The Vibrant Years(91)

“You know what I hate most? What I cannot stop kicking myself for?”

“Tell me.” All his attention was on her. Not bored, distracted Ashish. New Ashish. Who made rotis, picked up after himself, and spent hours lost in the music he was mixing.

Is there no place in all of this for forgiveness? he’d asked her. It had made her furious.

Then she’d watched in awe as he let the fact that Bindu had lied to him go. It wasn’t a small lie, but he’d understood why she’d told it.

Suddenly forgiveness felt less impossible. But first Aly had to say the things that hurt the most to say.

“You didn’t support me when I dared to dream, when I worked my butt off for it. Supporting each other is the heart of a marriage. You kept that just out of my reach, and you did it with brutal precision. I would have told a friend to leave a man for treating her that way. But I didn’t. I told myself that one worked on a marriage.”

She had to stop and breathe. “And then you were the one who left me. That, that’s the part I regret most. I let you humiliate me for years, and you got to take that final step. You. When I was the one who should have.” There, she’d said it. The heart of it.

“I know. Every word of that is true. I shouldn’t have left. I should have figured out what I was really angry about without leaving. I will apologize as often as you need me to. I will change whatever hurts you. I’m here now. But if everything I say gives you déjà vu to when I was a dick, we don’t have a future.”

She got out of bed. She’d pulled on a tank top over her bare body, and it was armor she needed. “I never said we had a future. I don’t want to be a wife.” Even before Cullie’s dates, she’d known it. She was done with marriage. “I don’t want to be the kind of wife I was conditioned to be. Nor the kind of wife you were conditioned to want.”

He got out of bed and came to her. “Then don’t. Be the woman you want to be. I’m not that man anymore.”

“I’m not sure I can put away our history.”

“Fine. But can you . . . can we put our happiness before our history?”

She’d have to think about it. So she told him that. Instead of a hard sell, she got relief from him. He was happy with what they had right now. She was too. And that was all that meant anything.





CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT


BINDU


“I’d rather have a large life than a long one.” It was a line from a film Bhanu loved. No life could be large in its entirety. Even a life that looked large from the outside was mostly mundane, filled with day-to-day struggles. But if you were lucky, you got to have moments—experiences and relationships—that were so big they made the rest of your life feel large. What I had with Bhanu altered the dimension of my lifetime.

From the journal of Oscar Seth

Bindu had tucked the red box Cullie’s young man had given her all the way to the back of her walk-in closet. Out of sight, where she wouldn’t have to think about it. Oscar’s journal. A copy of Poornima. And his letter.

So, being inside the closet, stroking the red silk box: admittedly, that was a little counterproductive. Opening the box and taking out the letter with her name on it—well, Bhanu’s name on it—was a lot counterproductive.

The paper was thick, strong, like old-world things. Meant to last instead of being consumed and discarded and replaced. Maybe there was nothing wrong with this new way. Wasn’t creation and destruction the inevitability of life? Renewal.

Sliding a finger under the edge where the glue had loosened, she opened it.

And dropped it. Because the last thing that she’d expected to find peeked out from between the thick sheets.

Parijat.

The parijat flowers she’d strung into a garland for him.

She sank to the floor. The flattened and dried-to-membranes blooms had slipped out of the envelope and lay on the floor, faded brown against the white carpet. She’d threaded them together with the needle and twine her aie left in her flower basket next to her prayer altar. Aie, who had always worn flowers in her jet-black hair, day or night.

Such a beautiful thing. Every morning Aie had sat on the front veranda of their red stone house and pierced her needle into the delicate orange stems with exquisite care. If only Bindu had been the recipient of half that care.

Aie had loved parijat. Cursed in mythology to only bloom in darkness. Lord Krishna had brought the plant from the heavens to earth for his wife Rukmini, but his other wife, Satyabhama, had become jealous. So he’d planted the tree in Satyabhama’s courtyard. It had grown at a slant and dropped flowers into Rukmini’s adjoining courtyard, sending Satyabhama into a rage. She had cursed the flowers to bloom only at night and to fall off the tree as soon as they bloomed.

Every morning, Bindu woke up to a carpet of flowers around the parijat tree, the orange stems sticking up from the white petals like flames. Fire blooms, Oscar had called them. Like you, Bhanu.

She let one finger touch the papery petals.

Life returned to them in her memory, the white and orange flesh turning plump again. They sat in the palm of her hand as she held them out to Oscar, and his sensitive eyes glazed with tears.

Why? Why did the only man in the world she would ever want have to be someone she could never have? She’d screamed it to the heavens. To all the gods in the universe. Not one of them had an answer. The pain of their silence had been unbearable.