He looked unhurt. The only sign that this wasn’t just another day at just another rally was that the giant YASH RAJE FOR GOVERNOR button on Rico’s jacket had come askew and was hanging lopsided.
“You need to let Abdul go,” Rico said, face tight with so many emotions that the emptiness inside Yash doubled down. “The ambulance is here. They need to look at you.” Rico looked over his shoulder as paramedics rushed at them with gurneys.
“This way,” Yash shouted, but they were already tugging his hands off Abdul and lifting him off Yash to a stretcher.
A paramedic helped Yash up and onto a gurney. “You need to let us look at you.” He tried to get Yash to lay down but Yash wouldn’t let him.
“I’m fine. He was hit.” Yash didn’t recognize his own voice, but something about his tone was familiar. “Why did it take you so long to get here?” Just like that Yash knew why it sounded familiar. He sounded exactly like his father. Yash had spent his life trying not to sound like his father.
He tried to soften it, tried to sound more like himself. “He’s within the golden hour. That means he’s going to be okay, right?”
The paramedic gave Rico a look and Rico pushed Yash back with a “Please, Yash.”
Yash resisted but suddenly pain shot through his arm making him lightheaded and he lay back.
He didn’t want to be on a gurney. The last time he’d been on one he’d ended up in a wheelchair for a year. His blood-soaked clothes, the pain throbbing in his body, all these paramedics. The numbness in his legs. He wasn’t fifteen, this wasn’t that day. He didn’t even have real memories from that day. Just these splashes of sensation.
It took some effort to stop himself from searching his surroundings for his bike. The one that had become as twisted and mangled as his broken spine.
“They’re taking care of him.” Rico pressed a hand into Yash’s chest to keep him on the gurney.
Before Yash could respond a woman screamed his name and ran at him.
Yash knew the woman.
He couldn’t for the life of him remember her name.
“Yash, honey. Oh no.” She was sobbing. Mascara ran down her face. She looked like she’d lost someone she loved.
That’s how I should look. That’s how I should be feeling. But nothing. He felt nothing.
“Naina, he’s going to be okay,” Rico said.
Naina. Of course.
Naina and Yash. Spoken for. The words made him laugh. They made him think of his parents. How would Ma survive it if he died?
Spoken for. Ma had come up with that label when Yash and Naina had said they wouldn’t get engaged. Ma, who always found a way to make things okay.
Spoken for. And he’d forgotten her name.
Naina kept stroking his arm. Then she leaned over and kissed his forehead. Mascara-tinted teardrops splashed onto Yash’s face. A light flashed with a sound Yash knew so well it could wake him from the dead. A camera.
“Honey, please let them do their job.” Spoken-for Naina sobbed as more cameras clicked.
“Their job is to make sure Abdul doesn’t die.” He tried to catch Rico’s eye, but Naina had wrapped herself around Yash and he couldn’t see. The smell of her perfume was so strong he couldn’t breathe.
Twisting in her embrace, he spoke to the paramedic who was clamping a monitor to his finger. “What’s taking so long? That man needs to be in a hospital. Don’t you understand? He has a bullet inside him.” His father was back in his voice.
“Actually, sir, he doesn’t,” the paramedic said, pressing something into Yash’s shoulder, making it feel like he’d taken an ax to it. “The bullet went through him. You’re the one with the bullet inside you.”
Chapter Two
India Dashwood loved her life. She lived for the joy she experienced every time she led a yoga practice and watched her students connect with parts of themselves they had never accessed before.
“Namaste,” she said to the room filled with twenty glowing faces.
They had just completed the final session of the two-week long Namaste Yogi camp she’d come to Costa Rica to teach.
That name always made India cringe, but it wasn’t something she had any control over. Calling yoga students “yogis” was quite a stretch. A yogi was someone who had harnessed their mind and body, so it was never regulated by desire. India had spent her entire life aspiring to this. Growing up in a yoga studio and being raised by a mother and grandmother who were yoga gurus meant India had lived the yogic practice since before she could walk, and she still couldn’t claim the title of yogi.
“Namaste,” her class chorused back in one harmonious voice. Fifteen days, and the texture of their namastes had changed. India had worked them hard. Relentless breath work, meditation that dug deep, poses that reset bones held long enough to bring out the strength of the very soul. Yoga brought together the entirety of a person’s experience being them. The body, the mind, the consciousness, all brought into awareness and experienced at once. If you gave it time, it gave you a glimpse of your whole self, your very humanness.
The enthusiasm of their first few days was sweet. The exhaustion of the middle slog that they hit on day seven and struggled through until day thirteen was heartbreaking but hopeful because India knew the outcome. It was this deeply relaxed and rooted “Namaste” that India waited for as she led them through their camp. Her grandmother would be proud.
They each stopped by to thank her and she pressed her hands together as she thanked them in return. Some of them just wanted her praise, others wanted her reassurance that they could hold on to what they had learned here. She gave each one of them what they needed, what the voice inside her told her would help them best.
There was very little you had control over in the world. But your own actions, those you could make exactly what you chose to make them. Staying connected to her inner voice was the only way India knew to make sure she kept her actions what they should be.
After the last of the students had left, India made her way to her suite wrapped in the kind of peace that came with giving a job your all. The resort was located at the edge of a cliff in Punta Quepos overlooking the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. She walked past the infinity pool that dropped into the ocean. Of all the resorts in the Manuel Antonio region this was the only one without a bar.
Most of her students would be headed to one of the other resorts today, to the places with multiple bars. India didn’t begrudge them their enjoyment. During her retreats, however, she preferred that her students not imbibe, and try to stay vegetarian. The body stayed better focused on itself with food that was easier to digest, and the mind stayed better focused on itself without alcohol messing with the nervous system. You emerged more refreshed and energized after a meditative retreat if you didn’t drink or eat meat; and India had never had a student who didn’t wholeheartedly agree, even if they’d started out trying to prove her wrong.
Inside her suite, she pulled off the turquoise shrug she’d worn over her white yoga pants and tank and put the kettle on in the kitchenette. Then, she retrieved her phone from her nightstand and let herself out onto the balcony. The coolness of the slate floor soaked into her bare feet. The resort was built on terraces tucked into a hill slope rising from the ocean and the briny sea breeze caught speed at this height and pummeled harder. Her hair caught every bit of salt in the air, making the short cropped strands stiff and heavy against her fingers as she tried to push them back in place.