A Distant Heart Page 9

  10

  Kimi

  Present day

  Kimi’s ears were still ringing. But she didn’t know if it was from the bomb that could have taken her butt right off her body or from the anger that someone had done that. To her, to Rahul, to that poor man who could have been killed if Rahul didn’t possess that super-cop DNA that had made him sense danger and shout for the man to get away from the car.

  Rahul! Just the thought of him was not doing good things for her anger levels. Rahul, who thought it was okay to lie to her, to turn away from her, to refuse to help her, and now somehow thought it was okay to throw himself in the path of bullets for her! As if that were in any way a thing she could ever live with! Every time she thought she couldn’t be angrier with him, he proved her wrong.

  And now, after acting like her human armor and sweeping her away from a bloody (she couldn’t believe she was even thinking the word) bomb!, he sat there in stony silence taking her to God knows where. Well, he wasn’t the only one who could do silence.

  She wrapped her arms around herself. But she hated having to go inside herself, hated that old feeling of not having any control over anything but her mind.

  “Don’t do that,” he said, deciding to break his silence just when she had decided that she didn’t need him to, and knowing exactly what she was feeling. The man made her so very tired. “I found you. You’re safe now. I won’t let him touch you again.”

  She glared at him. “You’re the one who let him escape.” He was also the one who had taken away her first chance at freedom. “Don’t try and be a hero about this.”

  He was about to respond, but of course his phone buzzed, and he held up a finger and spoke into the Bluetooth device sticking out of his ear. “Nikhil. Where are you and Nikki? Where’s Joy? Sorry about the voice messages.”

  He listened. Apparently, Rahul had left this person messages about Asif Khan’s escape too. She thought about the message he had left her.

  Please call me. It’s important.

  Yeah, this wasn’t quite what she had been expecting that to be about.

  “Okay, stay in a public place. Yes, the food court is good. I’ll send someone to take you home, and I’ll see you there in half an hour.”

  More silence.

  “Yes. She’s with me. I’ll fill you in when I get there.”

  He disconnected the phone, then made a call to send someone over to the mall to take the people he had been speaking with home.

  Then he turned to her. “Do you mind going to Andheri first? I need to take care of this.”

  She shrugged. “Why am I here, Rahul? And don’t say, ‘Because Asif escaped.’ I want the real reason.”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it. “Because he threatened to come after you. And I’m going to kill him before he gets anywhere near you.”

  “Why?”

  He gave her a look from behind those aviators that she was glad she couldn’t see.

  “Don’t flatter yourself, I’m not trying to get you to profess your love for me.” Doing it once was stupid enough. “You’ve made it abundantly clear how you feel. What I meant was: Why is Asif coming after me? I’ve only seen the man once in my life. Why is he so interested in me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t believe you.” Had he always lied to her about everything so easily? Or was it that everyone lied out in the world and it was just another thing she needed to learn to navigate? “Does it have anything to do with Papa?”

  His hands tightened on the steering wheel, making the thick muscles in his forearms jump to life under his folded-up shirtsleeves. “I only just found out about this. But Kirit-sir told me that last year Asif Khan started blackmailing him to get him to drop our organ-black-market investigation.”

  “The one you were involved in with . . . with that doctor?” Kimi tried not to think about that day when she’d seen them together. Possibly the worst day of her life.

  “Jen was a really good friend, Kimi, that’s all,” he said with far too much gentleness, as though she were a jealous puppy who needed a head pat.

  “I thought I was your only friend, Rahul.” Another lie he had told her over and over again. But saying it made her feel like that jealous puppy again, one that was fast developing a pathetic whine. “It doesn’t matter. So, the fact that Khan came after me has to do with your investigation with Jen Joshi?”

  He changed gears and turned toward the overpass. He was avoiding smaller, more crowded streets. “Jen was running the medical clinic in Dharavi and trying to set up an organ donor registry. People on the registry started to disappear. That’s when she came to me. But we couldn’t find bodies, and these were undocumented slum dwellers so we had no case. She couldn’t let it go. She kept digging. Finally we found out that someone was stealing organs from people on the registry and killing them off. And Asif was the man running the operation.”

  “I know. This was all in the newspapers. Asif Khan is a bastard. But why is he coming after me now? When you already have the evidence to put him away and he should be fleeing the country to save himself? What do I have to do with any of this?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. My best guess is that he has some sort of vendetta against Kirit-sir for not stopping the investigation. Irony is, Kirit-sir did try to stop me.”

  “Papa tried to stop you from investigating an organ-theft ring?” That sounded entirely unlike her father.

  “He believed the ring was already dismantled.”

  “Then why didn’t you stop?”

  “Because he was wrong. It wasn’t dismantled. It was worse than ever. Asif apparently had the backing of someone very powerful.”

  “And you don’t know who that is?”

  He shook his head. “Whoever it was is a ruthless bastard. I was just speaking to Nikhil Joshi, that’s Jen’s husband. We’re headed to see Nikhil and his girlfriend, Nikki Sinha. The bastard who was protecting Asif Khan blackmailed Nikki and sent her after Nikhil to steal the evidence Jen had collected and hidden.”

  It sounded like the plot of a crime thriller gone wrong. “So, Nikki’s the woman who was sent to steal the evidence from Nikhil and now she’s his girlfriend?”

  “Yes, they’re together. It’s strange. It’s like they have this connection. They’re such a family, you know.”

  She knew. Inexplicable connection she understood.

  Rahul’s gaze lingered on her for a second too long and she had to look away, because sometimes an inexplicable connection wasn’t enough. “How did you know to find me at the airport?”

  He withdrew behind so many walls so fast he might as well have disappeared from her sight.

  Had he always been this good at shutting her out? Had she really been naïve enough not to notice? “If you’re planning to lie, I’d rather you didn’t answer,” she said, affecting enough aloofness to give him a run for his money.

  They pulled into the parking lot of a cluster of gray low-rise buildings with clothes flapping on clotheslines strung across balconies like cheery flags determined to not notice the dreariness.

  “Give me your phone.” He held out his hand.

  Fat chance. He was delusional if he thought her puppy-dog-ness was this complete.

  He sighed and deigned to offer an explanation. “It can be traced.” He removed his own phone from his pocket, it was in two pieces. “I’ve disconnected mine too. The one I’m using is a ghost phone. Completely untraceable. We can’t let anyone know where we are. Not until Khan is in the morgue.”

  She handed him her phone and watched as he pulled it apart, removing the SIM card and battery, and placed all three pieces in a high-tech metallic plastic bag that he pulled from his pocket, along with the pieces of his own phone. Then he placed it all in the glove box.

  “You were tracking my phone?”

  Without answering, he swept a gaze across the surroundings and pulled out his gun. Sliding the magazine out, he checked it, then clicked it back in place with strong,
sure hands. It was the first time she’d seen him handle his gun. It was the scariest thing she’d ever laid eyes on, but also hot as hell. Those damn aviators still covered his eyes, but she knew the exact moment when he caught her following his movements.

  She would not allow warmth to suffuse her cheeks. She would be cool and sophisticated and focus on the fact that he had tracked her phone!

  “It wasn’t me,” he said before getting out of the car and then jogging around the front to let her out. “I wasn’t the one who was tracking you.”

  11

  Kirit

  Present day

  Somehow Kirit Patil had always known the worth of fate. Fate wasn’t destiny. Destiny was the assorted pieces of ourselves tied up in a cloth pouch that we hung on a stick and slung over our shoulder like a hobo. Fate was what we did with those pieces when we unpacked that pouch and chose which pieces we reached for and which ones we hid away.

  His pouch had come with dead parents, a legacy of land that bore gold, and his million-rupee face. At eighteen he’d learned that his face would be where his fate and destiny met. His uncle’s movie producer friend had seen him at a party and decided he was perfect for the magnum opus he’d been waiting to make for years. One look at Kirit and his search had ended. He’d found his humble prince who would fall in love with the daughter of the man trying to overthrow his father. India’s answer to Romeo and Juliet, complete with costumes and war scenes to rival Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra. Only because it was India, instead of Liz Taylor, the star had to be a man with a god’s face and a saint’s eyes.

  Back then, the body wasn’t treated like the ticket it was now. Not that it would have changed anything. If they’d needed a six-pack, Kirit would have given them the best six-pack a human being could sculpt. But in his day, muscles were the realm of villains. Physical strength was for those not capable of intellect and charm. An ideology Kirit couldn’t help but subscribe to.

  Mehra-sir’s vision had taken five years to make, but by the age of twenty-three Kirit had a new name and the title of superstar that would stick for the next two decades. But he hadn’t let it go to his head. He had watched from afar as his colleagues in the film fraternity fucked everything that moved. They spent all their time high or high-handed. Kirit didn’t do that, because he didn’t come from the gutter. His family had been growing sugarcane and supplying their great country with sugar even before the British turned their sweet bamboo into a printing press for their coffers.

  He had no memory of his parents, and his uncle had only developed an interest in him after he had become a star and the Patil coffers had needed some debt correction. Kirit had corrected the debt, taken over the lands, and made gold there the way he had mined it on the silver screen.

  In other words, when life gave him sand, he ground it down to silt and planted a forest in it. And yes, he was proud of all he’d done. The only sin he’d ever been guilty of was a little bit of hubris. A fact that, ironically enough, he was also proud of.

  “Does your daughter have any idea what a bastard you are?” Asif Khan said over the phone. He had the kind of guttural twang that made Kirit’s skin crawl. It wasn’t snobbery. It was an appreciation of the finer things in life and being deeply disturbed by filth. And Asif Khan was toxic filth.

  “You’re making a huge error bringing my daughter into this. She has nothing to do with this.” Being an actor and a politician meant he could make his voice do just about anything. Now he made it at once blasé and menacing.

  “You’re right. You know how your police force clears out the area when you’re going to carry out one of your ‘encounters’ where you butcher my men under the guise of police duty? You know why they clear out the public, don’t you? It’s because bullets don’t know the difference between enemies and friends. Between guilty and innocent. You’re the one who deserves to die. Your daughter’s the innocent bystander who’s going to get shot.”

  “You won’t touch her.”

  Asif laughed. “Oh, I already did. She’s all soft like a rasgulla. You know how no one can eat just one rasgulla, right? I can’t wait for another taste. I will touch her in so many places, you won’t recognize her body when I’m done.”

  The bastard was pressing his buttons, much like Kirit was pressing his. Kirit’s tone stayed as calm as his heartbeat. “This is the last time I’m offering you this, Asif. I will look the other way if you get on the next plane to Dubai, or Pakistan, or wherever the hell you want to go and hide out. As long as it’s for the rest of your life.”

  Asif grunted in that horribly uncouth way. “You smug bastard. I’m going to enjoy ripping your life into shreds.”

  “You’ll never find her.” Because Rahul would die before he let Kimi come to harm. That much Kirit had made sure of.

  “You hadn’t thought I’d find out about your grand scheme to get the evidence from Jennifer Joshi’s husband either. But I did, didn’t I? Even for you that was fucked-up beyond words.”

  Asif was right about collateral damage. Kirit hadn’t meant to hurt Nikhil Joshi. “I’m not the one who handed the evidence to the cops, Khan. Why don’t you go after the person who did?”

  Asif laughed so hard he went into a coughing fit, the ugly medley of sounds making Kirit sick. “Still trying to save your little princess and throw an innocent woman over the cliff in her place?”

  “She’s hardly innocent.” Nikita Sinha had ruined everything. If she hadn’t become involved with Nikhil Joshi, they would not all be under threat from this bastard again. The human condition was a pain in the arse sometimes.

  “Well, your machinations aren’t going to work. I know that Nikhil Joshi and his shiny new family are leaving the country today. If I hadn’t wanted to let them leave they’d be dead. But they’re not the ones who deserve to die. You’re the one who double-crossed me. And I had promised you that your daughter would pay for it if you did.”

  “I’ve already made you an offer. Take it or leave it. But we will find you, and this time the bullets will do their job.” In the meantime, he had to make sure Kimi didn’t try something stupid.

  Asif’s cool tone matched his own. “You don’t go into my line of business if you’re afraid of death, chutiye. You better say good-bye to your princess. I’m not leaving this earth without her by my side.”

  12

  Rahul

  A long time ago

  It was another two years before Rahul saw the girl with those strangely large eyes that reminded him of the baby doe he had seen on a school visit to the Jijamata Zoo—slightly lost, wildly playful, and unabashedly curious. But over those two years he had thought about her on that gatehouse roof and smiled more times than he could count. Dirty as Rahul had felt when he walked to the Patil mansion that day, he couldn’t seem to forget how he had felt coming home. The day had completely flipped on its axis after she had dragged him to his rock, their bizarre adventure painting over everything else.

  When he thought about that day, what he remembered was the strange sense he had experienced when he had seen her crouched on top of the gatehouse. Like unexpectedly spotting your reflection while passing a window. She had looked as fragile on the outside as he had felt on the inside, standing there talking to the hulking guard. He’d experienced that same feeling again when she had magically shown up on the front porch of The Mansion looking as though her life had taken an entirely unexpected turn.

  Between Kirit Patil giving him the power to know that he had choices and the girl giving him a chance to be fourteen again, he’d found himself on steady ground for the first time since losing Baba. How had he been stupid enough to turn away the opportunities Kirit had offered?

  If he never wanted to be helpless again, he needed power. To have power you needed money and for someone like him, education was the only way to get it. Turning away opportunity wasn’t a mistake he ever planned to repeat. What had happened that day was dead and buried, he would never touch it again. Those other memories of that day that had chang
ed his life were so much safer. And his favorite one was of the girl with the baby-doe eyes on his rock.

  When he was trying to convince Rahul to go to St. Mary’s, Kirit Patil had told him that his own child went there too. For a long time after Rahul started at his new school, he kept an eye out for her during assemblies and when he passed the lower classes. But if he hadn’t seen her in two years it probably meant that she wasn’t at the same school.

  In any case, Rahul had no direct contact with Kirit and he intended to keep it that way. At least until he could pay the man back for all his generosity. Rahul wouldn’t lie. He had grown to love his new school. He hadn’t realized how bored he had been at his old school. Here if he found something easy, they moved him to a class where there was material that challenged him.

  Kirit Patil had kept his word and provided Mona and him with brand-new uniforms and shoes and backpacks and books and no one at school knew that they lived in a chawl on the other side of the tracks. Patil-sir had also tried to arrange for one of the English teachers to make sure that the fact that Rahul’s medium of education had been Marathi until now did not interfere with his education. But Rahul had refused. He could read English well enough, but speaking was different. His mind tended to make sentences in Marathi, but recently his internal translator had become faster and faster, and now sometimes when Aie asked him something he answered in English without even thinking about it.

  It usually made her giggle into her sari, but some days she would tear up and dab at her eyes with it instead.

  The school had a huge cathedral-ceilinged library that they opened up to students every lunch hour. This had solved the only two problems Rahul had with the school—one, he didn’t have to socialize with his classmates, who all spoke English as though they had been born in a whole different country, and two, after reading through almost the entire contents of the library, his English improved enough that he could converse with his classmates with only minimal embarrassment when he mispronounced something.