Page 5 of Runaway in the Mafia
AHANA
Istepped out of the shower, my body wrapped in a towel and my soul healing from the warmth.
Silence.
The frantic fluttering of my ‘caught in a cage’ heartbeat was slowing down. For the first time in four months, only external noises invaded my senses. A stream of Italian outside the window.Drip. Drip.The water fell from the shower head and hit the white-tiled floor inside the bathroom. But the manic pulse in my eardrums was gone. Almost as if it were a distant memory. A nasty nightmare from a past life.
The steamed mirror reflected an unfamiliar room. Sunflower yellow tiles on the wall. A lime and lemon printed shower curtain. It was all bright and cheerful. Nothing about it was the normal I was used to. If it were, I wouldn’t have been entitled to a warm shower. A rush of agitation spiked up, and my toes and fingers cramped as images popped in like a slide show of my dark memory. Him. Kicking me into the shower. The hardporcelain biting into the bruises on my body. Cold water hitting me like icicles.Whores like you need to cool off.
I crawled my way out of the dark memories. Shook my head violently, as if I could physically distance myself from it. I’d made a promise to myself, and I was sticking to it. I should find my happiness in simple things. Like a hot shower that had been a given in my life until it wasn’t... but without the lack of it...you wouldn’t know how to appreciate it,I told thedark-skinned girl staring back at me in the mirror.
I left the steam and the comforting aroma of my Frangipani oil behind in the bathroom, one of the only tangible reminders of a happier time. That, together with some papers and the locket around my neck, were all that I had left to hold on to my past life.
Memories I didn’t want crowded down on me as I padded to the closet and opened it. When I’d got this room, it had carried signs of a careless user. One who’d obviously been born to luxury and had never stepped out of it. If I backtracked to a few months ago, this could have been my room back home in Delhi. You never really appreciated anything until you lost it. Like I had learned to do with the simple things that crossed my path ever since. Because the darkness that had been in my life... I wasn’t going back to that. Desperation had made me follow the kind lady with the pretty smile. Ada. Her name alone had sounded like a little piece of heaven to me. That and an iron will and a promise to myself. I was going to move ahead with my life. I wasn’t going to let fate deter me this time, or my family.
But the truth behind this house had soaked into my skin the moment I stepped past the brightly painted front door. There was crime hidden within the pretty facade of this house. Invisible to the innocent naked eye, but behind the ivory walls and the old wooden window frames, secrets and sins crawled through it as sure as the ivy climbing the brick walls. It clung to it, and just like with ivy, even nipping it in the bud left a scarbehind it. I saw it in the odd brown stain on a white marble tile, a distorted round hole in the wall next to the entryway. Too small for a fist and too big for a nail. Above all, I saw it in the closed door leading to the office. Abandoned and quiet, it screamed of scandal and pain. Of blood and murder.
I should have run, but I stayed. The house was never empty. Men and women came in and out. Uninvited but always welcomed. Strangers all over the place and no lock to protect me. Especially from the men. They were handsome, no doubt, but the bulge in their suit pants wasn’t because they were happy to see me. They strolled in nonchalantly, ate home-cooked pasta on well-used chairs and played with fake guns and happy children, all the while concealing death within a breath’s distance tucked into their pants. The girl my parents brought up would have run for the hills, or rather, behind a strong, able man. But the new Ahana, the one that had been broken too many times, wasn’t alarmed. After all, there were worse things in life. Besides, a woman on the run needed an army to protect her. Why couldn’t that army be the Mafia then?
Strangely, aside from the guns and the whispers of past murders, this home and this family reminded me of mine. Not the fake one in London. My hand froze on a black dress. It was like it recalled memories of that prison. The fear. The agony. The cold disgust in his eyes. None of it seen by the world outside. No. Definitely not the one in London, but the one in Delhi. Family around each corner of my parents’ villa, a warm pot on the stove to feed an army, the laughter floating underneath the kitchen door and the traditions. Especially the traditions. Who would have thought? Indians and Italians had a lot in common. It didn’t merely stop at the letter I.
My Papa may have sent me to university and made sure I got a Master’s degree in Publicity and Marketing, but that was just to keep up with appearances. There were two importantthings that a well-reputed family like mine upheld in India. Appearances and social standards. The Master’s degree had nothing to do with education or advancing into a working woman. It had everything to do with how it would look on my bio data. Which would be used to find me a husband. I was a diamond that my parents had treasured up to the day they could give me away to a stranger. A diamond they polished by adding the Master’s to it, so next to the tall and fair characteristics, they could typeeducatedin dark bold letters, and in that lay the perfect marriage material. Ready to be handed over.
I wish I could say I was an exception. But when you come from a family like mine, having a Master’s was as common as going to kindergarten or coming home in stained clothes afterHoli. No one was naïve enough to believe the illusion. Not a single cousin of mine dreamed of working beyond that pretty degree.
Except me. I had. I wanted to work. I chose Publicity and Marketing over the usual IT degree because I had a passion for it. So I guess having a Master’s didn’t make you smart because I had been naïve.
A knock on the door broke the suffocating cloud of my memory.
I pulled myself out of the dark pit of past mistakes and found my hand clenched on that black dress. My hair was dry, and goosebumps rode on my skin. I forced my hand to unclench as I yelled in a voice that sounded far away, “Just a minute.” My hand crawled away from the black dress and the painful memories and picked up a bright yellow one. I donned it hurriedly before calling out to open the door.
Lia peeped in, her face swinging half into the room. “What are you up to?”
I couldn’t help the smile that pulled at my lips. I had known this girl for all of one week max, and she had already found herway to my heart. There was an innocent naivety to her and a cheerfulness that made everything seem happy. She was like a pretty doll. Beautiful, full of smiles and made to bring joy. At first, I had thought the secrets hanging on to the walls of this house hadn’t touched her. But sometimes she’d do something. Duck her head and let her shoulders slump. Or look into the distance with an inner rage that seared in her eyes. I had a feeling I saw the real Lia then. And the real Lia carried with her an undercurrent of sadness and frustration.
For a second, my chest panged. I was jealous. I wanted her skill to hide secrets instead of burning with them incessantly. I’d do anything to erase the past half a year of my life and go back to the day that my world started tilting. It had felt like the rug underneath me had been ripped apart when Maa told me, no, I wasn’t going to work, that in fact they had found me a good boy.A good boy,according to his parents and friends. But she made it sound like that was enough. My nephew, who lived in London, had met him already, and he had given his approval, so by the time Rajesh was introduced as potential husband material to me, it was clear that there was no potential about it. Everyone had met him and approved of him. They just neglected to ask me. The only person who’d share a house and a bed with him.
I’d said no then to Maa. I’d gathered all my courage and forced words out of my dry throat. But it was too late. Which she told me every single time I begged her to cancel it all. How could they do that when everyone knew? What would people think? That I wanted to have a say in who I married wasn’t a good excuse.They’d say your father hasn’t brought up his daughter well, Ahana.She always knew how to shut me up. I would do anything for Papa and when she brought in the embarrassment he would have to face and the risk to his weakening health, I did shut up.Forty per cent Ahana. That’s all he has of his heart function.We had never got along, Maa and I. But thatday, she proved her shrewdness. Again and again for every day that passed. She brought it up, constantly, until it was a ceaseless pinch on my skin. A pounding thump in my head, more prominent than my own heartbeat. Papa had an ejection fraction of forty per cent. Indication of heart failure. Avoiding stress was a matter of life and death.
I had allowed it all to happen. I’d been chaperoned all my life. I’d never been allowed to be with anyone but family. Then they gave me away, just like that, to a stranger with dazzling bio-data. On paper. They left me unprotected. Alone with him.
They had been wrong. I’d gone through this a million times in my head. Let those wheels churn with every action and reaction. Each time, I came to only one conclusion. I wanted a redo. There was nothing I wanted more in my life than this. Just one time. This time around, I wouldn’t change my mind. This time around, when Papa came to my room and asked me if I was happy with the choice, I wouldn’t lie. I’d tell him the truth, that I wasn’t happy, or at least go to my brothers and beg them to find me someone else. Anyone, just not him. I’d be the perfect daughter. I’d marry whoever they wanted me to. Just not the man I married because from day one, he made my skin crawl. Unfortunately, it wasn’t with yearning.
“Ugh…hello?”
I blinked and found Lia sprawled out on my bed. Well, her sister’s bed, who allegedly also had an arranged marriage and fell in love.With her husband.
“Sorry, what were you saying?”
She caught my eyes with a sympathetic smile. “You must miss your home, huh?”
My hand wrapped around my locket. I moved to the mirror. It stood against one corner of my room next to the doorway to the bathroom. I fussed with my hair, which didn’t need any fussing. It was always straight and always neat. I shook it free,and it hit my back in an elegant, long trail. I used the distraction to shrug away the panic seeping in my chest when I associated home with me. London was out of the question, for obvious reasons, and it had never been home. And Delhi separated me with lies and deception.Don’t lie, Ahana.The web had already ensnared me.
I caught her curious eyes in the mirror and lied, “Not really.”
There was a time when home had been love and comfort. A pang of disappointment sprang to life in my chest. They’d all decided he was the one for me. Even Papa. Couldn’t he have asked me before the whole of Delhi had approved him for me? I shrugged the weight of my past off and hoped Lia wouldn’t push for more information.
She didn’t. She was enthusiastic and friendly. But she felt the line, the one I stood behind, the protection I carried around me like armour, and even if she was curious, she didn’t push for information.
