Free Bollywood and the Beast (Bollywood Confidential) by Suleikha Snyder Page A

steady, constant, impossible to ignore. He’d been the immovable rock in their lives since Bhaiya ’s accident. Those first few years, he’d cleansed Taj’s wounds, bathed him, fed him, dressed him, given him morphine injections when the pain was too great—daily, hourly, it seemed. As Taj grew strong, and so very angry and solitary, Kamal proved just as much nurse to his soul as his body.
    What was he now? Not a servant. Not quite family. A tall, forbidding hulk of a man with a close-shaven beard and mustache and a chest full of secrets. “Why haven’t you left, Kamal? Don’t you have other patients?” Ashu wondered aloud.
    As was his habit, Kamal replied mostly in that ridiculously formal Urdu. “I have all that I need here. Why, and where, should I go?”
    Ashu was almost jealous of Kamal’s cloak of mystery, his fine kurta of spider webs. The man could haunt this haveli like a noble ghost, never having to set foot outside, to expose his innards on celluloid. Now there was a thought… “Are you dead, Kamal? A spirit tied to this wreck of a house?”
    It was an impertinent enough question to actually penetrate the man’s implacable cool. His eyes widened, and his lips quivered with mirth under the neat bow of his mustache. “ Nahin, Chote Saab . I am no ghost,” he assured him. “I am only a man.”
    Only a man…and yet he seemed like so much more. Ashraf shut off his mobile phone, setting it down on the tabletop. “That day you said to me that I would come to you for healing. What did you mean?”
    But it was too late: Kamal’s mask was back in place. No nonsense. Untouchable. “It is for you to understand, Chote . Not for me to explain.”
    He vanished into the hall with almost soundless steps. But they echoed. To Ashu, they most certainly echoed.
    As did the harsh, blaring ring of the house phone. It roused him from his stupor of confusion, and he reached for the old-fashioned white receiver of the princess phone his mother had bought a lifetime ago. A decision he instantly regretted.
    If Kamal’s voice was music, Nina’s was the worst sort of noise pollution. “Ashraf, darling, you miss me, don’t you?”
    Poison stirred in his belly. “No.” He’d known the hang-up calls were from her, of course. With everyone else in the industry aligned against her like a silver curtain, she thought he was her last connection. Her gap in the cloth. The boy she’d cultivated. Molded. Warped. “Go to hell, Nina.”
    “And why should I go alone? You’re no different from me, Ashraf. But you’re a man. More easily forgiven for selling your soul. So you can profit from your Be-Izzati while I starve because of mine.”
    She wasn’t starving. Her divorce settlement from Rahul Anand’s father was massive. But Ashraf flinched anyway. “We’re nothing alike. Everything I have done, I have done for Taj. For my brother and what he lost.”
    “ Everything ?” Her voice dropped low, reminding him of the slide of her viper’s tongue round his cock. “ Vah ! Shabbash ! What a generous brother you are.”
    Ashraf was dizzy. Weightless. He struggled to stay upright as he wrapped both hands round the receiver like it was her throat. “What do you want?”
    “What I always have, sweetie: to be on top.”
    He didn’t even wait for the buzzing of the dial tone before he tossed the phone aside and bolted for the washroom. There was nothing to cough up, but still he retched and retched. As if he could expel the memory of her from his body. Grow up, Ashu , whispered Bhaiya in his head . Handle this like a whole man, not a half man, like me.
    How could he handle Nina when he could not even handle himself? When he did not even know himself?
    “It is for you to understand, Chote . Not for me to explain.”
     
     
    Learn-at-home Hindi CDs weren’t exactly as easy as the infomercials claimed. Rocky slumped against the sofa cushions, nearly ready to throw her ancient CD player across the room. Why, oh why, did verbs