Work Text:
~
When Seema died, the world shattered.
Seema is Priya’s first true experience with death. She was too young when their mother died—while the sadness lingers, it isn’t conscious. She remembers little of her mother beyond the pictures and the few comments her father made over the years.
Seema dies, and Priya’s world splits wide open. Seema dies, violently, with blood pooled on the ground. Seema dies in the way she was always scared of.
Seema dies and Priya loses her sister, her faith in her father, and her certainty that anything in her world is quite what it seems.
~
In the days after the fatal revelations, Priya no longer has any tears. She sits alone in the Chopra Palace, built by her father and organized with pride to reflect his standing in life. The house that has been her home for all of these years.
She should be weeping, reflecting on her father, or cursing the man who lied to her and murdered her sister and upended everything she ever thought was true.
But all that remains inside her is clear and white and empty. The details of her father’s death are still “under investigation”. The cause of death is known—the circumstances are not. Karan barely even brings up Ajay’s name, when he arrives to pay his respects.
Ajay who was Vicky. Vicky who was her lover. Vicky who broke her heart by engineering Seema’s death, and healed it.
The portrait of her father is set out and garlanded for all to see. For Ajay there is no image. She wouldn’t even know which portrait would be the right one; she has him brown-eyed in the official engagement photos and green-eyed in Seema’s manglasutra.
The house is quiet, except when the marble floors echo with the sound of her own footsteps, without even the servants’ antics to keep things interesting.
The first three days, she receives visitors, as expected. But after so many of them tell her consoling lies about her father, things she knows very much not to be true, she refuses to meet any more.
The last person she sees is one of her father’s former aides. He touches his hands together in greeting, which she returns, and hands her a briefcase.
“These are the records you asked for,” he says. “Everything that we could find. I hope they can help you make sense of this great sadness that has been placed over you.”
Priya sits, sorting through the fragments of a history she doesn’t know, in a house that echoes, not knowing who to miss or how.
The person she wants most in the world is not the man who is being mourned, but the girl whose death started it all.
~
Seema shows up the night of the funerals, when Priya’s grief is freshest and her loneliness never more acute.
She perches on the edge of Priya’s bed, dressed in pink, and doesn’t squirm away when Priya puts her head in her lap, like she hasn’t done since they were children. Instead, she puts her hand on Priya’s shoulder, the touch light but real.
“Didi, you’re back,” she murmurs, her sadness creeping in. “I thought you would be at peace by now.”
“How can I be at peace when your heart is broken like this?” Seema asks, a little bit playful even in such a serious moment. Her makeup is impeccable, even in death, and Priya can feel how Seema’s hair tickles against her shoulders as her older sister leans down over her. “Oh, Priya. I’m here.”
Finally, a touch that is comforting, after so long without. Seema was only a couple of years older than her, but Priya feels very much like a little girl again, safe from harm. In the past she was always the rough-and-tumble one, if there was rough and tumble to be had, but Seema has always been safe, and with her death that sense of safety had been robbed, supplanted only by—
“Do you still hurt?” Priya asks, softly. “I saw your body.”
Seema laughs indulgently and takes Priya’s hand in one of hers and brings it around to the back of her head.
“I don’t hurt, not anymore. All thanks to you, Priya. You were always so stubborn. I should have guessed that you would find out what really happened.”
“It felt wrong,” Priya whispers. “Even when we thought we found your killer, even though it didn’t make sense. Seema, I’m sorry—”
“Why are you sorry?” asks Seema firmly. She cups Priya’s chin and forces her to look up, to meet her serious, self-assured gaze. “That’s silly. How were you to know that things weren’t as they seemed?”
That was very like Seema. Once Priya would have been able to say something similar, but the guilt sits heavy in her these days—sometimes pressing down on her chest, making it hard to breathe, or sometimes on her stomach, making it hard to eat. Sometimes swirling in her head, making it hard to sleep.
Feeling Seema’s arms around her, like when they were little, it’s like the guilt eases, like flicking away a blanket.
“Will you be here every night?” she asks timidly, like the act of doing so might make Seema vanish.
“Of course,” says Seema, warmly. “Just ask for me. I come when called.”
Priya closes her eyes.
--
The first action Priya takes with her new business legacy is to rename everything. Not Sharma, not Chopra. Seema. Seema’s garments, Seema’s sugar…
It seems right, since all of it was bought with Seema’s blood.
She finds an acting director with a good reputation in the company and appoints him to oversee operations, because she’s still young and has a lot to learn. The man she chooses is steadfast, careful, and mostly importantly, not involved with either Ajay’s recent coup or her father’s original theft.
In the mornings, she studies the newspapers, not because she cares what they’ll say but because she still needs to know. In the nights, she studies history, walking back through her father’s records, seeking the truth.
Even through the confused fog of her grief, these things are done because they must be done. The rightness of the action is like a sunbeam through clouds—drawing the eye in a clear line, even if the rest of the world is murky and gray. It’s the same piercing rightness that made her pursue leads on Seema’s death, pushed her to look beyond Vicky’s beseeching gaze and proclamations of love.
There are tasks to be done, when untangling the mess of deals behind a company wrestled back and forth between the hands of two men. She wants to know the full story behind Madan Chopra’s rise to power—to confirm once and for all that Ajay Sharma spoke the truth.
Shobha Sharma’s initial catatonic state and Priya’s father brandishing a gun seem to support his claim, but she’s believed his lies before—she needs hard evidence before she can trust this story to be true.
Priya avoids Ajay’s office as long as she can, but she finally exhausts her father’s papers and unlocks the doors, shivering even in the warm, still air. She tries not to disturb any of the furniture any more than she has to, folding herself in the spaces between the walls and cabinets, between the desk and its chair, trying to touch these things as little as possible. So when she turns the wrong way while searching behind the desk, it’s not surprising that she nearly stumbles into the office chair.
It is surprising for Ajay to be there, lifting his hands to catch her by the waist, saving her from a true fall.
“Careful,” he says gently. He’s playing Vicky Malhotra, with those beautiful dark eyes that she liked so much.
Their faces are barely inches apart—he’s too close, close enough to kiss. She pushes the chair away and turns back to the desk, away from him, emptying drawers with short, erratic movements to hide how much her hands are shaking.
Why is he here, she wonders bleakly. Why is she more afraid of him now than she was on the day he died, when he revealed everything to her?
“Looking to burn everything of me?” he asks, still behind her and she can feel him getting closer. But he’s a ghost, he can’t be there, he’s not a physical heat pressing against her shoulders and back and waist even though the aircon is on full blast.
“I’m getting your mess in order,” she says crisply, pulling out a couple of promising-looking folders and turning to face him, hugging them across her chest like a shield against his intangible, agonizing presence. “Why do you need this? Your revenge is done. Chopra’s empire is no more, all because of you.”
Vicky—no, Ajay—nods slowly.
“Madan Chopra is no more. But Priya Chopra is still here,” he says softly, and her arms prickle into gooseflesh at the thoughtful way he says her name, like he’s weighing it on the scales of justice in his mind.
“Are you going to kill me, Ajay?” she challenges, her words cold and betraying none of her fear.
In here, where you and my father took turns bleeding each other dry?
She backs away from him, moving around to the front of the desk. He’s standing now with his hands in his pockets. Standing there behind the desk in his respectable suit. He still stands there like it’s his , like everything in that room is his, and she sees the coldness behind the eyes she once loved, their analytical assessment as they flicker over her, as if deciding whether she counts as one of his things.
But then Ajay breaks her gaze and crouches down. When he stands again, he’s holding a small, thumbmarked book that she missed in her haste to avoid him. He sets it down on the desk between them, pushes it toward her. She refuses to look at him.
Then he’s gone. The book remains.
She takes it when she goes.
~
Later, at the table at home, she pores through Ajay’s documentation, the contracts and memos and jotted meeting minutes. It is organized, but not disturbingly so—a human amount of clutter. No secret plans in cribbed ink, but ordinary terms and conditions to be carried out any which way.
And here are dates for…what is it, Bali? And a number jotted beneath it.
When she calls, there’s a travel agency on the other line. When she brings up Vicky Malhotra’s name, the kindly woman on the other end pulls up a reservation and good-naturedly asks why she is the one updating her honeymoon itinerary.
Priya drops the phone down back in its cradle and puts her head in her hands, eyes squeezed shut to avoid the way the room suddenly spins under her.
It isn’t the only note of its kind. There are also notices on available houses. Jewelry stores. Items that would be unremarkable in the desk of any engaged or married man. But they don’t fit the rest of what she knows of Ajay Sharma and his dreams of revenge. These notes indicate a man looking forward to newly married life, mixed among papers for transfers, to lock accounts and systemically destroy fifteen years of ill-gotten work.
Did he have to be so thorough in his façade?
~
She’s studied business principles, of course, but it was never expected of her—Papa had always been clear that he would train up the man she married to take over his company. It prickled a little, but never long enough for her to give it serious thought—she had been having too much fun, living her life and studying and figuring out how the world works.
The debris of fifteen years is a lot to handle, but she doesn’t know the right people to trust yet at her father’s business. Right now, all they know is that she knows nothing, and they are not on their guard. She needs to do this on her own, get the physical proof necessary to bring the truth to the light.
It’s complicated stuff, and Priya finds herself working late at night in her father’s office, trying to make sense of it all. She works only by the light of the lamps around her–the other systems all shut off when the rest of the workers went home.
The numbers and words swim and cross over in her vision, and she blinks hard to refocus. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean she can’t do it, she reminds herself. She uncovered Ajay’s lies, even when the evidence led elsewhere. She knows how to look for numbers not adding up, and she’ll do it right here.
“You don’t have to do this alone,” says Ajay mildly, and Priya throws herself away from the desk; the wheels of her chair squeal in protest at the force of it.
Gripping the arms of the chair so tightly that she might snap them off, Priya looks up at Vicky—no, Ajay , his name was always Ajay no matter what color his eyes were—and how he stands with his hands tucked in his pockets before her, politely waiting to take his seat.
“Of course I do,” says Priya, pushing herself up carefully so that she does not have to look so far up at him, unclenching her fists only with great difficulty. It’s not like she could throw it at him—he’s an apparition, and there’s no reason to suppose that she has any defense against him. “I don’t know who to trust. I’ll figure it out on my own.”
“You’ve always been clever, Priya,” Ajay acknowledges, with a funny little smile she doesn’t quite understand. He reaches out and turns one of the documents toward him, perusing it with interest. “But transfers and takeovers are different. I can help you find what you need.”
“Why?”
His green gaze is so steady—she can see so easily how she fell for him, still, even with everything that happened after.
“You want to know if I told you the truth about my father?” he asks softly. Priya nods, unable to speak past the knot that has tied in her throat. How comforting his voice still is, even when it shouldn’t be.
“I need to get it right,” she croaks.
“And I want to help,” he says. “I’ll get you what you need from these documents. The evidence will present itself.”
“How do I know that you aren’t trying a trick?” she asks.
“I’m dead,” says Ajay simply. “Why would I lie now?”
Perhaps it is unfair—Papa did kill him. Silently, she shoves a packet of documents over to him.
“Thank you,” says Ajay, and starts to read.
~
For three nights they work together in this fashion.
Nothing in her father’s papers contradicts Ajay’s story, and she wishes that she still had the capacity for surprise, waits for a new wound to rip open inside of her, compound her complicated grief.
But that doesn’t happen. Dimly, she can only see her father’s image darken a little more, fall broken off its altar. But this isn’t the true shattering of her father’s image—that happened last year, with his refusal to pursue justice for his elder daughter.
“Thank you, Ajay,” she says at last, hoarse from these last nights, from working and forgetting to eat, or to drink. “This is all I need.”
Ajay nods at her, brown eyes flashing that unsettling green again. He reaches out again, across the desk, but freezes when she recoils, and then he’s gone, leaving her alone in this dark, empty space.
She goes home, walks through her dark house, up to her room, and calls for Seema. Seema, fresh and ethereal, knows better than to ask what’s wrong, petting her hair until she falls asleep.
~
Before his lies came apart, when Seema was newly dead and she was still lost in her grief, Vicky had been angry on her behalf.
He had come over, ‘just to see how she was doing’, and they’d gone out on a long drive together in the car he’d brought her, drove out as far as they could go. He hadn’t spoken then, just let her drive and drive until tears blurred her vision.
“Priya,” he’d pressed, first gently, then more insistent. “Priya, Priya, please, pull over.”
She had, and burst into frustrated tears. He’d pulled her into him, tucked her head into the crook of his neck and let her cry out everything that hurt.
“Priya, Priya, It’s all right. Let me take you home, back to your father—”
“ I don’t want to see him. ”
The admission bled out of her, when she spit out that he thought that justice might make her unmarriageable.
He had gone very still.
“You think Seema was murdered?” he asked softly.
“Yes. But it doesn’t matter to Papa whether she’s dead by her own hand or dead by someone else’s! He’s more worried about the publicity of a trial, not justice.”
“How could he be so heartless? Who thinks of their family as a blot on their reputation?”
He softened at her, how she slumped over in her seat, her head in her hands, out of tears but her head still blank with Seema’s absence, the knowledge that she would never reappear.
“Priya…”
“What if it had been me?” she burst out. “Why can’t he care for her after her death? Isn’t she still his daughter? Isn’t she still a child to be looked after? Why is he shirking his responsibilities as her father? He loves us, how can’t he—”
Vicky had put his arms around her then, pulling her close, hands clutching against her shoulder and in her hair, shielding her from this bind of thoughts.
“I don’t know,” Vicky says, so raw that she is startled out of her haze. “I don’t know how someone wouldn’t want to seek justice for their family. And bereft of that justice, find it on their own behalf.”
It was exactly what she needed to hear. She reached out, holding him as tightly as he held her.
“I’ll find out,” she had promised fiercely. “My sister would have told me if she had sorrows. She didn’t do this herself.”
Vicky had stayed quiet, though he kept drawing her closer, the hold so tight that she couldn’t have moved even if she had any will to do so. The grip was soothing, something grounding in this new topsy-turvy world.
“Priya,” he had said at last, gently, not like he was afraid of spooking her, but like he wanted to share something valuable. “You knew your sister better than anyone else in the world. But there are always feelings in a person’s heart that cannot be controlled. Thoughts that even their loved ones will never know.”
“I know,” she had replied, touched at how carefully he spoke. “But I have to find out. If Seema was killed, I must find justice for her.”
Vicky had laughed, not mockingly, but a little hollow. “Of course. It’s your duty.”
“It is. Vicky?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you, for staying here.”
She had felt rather than heard his gentle laughter, one of his hands smoothing the curve of the back of her neck. “Of course. Where else would I go, with you like this?”
Priya had thumbed the edge of his jacket collar’s zipper, feeling the blunt edge of the teeth, admiring the rise and fall of his chest. “Papa doesn’t understand. He said that no one would want to marry me if they learned how Seema died. But you don’t care, do you? You think the truth is more important?”
“I do. What else is there?”
She smiled then, and settled in closer, pressing her cheek against his chest, wanting to feel the steady thrum of his heartbeat. “I’m so tired, Vicky.”
“You’ll be all right, Priya,” he’d said, his voice heavy, like he was making a pronouncement, like he was granting her a boon. “I won’t leave you.”
~
Priya Chopra has always taken care of her own, and ‘her own’ now includes Shobha Sharma.
Ajay’s death left the older woman fragile. There are still good days and bad days, but according to the neighbor who has helped Ajay all these years, even in her bad days, she is more whole now than before.
Priya makes sure the house will be kept in order, that the Sharmas’ neighbor is justly rewarded for her time and her kindness. It’s hard for her to return to the house that was the source of what upended her world, even after the blood and glass are cleared away, but she doesn’t live with that pain the way Ajay’s mother does.
In her first visit to the home after everything that happened, Priya takes care to ask Shobha if she could gather some of Ajay’s things to take back with her. None of his personal effects—just some papers to put his affairs in order.
It’s a good day for Shobha, and she looks at Priya with clear eyes, watching as Priya gathers up the old newspapers and diagrams and shuffles them into the suitcase. The manglasutra that revealed Ajay is still in there, and she doesn’t want to touch it, but she reaches out and picks it from amid the madman’s plans, staring bleakly at the gold locket, knowing that victim and killer’s images share space within it.
“Priya?”
“Yes, auntie?”
“Were you really going to marry my Ajay?” Shobha’s tone is mild, the question simple like that of a child’s, not laden with ulterior meaning. Not like her son’s.
“Yes,” she replies at last, the manglasutra’s weight heavy in her pocket. “We were supposed to be married soon.”
Shobha holds out her arms.
“Come here,” she commands.
Priya hesitates, then leaves the papers where they are and goes and kneels before the bed, obedient as Shobha cups her face in her hands and tilts up her chin, studying her.
She smiles weakly and bends forward to kiss Priya’s forehead. “Such a good and beautiful woman you grew up to be.”
The kindness in the gesture crumbles the careful wall Priya has put together as she goes through the motions of rebuilding her life and she has to squeeze her eyes tight to pinch away the threatening sting of tears.
“How can you be so gracious to me? My father treated you so cruelly.”
Shobha smiles weakly, and wipes absently at the corners of Priya’s eyes. “You were innocent. And you and your sister used to play so nicely with Ajay and Munni. How is your older sister doing? Is she married now?”
A lump rises in Priya’s throat; she swallows hard and shakes her head. “Seema died. Last year.”
Shobha, stricken, lowers her eyes. “Oh…I’m so sorry. Just like Munni. Did Ajay ever tell you about her?”
Priya shifts out of Shobha’s grasp so that she can take Shobha’s hands in her own. It’s so strange, to kneel in front of this woman when they are both in mourning.
“He did,” says Priya, fighting to keep her voice clear. “He told me about Munni after Seema died, to help me. He told me how he loved her very much, and how he missed her every day.”
Nothing she says is a lie: she remembers clearly what Ajay, playing Vicky, told her of his sister when she was still mired in grief. The raw ache in his voice was one of the only things that could shake her out of the daze of Seema’s absence —there’s a sharp stab in her ribs to think of it now that makes it hard to breathe, how at the time she felt that at least the one other person in the world who could understand was right there with her.
Shobha’s exhalation sounds even more like a sob, clutching at Priya’s hands. “He was a good son. I can’t believe he’s gone.”
“He’s with his father and sister again. Surely, they must be at peace,” says Priya, her own voice cracking, and then Shobha is pulling her close, as if they truly were mother and daughter, and not just two women left alone after so much bloodshed.
All that she has said is true—this she has learned from Ajay, how to lie without lying, for the sake of this woman, and she does it willingly.
It deepens her understanding of him just a little more, and she wishes it didn’t.
~
But Shobha’s talk of ghosts at rest prickles at Priya. She wishes that she could ignore that unsettling twinge in the back of her head that something is off with Seema’s visits, but her experience in the last year has taught her many lessons, and the most important one of all is to trust her intuition.
Seema always appears in her bedroom, trying on her jewelry or looking at the vanity mirror. Priya looks at the papers now on her childish desk and wonders if Seema ever reads them, but she never speaks of it. She can’t seem to put the manglasutra down either – it burns and burns but she can’t help but carry it wherever she goes. This was a gift that Seema picked out for herself. She ought to take out Ajay’s picture, so that they don’t quite share space, but she can’t bring herself to do that either.
Her sister is as punctual in death as she wasn’t in life. She asks about Priya’s day—questions about their mutual acquaintances, what Priya has learned about their father’s company. Priya answers her questions as best she can. She hasn’t spoken of Ajay or his mother to Seema yet. Seema has not asked about them, either.
Seema’s presence is so comforting—Priya wishes she could let go of her unease, to be reassured by her visits and not be left alone again in this empty house. But this isn’t right. Seema deserves to move on.
“Seema, why aren’t you at rest?”
Seema shrugs, the motion setting her sleeves fluttering. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it much. Some things are just unknowable.”
“But it shouldn’t be this. Your death has been solved. Everything is answered, or…”
Except.
Except there is a question she’s been worrying for a year now.
“Except?” prompts Seema, and Priya wonders if Seema can read her mind, see all of these shameful and terrible things that Priya has to keep inside, day after day. But Seema only looks curious, not knowing. This is her sister who she does not have to explain herself to—were it not for her question, she wouldn’t even feel the usual knot that has tightened in her stomach these last few weeks.
“Seema, why did you write that note?”
“What note…” Understanding dawns across Seema’s face, and her regret seems strangely old against her young, glamorous makeup that Priya always admired, even when it wasn’t to her taste. “You saw my suicide note?”
“What else would it be for, but for someone to see it?” asks Priya bitterly. “Seema, why didn’t you tell me about him?”
She can’t say his name. Not in front of Seema.
“Oh, Priya ,” Seema gnaws her lip, her hands twisting in her lap. “I…he asked me not to. And he was so nervous—like a young bird. I thought he would fly away if I ever spooked him. I’ve never had anyone like him before, in his own world and not just circling around me. And he was so sweet, and shy, and I…I was afraid to scare him away.”
Shy? “You didn’t get bored with someone who doesn’t do parties?”
“Not everyone needs the same kind of excitement in their life that you need, Priya,” says Seema severely, forbidding, like some glamour queen. “And I wanted someone who didn’t have to pay me attention every minute. It was fun to try to get his attention, and he would always tease me by refusing to do things properly.”
Since when does Seema care about proper?
Not noticing her sister’s silence, Seema continues, “Ajay let me do what I wanted, and what I wanted was to be with him. I know now that it wasn’t innocent, but I had never known anyone like him before.”
She draws up her legs to her chest, wrapping her arms around them like she was a child, gazing up at Priya from under her eyelashes. “I was wrong to trust him so completely, Priya. I won’t say I wasn’t. But you know how love is. You felt it too. Love is delicate.”
Delicate? Priya’s love for Vicky was absolute; all-consuming and solid as stone. She can feel around the edges of it, now that grief has given her some perspective, but she still doesn’t have the strength to dislodge it.
“I knew something was wrong,” Priya says quickly, skating over a year of memories, once rosy, now rotten. “You would have told me if you were that unhappy.”
“I would have wanted to,” says Seema, compassionate, but the words are like a half-empty canvas—the full meaning not clearly made. Priya lifts her head from her sister’s lap and shifts away on the bed to look at her properly, to watch her sister’s face.
“Then why didn’t you?”
Seema chews her lip and her silence is telling—Seema has never been one not to speak what is in her heart.
“He asked me not to,” she repeats. “And Priya…I was afraid.”
“Why?”
“That you’d try to speak to Daddy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Priya, you know what he’s like. I know he’s always done what you wanted, but something like the engagement…”
“No, you’re right. I might have acted before thinking.”
“You’ve always gone your own way, Priya. And I’m glad for it.”
“I could have done better. Then maybe Ravi and Anjali would still be alive.”
Seema’s smile flickers and she casts her eyes down. “Yes...I still can’t believe it.”
“We both were deceived. Neither of us is to blame.”
“No, we are not to blame,” echoes Seema, wiping away tears from her own eyes before reaching for Priya, her fingertips gently brushing Priya’s cheek and coming away wet. “Oh, no more tears.”
“Sorry,” Priya swipes at her own eyes and laughs hollowly. “I thought I was out of tears. But sometimes I can’t even move for crying.”
“Priya…You helped me so much now. It’s your turn to live.”
“I’m trying,” she whispers. “But, Seema, it’s so hard to be alone.”
“I’m here.”
“But you shouldn’t be. Not like this. Is there something I need to do for you?”
Seema shakes her head. “No. You’ve done more than enough. But, perhaps, there is something that I can do for you.”
Beyond her presence here, Priya can’t think of what that would be.
--
In the morning, Babulal switches the salt and sugar twice, and Priya is too distracted to even snap at him as she normally would.
She’s wondered before, how Ajay seduced her sister. It’s a shallow, superficial kind of wonder that she doesn’t allow herself to plumb too deeply, before the back of her throat goes sour and closes up. Ajay’s Vicky Malhotra act would never have worked on Seema, nor would his shy and thoughtless act worked on her.
Two different personas for two sisters. It makes sense, to integrate himself into her life before killing Seema. To use the grief he knew so well as an advantage, to slip in.
He was a tragic monster, but still a monster, she reminds herself. H e pretended he was in love with you. Forget him. Bury the grief for that persona deep in your heart—he never existed. Give back his mother what she lost, but don’t shed any more tears for him.
~
Now that the matter has been arranged, that Madan Chopra’s treachery is known, Priya assumes that Ajay, at least, will have moved on from the whole haunting affair.
He does not, appearing to Priya in her living room barely days after their last meeting.
“Thank you for the interview,” he says, hands in his pockets, as if he is a casual visitor in her house. “Now all of India has the story straight.”
Babulal and the other servants are in the kitchen, playing one of their usual farces, and don’t hear her startled cry, muffled as it is by his hand, the palm both rough and soft like she remembers.
“Don’t scream,” he cautions. “They’ll think you’re mad.”
“Of course I’m mad!” she spits, scrambling away from him until the backs of her calves hit the divan. Ajay Sharma makes no move to approach, just stands there, with his green eyes and in a red-stained shirt that was once white, the one he wore when he died in his mother’s arms. “Why else would you be here?”
“To see how you are,” he says, like it is a simple fact, the same way he said it when she went after him at the racetrack, like his attention to her was perfectly natural. Perfectly calculated to catch her. Priya crosses her arms tightly across her middle.
“Well, I’m perfectly fine. I don’t need you here.”
He’s not paying attention to her, looking around the house instead. “You’ve changed this place. Well, most of it.”
Ajay’s eyes narrow and Priya tenses when she sees that his gaze lingers on Seema’s portrait.
“Don’t look at her,” she snarls. Obediently, Ajay’s eyes snap back to hers and pins her where she stands.
“You haven’t hung your father’s portrait,” he says.
“The servants are slow, and Babulal insists on doing it himself,” she returns coldly. “Your portrait is with your mother—go see her if you want to be mourned.”
His mouth tightens in a thin line, but otherwise Ajay doesn’t respond to her barb.
“I didn’t expect to be,” he says coolly. “That’s not why I’m here.”
“Well, I don’t need you,” says Priya, stepping away from him, not breaking that strange green gaze, both familiar and peculiar. “I’ve taken care of your business. There’s no more reason for you to be here. You should move on.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?” challenges Priya.
“How can I, when you’re still so sad?” asks Ajay, and before Priya can protest, he’s gone. Priya’s legs slide out from under her and she stares, unseeing, at the point where he had stood, holding back the want to call him back, out of fear that he will obey as readily as he vanished.
~
He’s haunting her. She keeps dreaming of his eyes on her as the lights behind them went out—green eyes both strange and familiar. She dreams of his arms around her, how he called her Laila, joked of her bewitching powers. Seema will only come when called; Ajay does not require such permission.
She’s making plans to go back to school, for the company to be held by someone trustworthy until then. She’s turned over the documentation to Karan, to give more information about Ajay’s motives, though she asks that Seema’s name not be sullied. All of the right processes have been followed—the case should be closed.
But still Ajay remains.
Priya doesn’t understand it—by his own admission, he has nothing against her. She’s corroborated his story with her father’s paper trail. She’s taken care of his mother—still sees her from time to time, and makes sure she’s doing well.
And yet.
The summer air is balmy and soft against her skin, where she sits in the garden, lost in her own thoughts. She’s re-enrolled in school, and will be returning in a few weeks. Her story is well rehearsed by now—her father had been involved in shady business deals, and in his quest for revenge, her fiancé had seen his chance to protect his family’s honor, and confronted him. In time, the world will lose interest, and move on. One day, she will be left alone.
But not yet.
“I miss the lights from our engagement party,” observes Ajay, hovering in front of her.
“What do you want from me, Ajay?” she says, deliberately neutral.
“To see if there is anything you want from me.”
“Why do you care?”
“I told you once that I would do anything for you. I meant it. Are you sure there’s nothing, Priya? You seem worried.”
Priya tries to steel herself, squaring her shoulders, trying to be as intimidating as possible in front of this specter in only her nightclothes.
“If you are here, you might as well answer my question.”
“What question is that?”
“Who were you when you seduced my sister?”
He laughs a little in disbelief. “Why would you want to know that? It does not concern you.”
“Except it did,” she forces out. “Answer me.”
He’s gone still, the way he did when she first told him her suspicions of Seema’s death, when she’d thrown his insinuations of Karan in his face.
Then he blinks, and Priya doesn’t flinch when his eyes turn from brown to green. One of his hands fishes a pair of thick glasses out of his pocket and puts them on.
Then he smiles at her, and the transformation is utterly alarming. Here is a young man without any sense of pretense, his buttons neatly done, fussy, and stammering.
“Is this what you expected to see, Pri-ya?” he sings her name, tilting his head like a jackdaw, open and innocent, a far cry from the man she thought him to be, and the man she knew him to be. A regular absent-minded professor. He comes close to her, reaches out to tap her forehead. “Tell me what’s on that pretty mind of yours, hmm?”
She backs away, alarmed. Ajay doesn’t follow her, and when she can dare to look at him again, he’s watching her with Vicky-Ajay’s familiar calculation.
“You don’t like him?” he asks, his tone controlled again.
“I don’t like ridiculous figures. How could you have ever thought that it would suit Seema’s tastes?”
“Because it did. Seema didn’t want someone to dote after her very existence. She wanted someone from a world she had never seen. I showed her that.”
“Seema loved fun , not stuffed shirts.”
“I was fun,” says Ajay silkily, and Priya shudders. “Don’t worry—I was never vulgar. But your sister wanted to be worldly. She liked to be attuned to other people, and the Ajay Sharma I showed her appealed to that part of her nature. You, on the other hand, you just go your way, assuming that everyone will love you and obey to your will. And you were right.”
There is such warmth in his voice in that otherwise unflattering assessment of her self—Priya stokes her own anger.
“It must have been fun for you, to romance two sisters so coolly,” she keeps her voice level, tries not to react as if she sees the flash of anger behind his eyes. “We must have been such a game for you.”
“It was never a game, Priya.” He speaks her name like a caress, and she shivers. “Don’t ever think that I thought of my justice as a game.”
“What did you call yourself? Baazigar? Someone who wins to lose. How is that not a game? Stop acting like you care for my troubles.”
“I’m not acting,” snarls Ajay, grabbing her wrist and trying to draw her toward him. Priya flings back her arm to dig into the lawn chair, but its weight is insufficient to prevent her from being dragged forward. “What motive would I have?”
“What motive do you have for being here?” she spits. “You pretended to love me, to become part of the family—”
His other hand clamps around the back of her neck, pulling her up so that they are nearly nose to nose, so that she can see the spark in his green eyes, not unlike the one when he told her of his family’s fall at her father’s hands, his low, harsh voice running the same kind of monologue.
“I already was a part of your family. And if we had had a little more time, I would have married you, Priya. Bound for this lifetime and all the rest.”
“Thank God, then, that you didn’t succeed.”
The manglasutra in her pocket burns all the brighter. She should be terrified—a ghost has her at his mercy, there is no one else in the house, no nearby neighbors. But Vicky never scared her, and neither does Ajay.
“What a stupid plan you had,” she says craftily, maliciously, trying to see if she can wound him. “What did you think would happen after you took over Papa’s businesses?”
“What else? We would have gotten married.”
That throws her. “How?”
He blinks, and his intensity fades, the grip on the back of her neck turning into more of a caress, his thumb brushing at the skin under her earlobe.
“I would have told you.”
“Told me what?”
“That my name is Ajay Sharma. That I had sworn to destroy your father’s wealth that he had wrongfully taken.” His other hand releases her wrist, and comes up between them to stroke her hair, like it has done a thousand times before. “I would have begged your forgiveness and asked you to stand with me.”
“And Seema? Would you have confessed about her?”
His grip on her hair hurts, and then releases.
“No,” he says at last. “I knew better than that.”
And then he’s no longer there.
~
She might not be able to tell Karan about either of the specters visiting her, but she trusts him most. After herself, he is the only one who really has most of the pieces of the puzzle, who understands how twisted the handoff was on both sides. She leans on him a lot, in the months after, grateful for his support. Sometimes she invites him over just to sit with her in the garden, tea properly brewed by herself.
No one is happier than Priya when Karan announces his impending engagement. Priya doesn’t know the girl personally, but she studies Karan’s picture and likes the calm in her eyes, the straightness of her back. Here is a woman ready to be a policeman’s wife, to discuss his cases and his pursuits as well as listen to music in the evenings.
“We’re having the engagement party next week,” he says, taking the picture back, and she sees how he has that half moment to absorb the girl’s face before tucking it away again. “You’ll come?”
“Of course,” she agrees, already thinking beyond the party, to the wedding, what an appropriate gift would be. “I wouldn’t miss your happiness, Karan.”
He smiles, his face rounding even more—his work has aged him, but his joy makes him boyish. Truly, his wife will be a lucky woman.
But then he grows serious again, and Priya braces back against the garden chair, already knowing what is coming.
“You should consider marrying yourself,” he says gently.
“Not now, Karan,” she says, not cutting as she would be at another time, but tired.
“I won’t be able to visit you like this after I’m married—it wouldn’t be right.”
“You don’t think she’d trust that there was nothing going on between us?”
He shakes his head. “It’s not that—she’s a sensible woman. But you and me—we won’t be able to talk about what weighs on your heart in the same way. Priya, you gave yourself a heavy burden when you hid the truth.”
“I knew what I was doing. Why add another burden on top of it. A husband to hide things from?”
“Perhaps marriage will make it better, give you other things to think about.”
She scoffs. “Or, Karan, it might drive me mad.”
Karan stands, his sunglasses in his hand. “I don’t want to see you lonely, Priya.”
Beyond him, leaning against the stairs, Vicky gazes steadily back at Priya, his face like stone. When she blinks he’s gone.
She laughs, and the sound is thin as foil to her own ears. “Thank you, but this kind of loneliness isn’t something either of us can change.”
She almost married a liar—she won’t pin that fate on anyone else.
~
“Perhaps you should have married Karan—you’d have no secrets from him,” says Ajay, spiteful, later that night. This time, he is in her bedroom, sitting on his side of the bed, back to the headboard, boots on the comforter. He’s wearing Vicky’s leather jacket but his eyes are still green, the combination deeply unsettling.
Priya’s back slams against her door—whether because her knees gave out or to try to put as much space between herself and Ajay as possible, she’s not sure.
“Get out,” snarls Priya. He doesn’t inspire fear in her—never has, didn’t even when his eyes were glazed with madness and he cut through her father’s men like a demon. Seeing him in the offices, in the house—all of it has been painful, but nothing like the outrage inflaming her now.
He gazes steadily back at her, looking both right and wrong in this space of hers.
(He’s spent time in here before. Some nights he was up late working with her father and had a guest room made up for him. Some nights, he even slept there. More often, he crept through the halls and slipped into her bedroom instead to lay his head on the pillow next to hers.)
“You had the wrong idea about Karan then and you do now.”
Ajay glares at her in pure exasperation. “He was always in love with you. Priya. Just because you don’t feel love in your heart for someone, doesn’t mean they don’t feel love for you.”
“Like Seema did for you?” she challenges.
“I cared for her,” he says softly.
Priya whips around, appalled. “You don’t have the right to care for her.”
“I don’t. But I did.”
“Do you want me to leave?” he asks. “Truly?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” asks Priya.
“Who would see me?”
Seema. Seema will see him here, and if she knows that Priya was still seeing Ajay, then she might think—
She might think wrong.
Don’t come tonight, Seema, she begs silently. Please, Didi, heed my wish. Stay away.
“Why are you here with me?” she asks. “I don’t understand what else you would want.”
“You’ve been taking care of my mother.”
“I have.” She hesitates briefly, and resumes her routine: removing her jewelry and laying them out in their sequined box. In her mirror, she can see how he looks around her room, perhaps noticing that all of his gifts are gone.
She’s seen him making this circuit before, her pulse jumping at the memory. That time she had watched him openly, hungrily, and she’d taken so much delight in his unexpected shyness when she sidled up to him, letting herself be bold and tipping them both back into the bed. She remembers her sense of power, then, and wishes they were back in that night, for that security.
Priya returns her attention to her bangles before he can catch her watching. “She would have been my mother-in-law. Our engagement was real, even if your love was not.”
“Priya—"
“Why are you here?”
“For you.”
Another echo—Vicky charming her at the race, pretending that he lost for her sake.
“To pity me?” she bites back.
“Never.”
“For what, then?” she demands, turning at last to face him properly, arms crossed tightly over her chest.
“What else?” asks Ajay gently. Priya tightens her grip on her arms, reminding herself that she is flesh, he is not.
“You never loved me.”
“I would have loved you,” says Ajay quietly.
“Why should I believe that?”
“It’s the truth.”
“So? You lied before.”
Ajay‘s eyes flash with a familiar anger, but his eyes are green tonight, and that gives her the distance she needs, shields the inevitable twinge of regret in her own heart. Vicky’s eyes were brown, and she loved them. They were the eyes that got too close at times, that always seemed to be on her. She might speak to anyone else for a while, forgetting the world, only to turn around and see his face turned toward her—attuned to her every movement. Every time she looked, he looked back. She’d liked that.
Ajay’s face softens, the flash of anger gone as quickly as it came. He averts his gaze from her.
“I wouldn’t,” he says quietly. “I couldn’t.”
She starts to cry in earnest.
“Why not? You were pretending.”
“Vicky was me. Everything he said, I meant. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Priya…”
She cries harder, wrapping her arms around herself, sinking down to the floor, without the ability to take one step forward or backward.
And this immobility, this inability to move forwards or backwards because she might have sunk but she can’t fall, can’t fall the way Seema did, can’t fall the way her father has, can’t fall the way Vicky-not-Vicky-it’s- Ajay has—
“Priya,” says Ajay tenderly, and with her eyes closed all she’s thinking of is Vicky when she feels him gather her up and draw her into him, the way he did when she was grieving Seema.
“You pretended to be in love with me. You manipulated me. You made me need you.”
“You needed me because I could understand you,” says Ajay, holding her close, hands in her hair, and forcing her to see him, and the anguish as his eyes search her face, desperate for some semblance of the love she had for him.
(Love she still has.)
“Priya, you have every right to hate me for Seema’s death, but I never took her loss lightly. I wanted your father to feel the pain that he inflicted upon the Sharma family, the pain of losing all that you loved. I never thought he would abandon you to your grief.”
Priya’s sense of justice says he’s right. That his feelings are true. No wonder his lies were so easy to miss, when his words were so seductively true.
“I would have been happier without you. What makes you think I love you more than I loved Seema?”
“I don’t think you do. But I love you.”
Priya shakes her head slowly. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not. You were my family, Priya. You would have been my wife.”
And she cries and cries and cries. Because Ajay does understand family—she believes that. She believes that he understands family so well that he was able to infiltrate theirs, because he understood their family in a way her father had forgotten, or perhaps never had.
“Ajay, why are you here?”
“To help you find peace.”
“Why?”
“To hear what you have to say to me. I brought you into another world and left you alone. I can’t make up my faults to you in this lifetime, but before I pass to the next, I can give you some comfort.” He drops a kiss to her forehead, and she doesn’t pull away. “Poor Priya. You don’t need to keep secrets from the dead.”
And there’s the thing, both shameful and not. Even if he is cursed, he can take this final burden that rests on her chest, that has had her on the cusp of drowning these past few months.
“I loved you. I still do. I think I might always.”
Ajay cups her face in his hands, as gently as he did in life, like she was precious and something to be protected. Even when she knew he was capable of violence, she never feared for herself.
“Thank you, Priya,” he says, like a blessing. “Is there anything else?”
“I never want to see you again.”
“You won’t,” says Ajay tenderly.
And then he’s gone, really and truly gone.
Priya cries, relief and despair brimming over and spilling forth in equal measure.
~
Only one ghost visits her now.
“Seema,” Priya whispers. “Are you here?”
“I am now,” says Seema, sitting cross-legged at the foot of Priya’s bed, like when she used to sneak in for a late-night chat during the school holidays. She’s not dressed as elegantly as usual—in a soft sweater and leggings, no makeup, hair loose. It’s been a long time since she’s seen Seema like this.
“I think this is going to be your last night here.”
“Oh?” says Seema. “Are you going to talk sense?”
The teasing is so normal, and Priya just wants to hold back her revelation so that she keeps having it.
“I understand why you keep coming back to me.”
“I’m your big sister, I’d always come back to you.”
“But that’s not all.”
“Then tell me.”
“I need to apologize to you.”
“For what? Borrowing my clothes? Grinding up my makeup? You’ve never apologized for those things. I don’t see why you would now.”
“If only it were that simple. Seema, I told you that I fell in love with a shadow when I fell in love with Vicky. But that isn’t true. I loved Vicky, and by loving him, I also loved Ajay. And even with everything that has happened…I can’t stop. And for that, I’m sorry.”
“But I know that,” says Seema, frowning. “I know you loved him. Why would you need to apologize?”
Priya blinks back tears.
“For loving the man who killed you. For betraying you.”
“Betrayal?” To Priya’s disbelief, Seema laughs, the way she used to laugh at Priya’s jokes or Papa’s boasts or the servants’ mishaps.
That was Seema—always willing to listen and be accommodating. But she had to understand.
“Why—Seema, isn’t it clear? He lied, he killed you and used me to get to Papa. It’s more than enough for me to curse him . I should curse him! But that love is still here. Wishing that he had better. Wishing that he was here with me the way I wish you were here with me. And that’s…that’s not right. I should only pity him, not wish him peace. Not still think about him. Seema, can you forgive me for that?”
“Priya, I was willing to die for love,” says Seema. “I know its power. Why would I think that your feelings are a betrayal?”
“I don’t want you to think that I love him more than you,” says Priya through her tears, averting her eyes from Seema—she can’t look at her now. So many trials and this is where her courage fails her, faced with the ghost of her sister. “So many people have treated you badly. Ajay wanted revenge over your love. Papa loved his reputation more than justice for you. I’ve been lost without you, Seema. I don’t know what I would do without your love. I didn’t forgive him, Seema, I promise I didn’t forgive him…”
And here’s Seema hugging her now, in an embrace so tight that Priya hopes to never leave it.
“Of course,” she whispers in Priya’s ear, soothing as the sea breeze. “Forgiveness and love are not the same. I have both for you. Priya, please, don’t think that you could ever lose my love. It’s yours. Always.”
Priya’s grip tightens on Seema, inhaling the sweetness of her perfume. “Thank you, Seema.”
“Of course. You’re too good to me, Priya. I wasn’t the best sister to you while I was alive. You’re strong—you’ll be fine.”
“Can you move on?”
“I think so.”
“Can you stay tonight?”
“Yes.”
Priya falls asleep with her head in Seema’s lap. In the morning, Seema has moved on, and Priya continues rebuilding her world.