Yash was watching her. The awareness of it fell like sparks on her skin. She was glad for the tie-dye yoga jacket she’d thrown on over her usual yoga wear to go to the doctor’s office. No one needed to see the goosebumps that danced down her arms. He hadn’t said a word, but his presence was a hum in the air. Exactly like the breathing of a sleeping dragon in a fairy tale.
“Are there any other entrances to the place?” Brandy asked.
“There’s an entrance in the back that leads up to our home on the upper floors.”
Yash looked up at the facade of the studio and the late afternoon sun caught his eyes. A crystalline gunmetal-gray she’d never seen anywhere else.
She had been to the house he’d grown up in. Just the pool house on the Raje estate was larger than the Dashwood studio and apartments put together. But it was hers and she loved it. Childish as it was, she stuck out her chin as he looked at her, but he gave away nothing.
“Is that entrance secured?” Brandy said, studying the building as though it might blow up if touched.
“It’s locked and has a touchpad that unlocks it. This is the only public entrance.”
“I’m going to go around the back and check it out. Please keep this door locked.”
It’s a pretty safe neighborhood, India wanted to say, but Yash had just been shot, so India was happy for Captain Marvel here and her paranoia.
“I will. Come on in. Please.” She pushed the door open and Ashna walked in. Yash pressed his hand against the door and held it, waiting for India to go in before following her. He still hadn’t said a word.
She led them through the waiting area past the registration desk and the benches with cubbies for shoes and hooks for bags and jackets.
Yash took in the place with that utterly flat expression he’d been wearing this entire time. The kind of expression a guilty person might paste across their face when invited to testify in front of a grand jury. Trying to get people to plumb the depths of their emotions was what India did for a living. Resistance was her daily companion. He was not here of his own free will. This was not in the least bit surprising.
“Let’s go to my office.” Her office was her sanctuary. She loved what she’d done with it during the renovation. Self-consciousness kicked in her gut when she thought about the dramatic beauty of his parents’ estate. She kicked it right back and led them past the yoga rooms and showers and threw her office door open.
Fading sunlight streamed in through the wall of windows lined with shelves that held her grandmother’s bonsais. They were now her bonsais. They had been since Grandmona died almost ten years ago. White walls and white furniture were offset by an orange couch and carpet. The perfectly balanced beauty of it made her feel just a little bit less off-kilter.
Ashna sat down on the couch, but Yash walked straight to her bonsais, mouth slightly agape. A universal reaction to the miniaturized trees her grandmother had tended for fifty years and India would cherish for as long as she lived. She would not let the fact that he looked awestruck by her cherished trees affect her. It was perfectly normal to be fascinated by an art that harnessed the splendor of a giant life-form.
“Is this a banyan tree?” Those were the first words he uttered. The first words he’d addressed to her in ten years. Not that it was anticlimactic or anything.
The way he talked had changed. There was a deliberately understated quality to his diction now. The boundless enthusiasm that had struck her as so endearing was completely leashed. This new voice was the one she’d heard on TV. His jaw barely moved and each word came out laced with careful sincerity.
“It’s the bodhi satva tree,” she said, her voice even more deadpan than his.
“The one Gautama Buddha meditated under when he achieved nirvana.”
She met his flat look with one of her own. “One doesn’t achieve nirvana, they attain it.”
He stiffened so slightly she only noticed because she was trained to notice. It was a professional hazard.
“Didn’t you break your arm while swinging from the roots of a banyan tree in Sripore once?” Ashna said, a smile in her voice from the memory.
India wanted to give her a hug. How terrifying the shooting must have been for the Rajes. Especially since they’d been through something like this with Yash when he’d had that accident in high school. Did the man have to be ambitious about being accident prone too?
“There’s this three-hundred-year-old banyan tree on the grounds of our ancestral home in Sripore,” Ashna added, with all the fondness of a doting sister. “As kids we loved to swing by the hanging roots. Yash liked to pretend he was Tarzan.”
Color crept up Yash’s neck, past his tightly buttoned collar. He cleared his throat and turned back to the bonsai. So he’d started to take himself quite seriously, then. What she’d found most appealing about him was how self-deprecating he’d been, how filled with humor.
Enough. Time to stop with the Spurned Lover’s Tragic Musings. It had been one day. Fine, one day and one night. One magical night. But that didn’t make them lovers, not even close. He’d ghosted her, long before the word ghosted was minted. No one said he wasn’t a trailblazer.
“Tarzan grew up to wear a suit,” India said, and Yash stiffened again.
He wasn’t wearing a suit right now, just a crisp blindingly white shirt, and a long gray coat that looked like it cost as much as the studio’s monthly earnings.
“There are hooks behind the door, if you’d like to take off your jackets.”
Ashna took off her red leather jacket and hung it up. Yash pulled the lapels of his coat tighter around himself. A faint memory of something pricked at India’s mind, but didn’t fully form.
“Do you want to sit down?” she asked, because suddenly exhaustion seemed to drag at the body he was holding so tall and proud.
He turned away from her bonsai and looked at her funny. Admittedly, her voice had sounded a little too concerned. She barely knew the man. I care about everyone. You’re not special, she wanted to tell him. It was time to rein in her Mother Earth instinct. He didn’t need it. Even though he looked like he needed something.
“I’m fine, thank you,” he said in his new voice.
“As you know, Yash was shot,” Ashna said, every bit of her horror at the memory clear in her voice.
India had already established how much that fact had bothered her when she’d first opened the door and vomited her concern to Ashna, so she nodded.
“We need your help.”
We?
Yash cleared his throat. “I. I need your help.” For the first time today his voice sounded real, tinged with the vulnerability she sometimes still heard in her dreams. He turned to Ashna. “Can I talk to India alone?”
Ashna blinked as though he’d asked if he could take off his clothes and take a nap on India’s couch. The cousins exchanged a look. During the exchange, Ashna obviously didn’t find the answers she was searching for. His face was so stubbornly set, India would have been surprised if Ashna had argued with him.
She turned to India. “Is it okay if I go visit Chutney and Tara? I’m guessing China’s not home.” China and Ashna were best friends, so naturally Ashna knew that China had barely left Song’s side in a month.