Bollywood and the Beast (Bollywood Confidential) (3 page)

“No problem,” he was saying now, “Rocky can stay with my family. We have a house just outside the city. Very private. I’ll be going to the set from there also.” Her dad’s acrobatic eyebrows rose into his hairline, and Ashraf was quick to raise his hands, reassuringly. “
Nahin
,
nahin
, Varma-
saab
. All aboveboard, I promise. My brother lives there, along with his caretaker, our housekeeper and full staff. My grandmother, she is there also. Rocky would be safe.
Khuda ki kasam
. I promise.”

Everyone knew about Ashraf’s brother, Taj Ali Khan…once the industry’s most demanded star. He’d had a terrible, career-ending accident on the set of a big-budget action film, and no one had seen him since. Even ten years later, he was the subject of party whispers and the occasional gossip column speculations. He was a legend, in more ways than one. Rocky had a bunch of his movies on DVD. Who didn’t?

Although half of her wanted to throw a fit and refuse to let a roomful of men decide her immediate future, the other half of her couldn’t help but be intrigued. Turning down an opportunity to commute from the Khans’ house was probably like saying, “No, George Clooney, I don’t want to summer at your Italian villa.”

“Okay,” she said, wrapping her hands around her sweating glass of Coke. “Okay, I’ll stay with Ashraf’s family, and I’ll keep my head down. Anything to keep me on this project. It’s too important to me to mess this up.”

Her father gave her a pointed, eloquent look. One that said she should’ve thought of that
before
running her mouth on camera. She fired back a look just as chatty:
I know, Dad. I’m going to fix this. Don’t worry.

She was just good enough as an actress for him to believe her.

Taj slouched in front of the large-screen TV as the highlight reel of his greatest hits played out in bright, bruising hues of green, purple and blue. His legs seemed to go on forever. His hips swiveled like Elvis Presley’s. He looked like a king, as befitting his name, if not
the
King. The unerringly cheerful host, rosy-cheeked and pretty, couldn’t have been more than six when his first picture debuted in cinema halls. And now she was lauding him like he was a veteran, worthy of retrospectives while still in his prime.
Nahin
, not his prime. His early goddamn retirement. “
Aur ab
, Taj Ali Khan
ka aakhri
picture
ki
superhit song,” the girl simpered, as though his last film were a black and white from the ’40s. As if he wasn’t out in the world somewhere, watching his own bloody wake on a Bollywood “news” program.

Ten years since his career had been declared dead, and the industry never failed to remind him that blood could still be squeezed from his dusty bones.

His fingers closed round the controller, ready to pitch it across the room. Reprieve came in the form of his ringing mobile. “Yeh Dosti” from
Sholay
burst forth from the speaker. A playful ode to friendship was his baby brother’s idea of a grand joke, considering the state of their relationship most weeks. Their friendship had broken years ago, and they’d patched it together with strips of cello tape.

“
Bhaiya
?” Though the term was respectful, Ashraf’s tone was anything but.
Nahin
, he was hurried, distracted, a bit irritated.

It only amplified Taj’s own irritation. “Were you expecting Prince Charles?”

Laughter exploded over the line with a huff. “I never expect a prince when I ring you. Only royal pain.”

The pain was mutual. “What do you want, Ashu?” He sighed, letting his head fall against the hard teak contour of the sofa Kamal had arranged with an optimal view of the television. “My blessing to go to bed with more piranhas?
Jao
. Go forth.”

The dig was met with silence. Then a deep breath. “
Nahin
,” Ashraf finally said after the moment of melodrama. “I’m coming to Delhi for a shoot, so expect me home.” This was said as though he anticipated disagreement. He would not find it from Taj’s camp. “I will not be alone. Rocky Varma will stay with us.”

“Who?” The women in Mumbai grew more and more unknown with every passing minute. Younger as well. He glowered at the screen, where the infant hostess was still prattling on about his legendary exploits.

“My heroine.” Ashu mirrored his tone, the bite almost as impressive. “She is here from the U.S. Still new. But her family does not want her in the hotel or at the guesthouses with the crew. It is too unsafe. So I offered her to stay also.”

“Oh,
haan
, because your aged
nani
and your invalid brother pose no threat to her virtue,
nahin
?” He punctuated this thought with a few choice expletives, slouching into the warm cocoon of his pillows. “
Vah
. Brilliant. Very heroic behavior, Ashu.”

“Try heroic behavior yourself, okay,
Bhaiya
? We’re arriving tomorrow. Be civil.” Ashraf ended the call without any goodbyes.

That was fine. Taj didn’t need any. Not when he was being eulogized by a horde of background dancers and his own perfect, unmarred face.

Chapter Five

“I still don’t understand why you can’t stay somewhere nice. Particularly if a hotel’s closer to the set.” Caroline stood in the shade of a decorative palm tree, her oversized sunglasses practically glued to her face, but Rocky could guess at her disapproving expression. She’d seen it enough during the past few days. “Isn’t that more efficient than staying God-knows-where with some boy we don’t even know? I mean, honestly, what was your father thinking?”

“Bringing this up five minutes before I have to be at the airport isn’t useful, Mom.” Rocky dragged her rolling bag to the curb so the bellboy could heft it into the trunk of the private car. She’d packed light, a bunch of easily interchangeable
salwars
and a few dresses, knowing that Wardrobe would have her trussed up in costumes during the day. “Besides, Ashraf isn’t ‘a boy’. He’s my costar. I probably won’t even see him except for when we’re on set. It’s not like we’re going steady.”

At least one gossip blog had already asserted exactly that. Of course, they had a habit of pairing up whoever happened to be in a movie together. The ridiculous rumors circulating about a hookup between Avinash Kumar and Harsh Mathur on
their
last picture had cooled her father’s temper. Because anyone who was
anyone
knew Harsh was actually seeing Avinash’s wife.

“I’m not going to be gone that long, and you and Dad can visit all you want.” It was an eight-week location shoot, with interior, studio-only work in Mumbai afterward. She planned to be at the House of Khan for a fraction of that time…not that plans really meant anything when most crews had their own insane schedules.

“Visiting’s not the same, and you know it.” Caroline had said something similar just before they’d left Oak Park, when Rocky gently suggested she stay home and hold down the fort. “What if something happens to you? I won’t know what to do with myself.”

“Something probably
will
happen to me. It’s called ‘growing up’, Mom.”
You should try it sometime
, she wanted to say but thought better of it. Caroline’s streak of opulent narcissism was recent, probably a product of living in a new city. It wasn’t fair to call her out on something she couldn’t control. Not with minutes to spare before Rocky had to leave, that was for sure. “I’ll text when we land, okay? And when I get to Ashraf’s place—assuming they have decent cell service. Just don’t freak out.”

“I’m not freaking out. I don’t freak out.” Her mother frowned, the lines around her mouth growing more pronounced. Rocky loved those lines. Earned through girly shopping trips and movie outings and soccer games in the backyard. Why Caroline seemed determined to erase them, she didn’t know. “I just love you, sweetheart.”

Rocky hefted her purse higher onto her shoulder and then stepped into the shade, giving her mom a quick hug. “I love you, too. And Dad.”

Her father stuck his head out the passenger-side window of the dark Ambassador car. “You can tell me you love me on the drive, Rakhee. Come on. You will be late.”

If she interpreted his subtext correctly, he meant that being late would be one more strike against her.
Ugh
. She smothered a huff of frustration against her palm and made tracks. The door handle was already sizzling hot from the morning sun, and the hotel’s doorman gave her a scowl of reproach for trying it herself. She let him do the rest of the work as she slid into the backseat.

In Delhi, she’d be almost completely on her own. Like living on campus again. She really, really hoped she didn’t get schooled.

Home
. Just a short trip away via airplane, but it felt as though Ashraf had traveled a thousand kilometers and twenty years to get here. Certainly the flight had felt endless, as he’d made polite chitchat with Chatterjee and his AD and watched Rocky turn down a complimentary glass of champagne in favor of studying her script.

He’d downed two, the sickly sweet bubbles catching in his throat and then stirring his gut. Nina had never been without a bottle of the stuff, as if perpetually celebrating her schemes.
Their
schemes. She’d given him his first taste when he was just sixteen, congratulating him on completing his first Bollywood dance class. He wouldn’t be in a picture for another three years, but she’d toasted his every step along the way. Dance classes, acting classes, photo spreads, fashion shows and parties. He’d been waxed, shaved and styled to her every specification.

Rocky wore no makeup. Her brown hair was pulled into a horsetail. Her T-shirt was long-sleeved and overly large, with the name of an American university emblazoned across the modest chest. She wasn’t the least bit self-conscious, and had grabbed her own bags from the carousel at the Delhi airport.

Now, in the car, she broke the silence with occasional questions about him, about Taj and their family. He could answer only in generalities. In half-joking warnings and platitudes. The truth was not for her to know. Not when he barely knew it himself.

The road swiftly became less of one, the paving and lines giving way to dirt and dust. The city became a backdrop to fields and rice paddies and mud-brick houses. The pungent smell of cow dung seeped in even through the rolled-up windows, and Ashraf half-expected Rocky to press a handkerchief to her nose and shudder.

“This is gorgeous,” she said instead, her voice faint and dreamy. As though she were a million kilometers away. “Sometimes you forget…being in the city…that the real India is outside. Not in high-rise buildings and fancy restaurants.”

“You mean the
poor
India?” he translated, glancing out his own window at the dull brown canvas, so devoid of a film set’s glitter and color.

She glanced at him, her unpainted mouth curving upward with a faint disdain. “I grew up outside Chicago, Ashraf. I’ve seen farms and suburbs
and
walked through neighborhoods that time forgot. When I was in college, I took the El almost every day, not a fancy hired car, and saw plenty of real people—poor or otherwise. Don’t pretend I’m a snob just because I wasn’t born here.”

The lecture made him laugh, like so few things did lately. She was surprising, Rocky Varma. Not the silly, bubbly
Amrikan
the gossip rags painted her to be. She’d proven nothing but professional these past few days, and very refreshingly outspoken. That, in this business, was sometimes the true curse. Silence and secrets were currency in Bollywood. To speak up, to say what no one else would dare put into words, was a privilege of only the most elite, of Khans far more famous than him. Ashu certainly had not earned the privilege. His mouth was closed tightly, lest his star lose its precarious place in the constellation.

And now he was traveling to a land of endless night.

Chapter Six

The Khans’
haveli
was not, in fact, anything like George Clooney’s villa in Lake Como. It was more like something out of an old noir thriller…the stones crumbling from the rooftop parapet, the wrought-iron latticework on the windows caked with rust, every hallway dark and the rugs threadbare with age. The driver of their hired car left so fast, it was like he’d pulled in to the parking lot of the Bates Motel instead of a long, curving driveway and an arching portico—probably the
only
similarity to an Italian mansion.

Though Ashraf had promised her dad a full staff, the only person waiting for them inside was a housekeeper, Usha, who was in her mid-fifties and full of joy at seeing her “
Chote Saab
”. Beyond that, Rocky couldn’t translate. And it took approximately ten minutes after Ashraf and Usha deposited her in a room and vanished for her to get hopelessly lost. After two wrong turns from her bedroom, she somehow found the stairs and managed to trace her steps back to the house’s once-grand foyer and the dark, forbidding parlors that winged it. Had no one in this place heard of lights? Or feather dusters? It was like a haunted house, Hindi movie-style. Any minute now, she was going to be ax-murdered by a psychopath.

As if a celestial director had a window into her thoughts, she was drawn into the west parlor, a sprawling living room that had more shadows than light despite its huge windows and a dormant fireplace. Most of the furniture was covered with sheets. And one piece was occupied.

All she saw were his legs at first: dark track pants, the reflective white stripes up the sides ruining the camouflage of a man encased by a high-backed wingchair. Gradually, as she walked farther into the room and her eyes adjusted, the rest of his outline took shape. Broad shoulders, shoulder-length hair, a hand curled around the edge of the chair’s arm. And a voice as dark and rich as chocolate. Deep and glorious, like Amitabh Bachchan’s. “Who are you?” he asked, even as she mentally answered the same question about him.