

The way Shloka matched you with chants, Appiness matched you with an activity. Go for a walk, eat a piece of candy, meditate, watch TV, dance, talk to a friend. Even your most-loved ones didn’t know what you needed when you felt like shit. Maybe your own body did. Just the way your own body was what told you that your mind needed to calm down, which is what Shloka used.

They had been barking up the wrong tree all along. An app telling you how to find someone who made you feel seen and precious and right might be impossible, but it was also less useful than an app that held your hand through the battering this love business put you through.

Thinking the word love made Cullie’s heart do the most ghastly twist, and she wanted to kick herself.

Appiness kept telling her that she needed to keep coding and eat more of Binji’s food. She had worked her way through all the deliciousness Binji had cooked. Every ugly thought stopped when Binji’s familiar flavors hit her tongue.

You don’t get this, loser. And it’s delicious.

One did not hold mental conversations with a man who’d cheated you into thinking you mattered to him.

That was the definition of being pathetic. But Rohan, or Rishi, or whatever the hell his name was, kept making shattered eyes inside her head, and she couldn’t care less about being pathetic. She was dehydrated from weeping, so, well, the pathos train had chugged away from the dignity platform long ago.

Cullie stared at her laptop. Endless thumbnail images of his face tiled the screen. She’d googled him. Without meaning to.

She started clicking through. One after another after another. Long hair, short hair, shaved head. Bearded, stubbled, clean jawed. Lean and young, buff and bulky. Head thrown back in laughter, eyes hollow with grief. It was like his entire life was documented right there, and he’d been forever changing. Unlike her, Cullie, who couldn’t even bring herself to change her haircut or the color of the clothes she wore.

Rishi Seth.

Director. Producer. Actor. Writer.

Feminist. Activist. Film preservationist.

He was wrapped up in more labels than she’d ever known anyone to have.

She clicked and read. Clicked and read.

All of it. Every word. A bigger hunger than she’d ever known gripped her.

Her fingers stopped on a piece about his grandfather’s funeral. Clad in a white mourning kurta, eyes swollen. His Bollywood face broken with Bollywood tears reached into her rib cage and squeezed her heart.

Heir apparent to Seth Films. The only Indian to have studied film preservation under the Swiss grand master Bijou. Responsible for restoring some twenty destroyed films, slices of history that might have been lost to the human race if not for him. Apparently a Herculean accomplishment.

He seemed obsessed with it. This obsession with getting back lost things. “He’s an old soul, and I’m a young soul,” his grandfather had said in a clip they’d done together to promote the film preservation institute they’d been working on for ten years. “We’re the perfect partners in crime.”

Binji’s face, her smell, the million memories that went with her. It was woven into the fabric of who Cullie was. The pain of his losing his grandfather slashed through her.

I just want to give her something. Something I’ve worked on for years, something my grandfather died without ever being able to give her. She’ll want this. Trust me.

She’d barely seen Binji for the past two days. Her parents had left her alone. Binji obviously needed space too. Those were some potent bombs Cullie had brought home that day. Then been too selfish to think about.