The Fifth House of the Heart Read online

  There was a variety of people at the dinner, held in the wintery-white dining room: Nilu recognized a couple of aspiring actresses who had entered the business through the dramatic side, rather than dancing. Junior artistes, such people were called. Seated opposite Nilu was a retired judge, who now held large tracts of working farmland, and his wife, once an actress who had worked with Mallammanavar Jagadish’s father. Beside them were a noted architect and his spouse, a fashion designer who had made a fortune in prewrapped, fitted saris for Westernized desi girls.

  A big, white-haired Russian with a diamond wholesale business in Surat sat to Jag’s right. At the opposite end of the table was a director of photography who was known for his action sequences back in the 1970s and whose memoir had been quite successful. He was a very funny man—it turned out he’d once been a comedian in films, then discovered he preferred life behind the camera.

  It was an interesting party, enlivened by Jag’s impeccable skill as host. He knew how to keep things moving along. The popular image of the film producer as a demanding boor was entirely out of place with him. His sense of etiquette and propriety could not be faulted. Nilu thought she detected the mode of his sexual conquests: he was so equally interested in everyone that the other two young actresses were competing for his attention. Even Nilu found herself doing it. They all wanted to shine just a little more than the rest, collecting laughter and smiles from the party like gambling chips scooped up from the center of the gleaming mahogany table. It wouldn’t take much before one of them carried the competition to the bedroom.

  At some point, Nilu realized the formula for success in this setting. Concern for her reputation had kept her from throwing herself completely into the “brightest young thing” contest; the taller of the two actresses was winning that category, as it happened. But it was precisely Nilu’s reserve that caught the eyes of them. She observed it was the girl who least often jumped into a conversation, and spoke only thoughtfully, who most fascinated the men. At first she wasn’t certain how to amplify the effect: after all, a girl who is too quiet will come off shy or stupid. But Nilu found she didn’t have to speak so much as listen.

  If she nodded her understanding of the perils of land management when the judge spoke, Jag and the Russian watched her instead of the actresses, who could scarcely feign to be listening at all. But to really make an impression, she couldn’t just listen—she must speak. However, she knew little of the subject.

  She scoured her memory for something and recalled an article she had read on a bus the previous year. Something about women’s rights and the system of village governance. Yes! So she asked a pointed question about the panchayati raj system and land ownership for women, and the judge went off into a lengthy, fairly technical explanation of the issue. Although in truth Nilu had very little idea what he was talking about, the fact that she had composed an informed-sounding question earned her admiration all around.

  Eventually Jag announced he was going to have to break up the party earlier than he wished; there was a script that needed revising and Jag had paid the writers enough already. He would do the work himself. Nilu’s heart beat faster. If there was to be some kind of assignation, it would be soon.

  The party lingered awhile. Nilu watched Jag for signals. She didn’t know what they would be, or how she would respond. She wasn’t a virgin, but neither was she particularly experienced. She didn’t know how they did these things in the swinging world of real players.

  The judge and his wife left first; shortly afterward, the fashion designer towed her architect away, although he had been hoping for more drinks. The rest of the party retired to the great room with its vaulted ceilings and tall, stacked fireplace of rough stone.

  Jag poured cognac for the Russian and the young women continued on with their Californian white wine. He made a whiskey and water for himself. They sat at intervals on the white leather sectional, which formed the margin of a conversation pit set lower than the rest of the floor. Nilu admired everything, smiled and laughed as the others did, but she was still afraid. She felt like a contestant in a game show she wasn’t certain she wanted to win.

  Jag checked his ashtray-sized Panerai watch and clapped his hands together.

  “Another few minutes,” he announced. “Then we must part ways.”

  To her surprise, Nilu realized the Russian was observing her closely. She hadn’t paid much attention to him; he seldom spoke throughout the evening, and when he did, it was with an impenetrable accent. Apparently she had made an impression. She studied him with brief glances as the conversation fluttered around in its last phase.

  His name was Andronov, which he pronounced yendronew. His eyes were dark gray, and even the whites of them were gray, as if there was a shadow that fell eternally over them. His hair was white and stiff, like cats’ whiskers, and swept back over a monumental skull of such strength that his features seemed merely to have been draped over it. His face was complex and mobile, shifting with expressions that Nilu could not read.

  It was as if she was seeing him through slightly rippled glass. He had large, hard hands with thick fingernails. She could not guess his age. In some moods, he appeared to be around fifty; in others, he could have been a hundred years old. There was something ancient about his eyes. When he looked at her, he caught Nilu staring. He smiled, just a little, and seemed almost to light up from within. Nilu wanted him to smile at her again. He was so masculine, his face more expressive even than that of the actor Sanjay Dutt. She had danced once with “the Deadly Dutt.” He was tall, but not as tall as the Russian.

  It might have been the wine, but Nilu found herself less wary than she had been all night. She was still on the alert for trouble, but she believed now that trouble could be handled. It could be shaped. She could stop things whenever she wanted. There was more to be discovered tonight.

  The junior artistes twittered and cooed and the short one all but asked if she might stay behind. Jag dismissed them both, and the old director of photography went out with them. Nilu felt light-headed but well. She made her good-byes, knowing the next move was not hers to make. Jag glanced at Andronov. The Russian was staring fixedly at Nilu. Jag turned his eyes back to her.

  “You made a good impression,” he said. “Please stay a few minutes longer. I am interested to hear what sort of a career you have planned.”

  Nilu felt like she had leapt off a cliff and soared into the air and flown upward toward the sun. Tonight it was all happening, that moment when things would go right. For most people, that moment never came. For those few who got such a chance, some were not ready, or not paying attention, or didn’t have the courage to proceed; they would wake up ten years later to discover they had not realized their dreams. Nilu felt blessed: She was aware. Now her life could truly begin.

  Jag smiled at her and she smiled back, although the smile somehow missed Jag and landed in the Russian’s cognac.

  “I’ll go get the latest sides for the new show,” Jag said, and put his glass on a console table. He walked out of the great room, leaving Nilu and Andronov alone. Neither of them spoke until the ice stopped turning in Jag’s glass.

  “You are an item girl,” the Russian said. Nilu blushed.

  “Only a dancer. But I want to take dramatic roles,” she said. Her ambitions suddenly seemed very small in her mouth.

  “It’s a competitive industry,” he said. “Even with diamonds, it’s nothing so competitive. There are always so many more diamonds than people believe. There are thousands of tons of them in warehouses all around the world. They’re common.”

  He removed a ring from the small finger of his left hand and tossed it to Nilu. She caught it in both hands, slopping her wine. It was an enormous flashing stone in a plain gold mount; the thing had looked petite on his finger but was as big as a door knocker now that she held it. She noticed the metal was cold, although he’d worn it all night.

 
“Talent,” Andronov continued, “is far more rare than diamonds.”

  Nilu offered him the ring back. He dismissed it with a puff of his lips. “Keep it,” he said.

  Nilu was ashamed of her own suspicious mind: now she wondered if he was offering her the price of her body. It wasn’t unreasonable to be concerned about such a thing. She didn’t know what to do with such a valuable gift. She couldn’t keep it. It would be seen to influence whatever else happened.

  She found the Russian hypnotic. In fact, she wanted him to have her for nothing. He excited her. Fifty? He was in his midforties, seething with virility. He looked older because he was so pale, as Europeans were. She wondered if his body was like his face, a powerful frame harnessed with muscle, and if he was so large everywhere as he was in the hands.

  The blush sprang up her face again. She was thinking immodest thoughts. She might joke about such things with the other dancers concerning an especially fine male specimen amongst their colleagues, but it was only coarse talk, without the heat of desire. They never spoke in that way about the leading artistes, the stars with whom they danced, or about strangers, for that matter. Now she was experiencing real lust, her mouth flooding with it. A ridiculous fear caught her off guard: What if the Russian could tell what she was thinking? Could he see her thoughts reflected in her eyes? He would see himself naked, then. Nilu laughed aloud in spite of herself.

  “You look happy,” Andronov said.

  “I feel happy,” Nilu said, and knew it was idiotic. She carelessly set the ring aside.

  She laughed again, abandoning her nagging self-observant monkey mind. An aching orb of pleasure was swelling inside her, honey flowing in the nerves of her belly. Laughter and light was the thing. Touch and spill and tangle. Her joy flew into a million glittering fragments. She could hear tinkling bells somewhere above her, a golden tintinnabulation that matched the sparkling light of the room, waterfalls of gold. Diamonds. It was the sound of diamonds she heard. But she saw gold, flowing in bright rivers.

  It was blue dark and quiet when she awoke. Her body was sore, her groin so tender she could hardly move her legs. Her breasts ached. Even the light satin bedsheet abraded her nipples. There was a throbbing in her womb. She remembered some of it now. The Russian, Andronov. He’d taken her. His skin was cold and hard as stone, corded with veins. Pale and translucent. His mouth was cruel.

  He had done more than violate her—he had made her want it. She remembered begging him to defile her, but it wasn’t desire she felt then. Only fear. He had taken her, teasing unwilling orgasms from her like a magician with a volunteer from the audience: an endless supply of climaxes, from here, from there, from anywhere he chose, until Nilu was weeping with exhaustion and the pleasure had turned to agony. Wave upon wave of profound sexual release, electric spasms crashing down upon her until it was the same as drowning. It came from outside her and rushed into her. It was terrifying, like snake poison. She felt herself dying, draining away. Her strong dancer’s muscles were torn and bruised, cramping from the paroxysms of release that flooded through her body.

  She was in ruins. He had literally fucked her half to death.

  Nilu rolled on her side and was sick on the floor. She’d been drugged, certainly. She had no idea where she was. A bedroom. She didn’t know where. There were shutters on the windows. Faint light crept between the slats. She could hear distant traffic sounds. She was still in the city. Perhaps still in Mallammanavar Jagadish’s mansion.

  Andronov was not there. She felt his absence. There was a power that radiated from him when he was around. It left behind a stale note, like ozone, when he was gone.

  It occurred to Nilu that he might return. Panic strobed in her mind. She tried to get out of the bed and fell to the floor instead, the sheets clinging to the vomit on the cool marble. She needed to find her clothes, or anything at all she could cover herself with. She was getting out of here, away from danger—wrapped in a curtain, if need be.

  She crawled to the wall, where the dark rectangle of a doorway loomed in the shadows. She pushed herself up the wall and her fingers found a switch. The room lit up behind her. Suddenly she knew he would be there, sitting naked in a chair with a drink in his hand, waiting for her. Then he would begin his attack again, and soon she would be dead.

  She spun around. The room was empty.

  There was the ring, sparkling on a side table. She stumbled across the floor on trembling legs and snatched up the bright circlet. It smelled like the Russian. Like the ocean, she remembered. Like wet earth. His mouth tasted of cold flint. Nilu cast the ring on the floor.

  There was a wardrobe against the wall. She made her way to it, lurching from one piece of furniture to the next, and was afraid to open it. Andronov was inside, waiting for her. She opened it despite her fear. A long white terry-cloth dressing gown hung inside, and wire hangers in paper jackets. She pulled the gown over her naked body, her arms sore and protesting as she thrust them into the sleeves.

  Nilu staggered, and sometimes crawled, and eventually made it outside. She was not in Jag’s palatial home; it was a private bungalow on the grounds of a large hotel she didn’t recognize. There were a dozen such cottages arranged at discreet distances from each other in a densely landscaped part of the property, a hundred meters removed from the main bulk of the hotel.

  There was a doorman beneath the brightly lit porte cochere of the hotel proper. Nilu thought to beg his help, but even now she held some faint hope that she could salvage her future. If she sought aid, she would be identified. She would become a sensation. The public would sympathize with her plight, a poor beautiful item girl drugged and raped by a foreign madman. But it would also label her a whore. Then she would have to remember where her home was, because it would no longer be Mumbai. She would have to live in what little of her past she could reclaim. The future would be gone.

  High walls surrounded the hotel grounds. There was night traffic beyond them. Nilu pulled the dressing gown tight around her and left the hotel by the driveway entrance, her bare feet slapping on the pavement.

  The police found the young woman lying in the street at three in the morning, dressed only in a white cotton robe. They transported her to Saint Mary’s Hospital near the Victoria Gate. She was not a beggar or a slum dweller. She was too well maintained, her hair handsomely cut. So they took good care of her at the hospital and placed her in a semiprivate room, in case her family should turn out to be wealthy.

  Nilu lay in her hospital bed and listened to the din of the Mumbai traffic coming in at the window. It was daylight. The room smelled of exhaust fumes and phenyle cleaning solution, a sweet tarry stink. Without turning her head, she could see an old-fashioned glass intravenous bottle on a chromium stand rising up on the right side of her bed, some sort of beige electronic machine on a cart to her left. There was a green curtain on a rail and a ceiling fan overhead. She couldn’t see the window itself, except as a bright patch beyond the flexion of her eyes. She couldn’t turn her head at all. Her neck had become stiff.

  Because there was nothing else to do except listen to the traffic in the street below and stare straight ahead at the wall, Nilu reassembled the events of the previous night and studied them in her mind. It was as if she had memorized individual pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle, their shapes and the fragments of pictures upon them, but the puzzle would not remain in its finished form. Each time she wished to examine the picture, it had to be rebuilt. There were pieces missing. She yearned to conjure them up but also feared them.

  The picture was ugly and terrifying, worse than the vividly painted tableau of the goddess Durga Maa she had found so fascinating when she was a child: opposing an army, the many-limbed deity sat astride a lion, her fists full of bloody weapons, the battlefield littered with dismembered corpses spewing gore that flowed like long hair.

  A nurse stepped into the room and the puzzle flew apart again. The woman crossed throug
h her field of vision, small and dark in a white half-sleeved smock and starched cap. The traffic noise diminished as the nurse closed the window and latched it. Nilu shut her eyes against a wave of pain from trying to turn her head. When she opened them, the nurse was gone. She hadn’t heard the door close. The blades of the ceiling fan were turning now, stirring the warm air. The darkness came then, and swallowed her up. She dreamed of hard, white bodies and probing fingers and long, snakelike tongues. She itched and burned. The Russian sucked at her flesh and she felt her soul draining away.

  It was nighttime again when Nilu returned to consciousness, flailing through slimy folds of nightmare back to the stifling-hot hospital room.

  Andronov was standing at the foot of her bed. Fear flooded her veins. His face was impassive, the flesh lifeless except for his eyes. He seemed about to speak but thought better of it. Instead, he glanced toward the door of the room, then stepped around the foot of the bed until he stood beside the chromium IV stand.

  Nilu was terrified, but she made no move or sound. He had come to kill her, she knew. She could not resist. Her life was his to take. Now he would finish the project.

  He stretched out his large, waxen hand and touched Nilu’s face, kneading the flesh like a doctor palpating for hidden flaws. Then he bore down, and the cold fingers became hard, and Nilu’s neck screamed with pain but there was no voice to it. Water spilled from her eyes. He had his cool palm across her nose and mouth. She began to suffocate. He stared into her eyes, and what she saw there was more terrible than hatred or glee. It was boredom. She forced her arms up and clawed at his fingers, but they were as unyielding as stone. Bursts of light filled her vision. Her empty lungs burned.