Page 35 of Milk
“You are impossible!” I huffed.
We both laughed and shared a rare moment of intimacy and ease. I thought for a moment longer. What other innocent question could I ask this man?
“What’s your favorite food?”
Carter paused. His smile was gone. I didn’t understand, but he shook his head and, without explaining or answering, he got up.
“You should sleep. The mark is almost healed. Tonight you can come sleep in our room. I’ll meet you there.”
‘Our room?’Our? I was stunned. I watched Carter leave, then slowly turned, careful not to sit on my IV. After such a long time, days he had said, dozing off and on, my body simply didn’t want to stay awake. Yet, horny and thrilled, I repeated it in my head.
‘Our room.’ I was going to sleep in his room with him. Would we cuddle? Would he finally fuck me? God, I fucking wished.
Istopped in the corridor outside the infirmary room where Tiffany was being held. Her mark looked beautiful. Pink and pristine now that the scabs had peeled off. By tonight, she would be able to come back to our shared room. Yet, her last question stuck with me. My favorite food.
Tikka Masala. NotanyTikka Masala, but the one I got from that lovely restaurant on that street in Delhi, close to my apartment. The smell, the chaos of the traffic, the sounds. Everything about India brought me so much happiness, and yet, it filled me with a bittersweet sorrow.
It all started when, at nineteen, I left my father’s farm in Vermont to travel the world. First with daddy’s money, then panhandling, hitchhiking, and making rich friends. Life was easy for a handsome, rich, white boy, even easier for someone who knew how to charm others. Italy, Greece, then Turkey and Lebanon; I did the rich kid route through Europe and Asia before I went into the grittier parts of the world: Iran, Kazakhstan, Indonesia and the Philippines. I spent six months working as a fisherman, a couple of years working as a bodyguard for a trucker through Southeast Asia with my pistol on my side, ready to scare away would-be robbers. At twenty-one, I finally landed in India.
I never wanted to leave. The sheer connected spirituality of the place, the people, the colors, the food, and the sounds was a feast for the senses and the soul. The longer I was there, the deeper I fell in love with the country. By then, my father was writing to me, calling me, sending people to deliver me messages by hand, asking me to return. For eight years, I said ‘no.’ I wasn’t sure if I would ever come back to America at that point. Every year I wondered if I was ready to leave and every year my desire to stay in India grew.
I had girlfriends there and good friends. I knew the owners of every shop and restaurant on my street by name. I knew their children and spouses too. I would travel to other cities, do odd jobs, and whenever I was short on cash, there were always some American businessmen willing to pay me thirty thousand dollars to be his India Guide for a week. That was enough for my cheaprent and food for a year. It was a vagabond’s life, yes, but it was mine. I was happy.
Happy until I got my father’s last message at twenty-nine, when I was considering asking my girlfriend of five years, Pria, to marry me. My father was dying of cancer. Stage four colon cancer specifically. Since it was so aggressive, he was given three months to live. He asked me to spend a little bit of that time with him. The choice seemed easy. I would fly to America, keep my dying father company at his bedside, and then return to India after selling my inheritance. I would ask Pria to marry me then and there, or maybe bring her to America. The details could vary, but there was no reason for me not to go.
Oh, I was so very wrong.
The true extent of my father’s deception did not fully dawn on me when I first landed back in America or when his private jet took us to the family farm. Things were going well for us, financially. We were never truly poor, but I could see how much investment the business had been getting in my absence. I wondered if my father was trying to dazzle me into returning. The truth of it was far darker. He wasn’t sick, but had another death clock above his head. Killing him wouldn’t help – he made that clear. I would inherit that terrible debt from him in the event of his passing.
“I gave you time, Carter. I let you go gallivanting across Asia, thinking you needed to get it off your system. Get some Vietnamese pussy, go to town on some lady-boy in Thailand, or go snuggle with the monks,” he’d said, crude as always, as he led me down the tunnels to the facility. I was so offended at his condescending tone, that I didn’t even process where we were going. “But it seems like you got a bit enamored in your fantasy, so I had to bring you here. I had to show you the truth.”
“So you fucking lied,” I snarled, obviously pissed. “Played on my compassion to get me here for what?”
He hadn’t once apologized or shown remorse for uprooting my life with a lie. No, his focus was on my failings as a son. I felt something twisting in my stomach as I followed him down the tunnel. After this, I was getting on the first bus or train out of town, then the first flight I could get back to India. He had no power over me.
But something about my father chilled my spine. He had a confident smirk, as if he knew my plan and knew it would fail. I thought it was a mistake or a ruse. Whatever he tried to show me to keep me here wouldn’t work. I doubted anything in the world would make me stay with this man. Nothing would keep me away from India.
I was thinking about the Tika Masala from the corner restaurant when the door opened and I saw how deeply mistaken I was. The horror in front of me soured every happy memory I owned. The experiments. The failures. The pain. Then my father told me about his business partner, his deal, my cursed inheritance, his debt and my role in it. He tossed pictures at me. Pria and me in India.
“Did you have someone follow me there?” I asked, not too surprised.
“No. I didn’t take those,” my father said. “Not my men.Hismen. My legacy is yours, whether you want it or not.”
“Why are you telling me all this? Showing me all this?”
“I told you, this is your business too. Your little vacation is over, Carter. It’s time to man up. It’s time to take your place by my side.”
“But father-”
“I don’t want to hear about that little exoticpoonyou got there, and how ‘she’s the one’. You are home now. You are going to stay home.”
“Don’t talk about her like that!” I shouted.
Her. Pria.
Pria would be a part of it if she had been alive. Maybe it was kindness that she wasn’t. No.
Nothing my father ever did could be kindness, not even by accident. It was my fault Pria had died. Not because I flew her in to meet my father, it was because I met her. The second I loved her, when she loved me, her life was gone. Forsaken. I’d thought, for a brief moment, I might have it all.
