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

have gender? How were you supposed to know if a train was feminine and a car was masculine? Why wouldn’t they arrive with the same conjugation? “Ugh!” Pronunciation, she’d learned early on, was easy. She was a decent mimic, with a good ear for accents, so pretending she spoke Hindi onscreen wasn’t hard. It was being tested by the public at large that was her problem. The public, the private…
    Taj had warmed to her— more than warmed to her—but she still saw the questions on his face, the reservations. Nani deserved more than her halting, pathetic attempts to make conversation. And was it fair to keep playing charades with Usha just to figure out where she kept the sugar and how to tell the dhobi to put less starch in her clothes? So she had to step up her learning, prove she was serious about improving her craft and about respecting India as her new home.
    Rocky wasn’t a spoiled Amrikan princess, here to steal roles from hardworking Indian actresses. And even if the assumption was what had landed her here, she wasn’t a silly city girl just slumming it in an industry veteran’s spooky haveli to keep from causing more trouble.
    Besides, she’d found trouble anyway.
    Six feet of it, dark and so dangerous.
    You wouldn’t bloom with me, Rakhee. You would die on the vine.
    She had to prove him wrong. She had to show him she could flourish, no matter what he threw at her. She had to be strong for him . The realization had stunned her in the garden, after he’d wheeled away, and it was no less awful and painful now. It hurt to take a breath when she thought of his face, his voice…when she relived that soft dusting of his mouth that barely registered as a kiss yet seemed to cost them everything. And she ached for what they’d left unfinished.
    “Rakhee? Bacche ?” The tap-tap of Nani ’s cane followed the plaintive call.
    “I’m here,” she replied, though it was re-stating the obvious as Nani gingerly tottered into the parlor and greeted her with a delighted smile.
    Far more comfortable on her feet than Taj, she insisted on taking the stairs by herself, even if the trek from her rooms took a half hour. “I came to this house on my own power, and I will leave it only when every drop of that power has left my body,” she’d said to Rocky the first time the question cropped up…and it had taken the better parts of her power to parse the philosophical words.
    She slipped off her earbuds, folding the wires up and patting a space on the sofa beside her. “ Kaise ho , Nani ?”Her “How are you?” was probably informal instead of formal and conjugated totally wrong, but it was the effort that counted, right?
    “As fine as these old bones are ever going to be.” Nani spoke emphatically and punctuated with a chuckle, the twinkle in her eyes almost a match for Ashraf’s. “How are you, child?”
    “I’m so tired.” It was an easy Hindi phrase, and Rocky held up the case for the language CD for emphasis, hoping that spoke volumes.
    Nani ’s snow-white eyebrows rose in response, and she shook her head. “What is the need for this nonsense? The heart knows the heart’s words. It needs no translation.” She touched her chest to reinforce the message, just in case Rocky didn’t get the gist.
    She did. Oh, man, did she get the gist. She squeezed Nani ’s hand, not trusting herself to speak…likely not needing to, since her heart was apparently expositing all over the place.
    Taj didn’t need her to be proficient in Hindi. He needed hope.

Chapter Fifteen
    The open living room often felt cramped by the sheer size of Bhaiya ’s presence. As if he were still projecting every emotion for the cameras, squeezing blood from a stone for the career that had already ravaged his body. Tonight, like so many recent nights, he only had an audience of two. But, still, Taj seemed tall enough to fill a movie screen, even slouched as he was in his chair.
    Ashraf was surrounded by men with an overabundance of