“And you call me stubborn.”
Mili gave Ridhi her sweetest smile and held out her hand for the
duppata.
The intercom buzzed again. Ridhi held down the button. “Mummy, I said I’m coming,” she said so loudly Mili wondered why they even needed the intercom.
She shoved a chiffon
duppata
into Mili’s hands. “Go find your Romeo. I’ll bet he’s looking for you.”
“Ridhi, please!” Mili said as Ridhi pushed her out of the room.
Mili tried to wrap the
duppata
around herself but Ridhi, the traitorous sneak, had given her a thin skinny scarf. She tugged and pulled it around herself to no avail. What she should’ve been doing was holding on to the railing instead of struggling with the scarf, because with her first step onto the sweeping stairs two things happened. One, her ankle did a funny twitching thing and turned to rubber. And two, she caught Samir looking up at her and her knees followed suit. Her arms flew out like wings, flailing wildly for support, and her body lurched forward into free-fall.
She landed with a thud against his chest. Her breasts flattened against hard muscle. One powerful arm wrapped around her waist while the other arm grabbed the railing and kept them both from falling. She found her nose squished against the exact center of his chest, which meant her lips were also pressed against his warm cotton-covered skin. Rich magazine-fold perfume filled her head. Her senses pushed past the smell, searching for that other scent she knew she would find. The scent of the desert, of hot sand and warm rain. She breathed it in as her fingers found the bulges on his arms, and held on to them unbidden.
He pulled away and swept her up in his arms as if she were a child. One arm under her shoulders, one in the crook of her knees. No, not quite like a child. Hot need cramped in her belly. A cheer rose from the crowd, followed by claps and wolf whistles. He spun around, refusing to meet her gaze. Color kissed his golden cheeks. With slightly dazed eyes he took in the crowd at the bottom of the stairs.
“Put me down,” she hissed. “What are you doing?”
He glared at her. “What are
you
doing? If you fall with that ankle, you could damage it permanently. Did you lose your mind when you crashed your bike?” He carried her down the stairs. The crowd parted for them. He dumped her on a puffy bench in the hallway.
“Please,” she said into his ear. “Please don’t make a scene. Everyone is watching.”
He took in the expression on her face. She must’ve looked mortified because when he straightened up and faced the crowd, he had plastered a cocky grin across his face. “She’s fine. Everything’s okay. She was just born clumsy. Nothing more to it.”
The crowd laughed and murmured their concern. Hands patted Mili’s head and everyone dispersed into the kitchen and the living room.
“Born clumsy?” Mili glared up at Samir. But color suffused her cheeks and her eyes did that bashful thing they did when she was pretending to be angrier at him than she was. The ache that had set off in his chest when he’d seen her coming down the stairs struggling with her scarf took on an intensified burn.
It had been hard enough when she wore those boxlike T-shirts on her un-boxlike body. The women he went out with routinely wore a fraction of the clothing her friend had obviously forced her into. But the last thing he needed to see, to know, was that she blushed with her entire body, that the glistening luminosity of her skin wasn’t restricted to her face, to her arms.
Shit,
he was thinking about the skin on her arms. And he couldn’t believe how bloody erotic the thought was. He felt like one of those lecherous crotch-scratching
mawalis
who hung around street corners ogling women for sport. How many of those fuckers had he punched in the face?
He sat down next to her and desperately stared at the substantial crowd of unattractive, out-of-shape aunties wrapped in all forms of gaudy silk. But it relaxed him only a little. What he really needed was to get out of here and get laid. Fast. It had been a month, and that was a fucking record. This asceticism thing wasn’t for him.
She twisted around next to him and planted her hand on her waist. The memory of how perfectly that waist fit in his hands burned on his palms, on his fingers. The action made her breasts heave in that stupid top and the oxygen in the room thinned. Her breasts were exactly the way he’d known they’d be, right down to the rosy blush, the lush rise—not looking at those breasts like one of those fucking lechers was going to kill him.
She blinked those how-can-they-be-real lashes, adding innocence to the anger flashing in her eyes, and earned herself a glare of mammoth proportions. “What, now you’re going to yell at me for saving your life?” Great, now he was growling like a Mogul warrior from a period saga.
“Oh, is that what you did?” Her tone was angelic. “Because I thought you were trying to”—here her voice changed to a hiss—“kill me.”
“By leaping up the stairs like some superhero and preventing you from bouncing down the tower of terror on your bum?”
“No, by—by—never mind.” She colored even more and looked at her toes, and he felt like a bastard beyond compare. It was a feeling he had quite enjoyed until recently. Now he never wanted to feel this way again as long as he lived. Not with her.
He softened his tone. “Is your foot okay?”
Her head fell forward until her chin touched her chest and her curls spilled around her mortified face.
“Yes, Mill, is your foot okay?” The horrible nasal twang of Ridhi’s voice destroyed the tenderness bubbling in his chest. Horse-woman threw a suspicious glare at him. “What are you two doing here when everyone else is in the other room?”
Samir gave Mili’s friend his hottest smile. “We were making out. And now you’ve gone and killed the mood.” He got up and stalked away without a backward glance.
15
M
ili found Samir in the most unlikely of places. After he had stormed off in the style of Prince Salim in the Mogul saga
Mugal-e-Azam,
she had expected to find him brooding in some corner. Instead he was standing at the huge kitchen island—the only man in the room—surrounded by women of every age much like Lord Krishna and the worshiping village belles who couldn’t resist him when he played his flute. Ridhi’s two grandmothers flanked him on either side. Ridhi’s niece was sandwiched between him and the kitchen island, watching his hands deftly roll balls of dough into thin, perfectly round rotis with a rolling pin.
When Mili entered the room he did nothing more than throw her the most cursory of glances. “There,” he said, lifting the rolling pin off the roti and letting the little girl peel it off the wooden block. He helped her lay it on a sheet of butter paper next to several identical rotis.
“Fifteen!” one of the grannies announced, staring at his handiwork with an admiration that bordered on reverence. All the women standing around the island clapped.
Three cousins somewhere between the ages of thirteen and twenty furiously stuffed balls of seasoned potatoes into the rotis Samir had rolled out and tried to fold them into conical samosas. And failed miserably.
“You girls should be ashamed. Samir is rolling out the rotis faster than three of you can stuff the samosas. A man can beat you at cooking? What a generation of girls we have raised,
Didi!
” the grandmother making the potato balls said to the grandmother making the dough balls.
“Beating them at sports and academics was easy enough, but cooking too?” Samir
tsked.
The girls huffed and then ruined the effect by giggling.
“Great, he’s sexist too.” Ridhi dragged Mili into the kitchen and inserted herself into the audience around the island.
“Yeah, I’m so sexist I’m rolling out samosas for your wedding while you watch,” he said without stopping what he was doing. The rolling pin moved over the dough in clean strokes, spreading it into a perfect circle.
Ridhi glowered at him. He looked bored.
“Are you a chef,
beta?
Did you go to one of those cooking-type schools?” right-hand-side granny asked.
“
Culinary
school, Naani,” the little girl helping Samir said.
“Ah, finally a competent girl. There’s hope for
womanity
yet.” He patted the little girl on the head. “No, Naaniji, I didn’t go to culinary school, I just listened when my mother taught me things,” he said in an angelic tone that hid all sorts of arrogance.
Mili met his gaze and circled the island to where the girls were failing so miserably at stuffing the samosas. “Oh, there
is
hope yet.” She faced him across the granite. “But only for
womanity.
There is absolutely no hope for you, mister.”
He tried to give her a bored look too but his eyes lit with amusement. Amusement and something far warmer.
The little girl giggled and looked up at Samir. “
Womanity
is not even a real word.”
“Samir doesn’t get reality,
beta.
Let’s give him a lesson in reality
and
humility, shall we?”
His golden eyes met the challenge in hers. “And who’s going to beat me, you?”
“Single-handedly.” She waved the three girls away and they almost sank to the floor in relief. A cheer went up around the island. “Ready?” she asked him.
The smile he was holding back split across his face. Mili removed the scarf from around her shoulders, slung it across herself, and knotted it at her waist. The battle was on.
She picked one rolled roti off the paper, laid it flat on one open palm, and flicked her wrist to give it a spin. More cheering. Samir raised an impressed brow.
Good. Arrogant donkey.
He picked up a dough ball, spun it up in the air, then caught it and slapped it on the rolling board.
Both their hands started to fly.
Mili folded the roti, flipping the edges to make a cone, smacked potatoes in the center, pinched the edges together, and one perfect samosa was ready just as Samir finished rolling out another roti. His roti landed on the paper at the exact same moment as the perfect conical samosa joined the less skillfully put-together ones from before.
Everyone cheered. Samir joined them and clapped. Mili tightened the scarf around her waist and curtsied.
One of the grannies laughed so hard someone had to bring her water.
They went for another round, then another. Each time they finished at exactly the same moment.
One of Ridhi’s aunts put a huge pot of oil on the stove and started to fry the samosas. Soon the entire house was doused with the smell of freshly frying dough. The samosas disappeared faster than they could fry them.
Samir and Mili continued to work together, their hands in perfect synch, their gazes measuring each other’s actions and falling in step, the rest of the world a buzz of activity around them.
“Ravi makes really good
dosas,
” Ridhi pouted, inserting herself between them.
Samir promptly volunteered Ravi to fry the samosas, much to the grandmothers’ chagrin.
“For shame—what kind of household puts the groom to work?”
“I’ve been making dough balls for half an hour, Naani, why can’t he?” Ridhi whined.
“Because you’re a woman. It’s your place,” Samir said, and Ridhi and Mili both picked up handfuls of flour and dumped it on him.
That earned them both a sound scolding from the grannies and exaggerated indignation from Samir. “Girls these days, Naani,” he said, shaking his head dolefully. “No grace. No refinement. Would you ever throw flour on a guest?”
That earned him bigger handfuls of flour, until Ridhi’s mom bellowed across the kitchen for them to stop.
Before long the samosas were all fried and gone. Bhangra music started to pump from the backyard. The DJ had finished setting up. Everyone including the grannies ran out into the yard to check out the dance floor that had been installed across the lawn.
Samir stood by Mili’s side at the kitchen window and together they watched the excitement. Suddenly the entire backyard sparkled to life. Thousands of tiny blue and white lights twinkled across every tree, every bush, every retaining wall. Thumping bhangra beats started up and the crowd threw up its arms in unison and broke into dance.
“And here I thought the way they showed Punjabi weddings in movies was a stereotype. These people are loony.” Samir spun his finger around his temple like a five-year-old and Mili had the strangest urge to ruffle his hair. And pull him close. She reached up and wiped the flour off his nose and cheeks.
“Thanks.” His laughing eyes darkened to smoky amber as he watched her.
“You should clean up,” Mili said, ignoring the look on his face.
“I like it better when you do it for me.” He didn’t touch her, but he looked like he wanted to.
Mili’s hand froze on his cheek. She pulled it away and stepped back, but only a little bit. No point letting him know how much he rattled her. “I think we got some on your shirt too.”
“Even better.”
She whacked his arm and dragged him by the sleeve to the bathroom.
“Are you coming in there with me?” He was all innocence.
“Samir. Shut up.”
“What? You need to clean up too.” He picked some flour off his shirt and flicked it on her.
“Samir, you can’t talk to me like that.”
“Like what?”
He was impossible. But in this moment she couldn’t muster up any real anger. She pushed him inside the bathroom and pulled the door shut.
“Don’t start dancing without me,” he said from behind the door. Then suddenly he opened the door and stuck his head out, his brow furrowed with concern, his eyes so soft—the real Samir, not the rogue he loved to play. “Mili, you’re not going anywhere near that dance floor. You need to rest your foot, okay?”
She pushed him back in and slammed the door in his face. A smile glowed in her heart and spilled to her lips. She headed for the backyard and stopped dead in her tracks when she passed the hallway mirror. Who was that girl staring back at her? She dusted off the stray specks of flour from her nose. But she refused to meet her own eyes or acknowledge what she caught shining in them.
Samir made his way across the suddenly empty house to the backyard and found Mili watching the crowded dance floor. She was perched on a patio wall, her body bobbing up and down to the beat. It wasn’t an obvious movement. In fact it was so subtle you wouldn’t see it if you didn’t know how she usually held herself. There was something lyrical in the angle of her spine, in the tilt of her head. The lines of her body had the grace of a classical dancer and yet she was the clumsiest person he knew. She fell and she fell.
He had no idea how she knew he had stepped outside but she turned around and looked for him. Her eyes searched until they picked him out of the crowd, her smile a torchlight, her eyes flashbulbs shining a light into him. All on their own his legs moved past the tables and candles and chattering people and took him to the patio wall where she sat, her feet dangling a few inches above the grass. She patted the concrete next to her and indicated the dance floor with her chin.
“No kidding. They’re dancing,” he wanted to say. But there was something so comforting about this silent communication between them he couldn’t disturb it.
He dropped next to her on the wall and they sat there together watching the dance floor. One thing he’d say about Punjabis, they could dance. Even the ones who didn’t dance well could dance. They threw themselves into it, completely unselfconscious even when they were miles off the beat. From the two-year-olds to the ninety-year-olds, there was a wild abandon to their moves and right here, right now, he didn’t feel like making fun of it.
“You like to dance,” he said. Somehow he knew she loved it.
She turned to him, her smile so bright it hurt to look at her. “Not this kind of dancing. But when all the women in our village gather for the
Ghoomar
at the Teej festival and for
Garba
at Navratri we dance all night until the sun comes up. I’m always the last to leave. My
naani
has to drag me away and even then I can’t get myself to fall asleep. Sometimes after Naani starts snoring I get out of bed and continue to dance.”
He swallowed. What could he say to that? Except that he knew exactly how she must look with the bangles jingling at her wrists and anklets tinkling at her ankles as she twirled and her
ghagra
skirt spun a perfect circle around her.
A flush spread across her cheeks, as if she couldn’t believe she’d just told him what she had. She stared at her toes, then looked back up at him. “You don’t like to dance.” She tried to make it a statement but the subtlest hint of hope leaked into her voice and hooked a finger around his heart.
“Not always.”
“Ah. So you like to
go
dancing, like they do here in the west.” That wasn’t a question either.
“We do it there in the east too.” He flicked his chin as if “the east” were next door.
“Isn’t it amazing, Samir, how we’re both from India but our Indias are so different?”
An intense need to know what her India was like flooded through Samir. He wanted to know where she lived, where she ate, what her precious
naani
looked like. He wanted to know why a person this sweet, this guileless, would send a wounded man’s family a legal notice to claim his family home. There had to be something that had driven her to it. She wasn’t spiteful and she sure as hell wasn’t greedy. Then what the fuck was it?
“So in
the east,
when you go dancing, how do you dance?”
“It depends. If you go with a bunch of friends it’s pretty much like this.” He waved his hand at the crowd bobbing and shimmying to the beat as one. “If you go as a couple, you generally go to a place with slower music.”
She lowered her lids and her lush lashes splayed against cheeks that couldn’t seem to stop blushing. “And what do you do to the slower music?”
Maybe Mili shouldn’t have asked the question because Samir hopped off the wall and strode to the DJ. By the time he came back, the catchy beat of the bhangra faded into the lilting strains of a much slower song.
“Pehla Nasha”—the slow-burning flush of first love. It was one of her favorite songs.
Samir held out his hand. “May I?” His gaze sent a slow fire burning through her. She let him take her hand and lead her to the dance floor.
“I thought I wasn’t allowed to dance.” She smiled up at him.
“I have a plan,” he said. His eyes glowed with that arrogant mischief she was starting to realize wasn’t arrogance at all but absolute and utter comfort in his own skin. He raised his eyebrows the slightest bit, adding a touch of mystery to his words.
He must be a very good director, she thought out of the blue.
“Kick off your shoes,” he whispered into her ear.
When she didn’t, he stepped out of his own shoes and waited until she did the same.
He placed his huge hands on her waist. “Put your feet on mine.” He lifted her up and off her feet.
Her bare feet landed on his bare feet.
“Oof,” he said and she hopped off.
“I’m sorry. I’m too heavy.”
He laughed. “You’re lighter than my high school backpack.” He lifted her up again and put her back on his feet.
She dug her toes into his feet. “You’re horrid,” she said in the Hindi of her village.
“Ouch. That hurt.” He mirrored her dialect.
“Good.”
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her closer. “It might help if you held on.”
She tried to reach around him, but she couldn’t bring herself to be that bold. Instead she let her hands rest on his arms. He started to move and she had to tighten her hold. Her elbows hooked around his, her hands cupped the beautiful bulges of his arms in a perfect fit.