“The final option is you tell Leena sorry, then find a way to show Hemant you are good enough for his daughter.”
Prem was trying very hard to get the screws to tighten up and keep the knob in place, but when Beena listed this final option, he fumbled his screwdriver, causing everything to fall down again. “But I am not good enough,” he said. “Not yet.”
“Look,” Beena said, placing the cover on a pot of dal with great emphasis. “Do you want to marry this girl or no?”
“Yes.”
“Then you have to understand you are acting like an idiot.” She went on to delineate the ways in which he was acting like an idiot, chiefly that he was not considering Leena’s point of view or working on a solution together with her, but rather making a rash decision all on his own. “Are you trying to marry the girl or her father?” she asked.
“It’s not that simple,” Prem tried to explain, collecting the bits of hardware.
“Do you understand that it is not her father that is in your way, but your own ego?” Beena continued.
“Well, I don’t—” Prem started.
“And that you drove her away with your own self-centeredness?”
“Uh, I think—”
“And at the end of your life, you’ll be sitting on a big pile of money, all alone?”
“This is true,” Kailash Mistry said passing by in the hallway on his way to his apartment.
“Okay, okay, fine,” Prem said. “Let me think.”
“Nothing to think about,” Beena said, chopping up a large head of cabbage. “Find out if she will take you back, then make some money. Maybe you can negotiate the amount, I don’t know.”
The desperation he felt then was like a stranglehold leaving him unable to breathe or fix a doorknob. He feared she was already lost to him. He envisioned an empty future in which he would work forever at the gas station, without Leena, without joy, left only with a ball of hair. Or equally as catastrophic, a future in which he would work hard and make something of himself only to find that she had moved on. Yet he could not easily let go of Hemant’s words or his own unworthiness.
For the next two weeks, he slept on Beena’s plastic couch and barely functioned as a human. He cut down his hours at Exxon to the minimum amount required to still call it a job and hid inside the apartment all day, avoiding contact with everyone but Beena and Cash, who would occasionally stop in to fix a leaky faucet and end up shelling peas.
Prem made one major outing to the Service Merchandise electronics and appliance store to purchase a VCR with the money he had left in his polka-dotted pouch, and he purchased Shree 420 from Urmila Sahu and watched it twice every day. The next time he ventured back into King’s Court society was when Beena dragged him to the Holi celebration.
“It is for Lord Krishna,” she said. “Or Vishnu. Or Shivji? I don’t know, just come.”
The celebration took place more than a month after the actual holiday, when it was just warm enough in New Jersey for people to be outside without shivering. It was the third year that King’s Court hosted the event, which mimicked on a small scale the festivals of colors that took place throughout India each spring, leaving an entire nation multihued and, in some regions, drunk. As in India, they played Holi in Edison with all manner of powders, pastes, colored water, water guns filled with colored water, and balloons filled with colored water, using supplies Nalini Sen had brought back from Pune. But unlike in India, where loved ones and strangers are equally fair game, in King’s Court they limited themselves to coloring only each other, no ambushing stray passersby or the mail carriers. For Prem, and much of India, Holi was inextricably linked to the 1981 hit song “Rang Barse” from Silsila, sung by Amitabh himself, the entire picturization of which embodied all that was beloved about the holiday: graceful dancing by the lead performers, sideys dressed in white moving in perfect symmetry, the drumbeats of the dholak, the milky, refreshing, laced-with-marijuana thandai, the tossing of flower petals near a soothing backyard water feature, the buttons of Amitabh’s kurta thrown wide open to highlight a gloriously hirsute chest gilded with chains, all in service to the immortal song sung playfully and soulfully as only Amitabh could. “Rang Barse” dramatized Amitabh’s forbidden love for the sultry Rekha, and when someone at King’s Court decided to blast it from his bedroom window to liven up the festivities, Prem was devastated anew, reminded of his own love who had forsaken him.
At that moment, Leena appeared across the yard, smeared in pink. She didn’t look in his direction. He tried to talk to the people around him—Lucky, Gopal, Tun-Tun, Tony—and he let them throw colors on him, but didn’t throw any of his own, encumbered as he was by sadness. She was right there. Option one, to forget about her, was impossible. Theirs was an honest-to-Ram love story, as bursting with romance and melodrama as any Hindi movie. The rich boy fell for the poor girl (as in Devdas) or the rich girl fell for the poor boy (as in Ajnabee), he wasn’t sure which story this was, if he was the rich or the poor. There was the heroine’s intractable father and the lovers who were forced apart. And then there was Prem himself, whose name meant the essence of who he was—love, but not casual love, pleasurable love, selfish love, but an elevated kind of love involving complete surrender and devotion, the kind of love for which a person is willing to give everything of himself, to lay it all on the line. Streaked with blue and drenched in red, a bucket of green water being cast upon him, Prem resolved to put aside his insecurities and beg her forgiveness.
The day after King’s Court Holi, when the colors had been washed from people’s faces but remained in the stained grass and sidewalks, Prem delivered a note to Varsha Virani to deliver to Leena.
13
The following weekend, apartment 3D was packed for the King’s Court premiere of Tezaab, proudly billed on its posters, cinema hoardings, and cassette covers as “A Violent Love Story”—the violence, of course, not having to do with the love but a completely separate storyline—which naturally made it the most anticipated movie of the year. They were able to watch the film before its Indian release date thanks to a bootlegged copy obtained from Urmila Sahu, who was becoming quite an authority in the field of video piracy. Tezaab starred Anil Kapoor, the playful and not-so-angry young man with the baby face paradoxically overrun with facial hair, who had become a household name since his star turn in Mr. India; and virtual newcomer Madhuri Dixit, who would go on to star in over sixty movies, hold the record for most Filmfare Award nominations by an actress, be awarded a Padma Shri by the Indian government, and become a Hindi film icon, inspiring an adulatory movie, Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon (I Want to Become Madhuri Dixit), as well as as well as paintings—and a creepy sort of admiration—from modern master M. F. Hussain. Trained as a traditional Kathak dancer, she elevated the song and dance aspect of films, bringing classical grace to the jhatka-matka, gyrating and titillating, spangling choreography of Indian movies, causing viewers to scramble for the rewind button before there were remotes.
“They should have taken Sridevi for the role instead,” Uttam Jindal said. The immensely popular song “Ek Do Teen” was starting up, the flat-stomached heroine already front and center as the sideys, sporting their doughy tummies, poured onto the stage, and everyone was excited to see what the talented, destined-to-be-legendary dance director Saroj Khan had come up with.
“See the song first, then decide,” Beena said.
“Damn good number,” Lucky said, shaking his head as the catchy refrain began and the bass kicked in.
Madhuri sprang into action, all charm and vivacity in shiny hot pink. “Excellent dancer,” Shanta Bhatt said.
“She is cheap,” Uttam Jindal said, adjusting his hairpiece. “Sridevi would not behave in such a cheap way.”
“Why you are in love with Sridevi?” Beena said.
“Stop passing comments and let me watch the song,” Mohan said.
They didn’t just watch the song, they got up and danced to it, cheered wildly, sang along, then rewound it and played it again. It wasn’t until the intermission that Prem spotted Varsha in the crowd and leaped over four people and an end table to reach her.
“And?” he said, careful that no one else could hear.
“Ya, Prem, okay,” Varsha said, pulling something from her purse. “Here is your letter.”
Prem did not understand. “She wrote a letter back already?” he said.
“No, no, it is your letter, the one which you wrote,” Varsha said.
“You have my letter still? You should not have my letter! Where is her letter, the one which she wrote?” Prem said.
“What letter?” Varsha said.
They went on like this until Prem was able to extract from her that Leena had left to spend two months in Minnesota with her father’s sister and that Varsha had been unable to deliver the letter before her departure. Prem was dumbstruck. Leena would be gone for so long without having resolved anything with him. He didn’t even know she had relatives in Minnesota.
“Isn’t it like an icebox there?”
“Not so bad. Lot of lakes.”
