“Okay.” Dimple nodded, and he let go of her hand. She began to flip the cover open again. He put a hand on hers. She looked at him, one eyebrow raised.
“One more thing. Don’t look just at what’s happening; look at the nuance. Like, notice the backgrounds in each panel. That’s important information; it’ll tell you more about what I had planned for the story. It’ll set the mood and everything.”
Dimple nodded again. “Okay.” Rishi let go of her hand, and she began to open the cover.
“Oh, and another th—”
“Rishi,” she said, turning so she could look him in the eye. “I have no expectations. Okay? None. Whatever’s in here, I’m not going to be judging. I just want to take it in.”
He studied her, the honesty in her eyes, the frank openness of her face, and his shoulders relaxed. “Okay.”
Dimple opened the sketch pad, and as she studied each panel, each sketch, each line he’d made, Rishi studied her. She smiled quietly at some sketches, others seemed to arrest her. Her gaze would travel over each line, over and over, and sometimes she’d pull the book closer. One she stopped and squinted at, the most curious mixture of disbelief, amusement, and wonder on her face. Rishi leaned in to see what she was looking at.
It was a panel he’d done around two years ago, of a boy of about ten or eleven making paper flowers out of a heap of crumpled pages while rain poured outside his window.
Rishi chuckled, the sound slow and deep in his head. “Paper flowers. I used to make those when I was that age. I don’t know why, but I was obsessed with them for a while. That panel was more like an exercise. I was feeling sluggish and empty that day.” It wasn’t nearly his best; he didn’t know why Dimple seemed so enthralled with it.
She turned to look at him, that same strange expression still on her face. Her entire body was frozen, still. “You made paper flowers. Out of magazines.”
He nodded, surprised. “How’d you know I did them out of magazine pages?”
“Don’t you remember?” Dimple shook her head, her eyes wide as she studied him. “Keep it. Remember me. And don’t tattle.”
And just like that, the memory slammed into him.
He’d been dragged along by Pappa and Ma to some Indian acquaintance’s wedding in San Diego. It was hot, and the wedding was outside. Ashish was being a baby, whining about being hungry, and his parents were bickering about something, and there were absolutely no activities for the kids to do, so Rishi told his parents he had to go to the bathroom and wandered off. His kurta had been a thick gold brocade, he remembered, and itchy as heck. His plan was to get inside the big hotel where it was cool and air-conditioned and find a T-shirt or something to wear. Maybe he’d steal it from an open room—that always seemed to work in the movies.
But when he got inside, Rishi saw the guests had commandeered the interior lobby too. There was no way to get past them and to the upstairs—there were caterers and waiters and nosy aunties and uncles everywhere. So he’d ducked into a room with a sign that said CONFERENCE ROOM A, whatever that was, and sat down on a chair in the semidark (just one lamp in the corner of the big room was on), grateful for the cool and quiet. There was a pile of magazines on the table in front of him, and Rishi began methodically ripping out pages as he sat, folding and turning them into flowers that he set in a line in front of him.
He’d gotten into the habit just months ago, having seen some special on TV. Rishi first tried it with one of Ma’s Bollywood magazines and found it weirdly compelling, not even minding that his fingers were constantly covered in paper cuts. Now he made roses and mums and lilies, the repetitive, familiar motion soothing.
He was on his third rose when he heard someone clear their throat. Startled, Rishi looked up at a small girl with wild hair. She sat on a high-backed armchair he hadn’t noticed in the corner of the room. A copy of A Wrinkle in Time was facedown in her lap, and her feet, sticking out from underneath her bright blue lehenga, didn’t touch the floor. She was staring at him through glasses that were too big for her narrow face. “Why are you ripping up those magazines? They’re not yours.” Her voice was high-pitched. It reminded him of Tinker Bell, a cartoon Ashish loved to watch, though he didn’t like to be teased about it. Rishi had learned that the hard way. He still had the bruise on his shin.
Rishi sat back, letting the rose fall from his fingers, and studied the tiny girl. She must be around his age, he decided, in spite of her unimpressive size. “You’re not a tattletale, are you?” he asked, in a way that implied (a) there was little he could think of that was worse than being one, and (b) she definitely looked like one.
“No,” the girl said immediately, almost before he was done speaking, pushing those oversize glasses up on her nose. “I was just asking.”
Rishi looked at her for another long moment, appraising. Then he said, “I’m bored.” And went back to rolling the paper for his next flower. “Why are you in here reading?”
The girl studied him for a minute before replying. “I’m bored too.”
Rishi nodded, but kept his eyes on his lily.
After a pause, the girl hopped off her chair and came up to the table, sidling into the chair across from him. Rishi watched her through his peripheral vision. She set her book carefully down, dog-earing a corner of her page with love. When that was done, she picked up a chrysanthemum and studied it closely, turning it this way and that. “I like it,” she pronounced finally, setting it back down and looking up at him. “How do you know how to do that?”
Rishi shrugged nonchalantly. “Picked it up.”
She nodded, curls bobbing. “Cool. Maybe you could teach me.”
“Nah, it’d take too long,” Rishi said. “Besides, your hands are too small.” Rishi wasn’t entirely sure this was true, but it wasn’t like the girl would know any better.
“Hey, that’s not—”
“Diiiiimple!”
The girl froze, looking toward the door. “That’s Mamma. I have to go.” She grabbed her book and began to slide off her chair, but right before she was completely out of reach, Rishi grabbed her wrist. She looked at him, confused.
He pressed the chrysanthemum into her small, sweaty hand. “Keep it,” he said, his gaze boring into hers like he’d seen Shah Rukh Khan do to a dozen different actresses in a dozen different Bollywood movies. “Remember me.” He paused. “And don’t tattle.”
The girl glanced down at the flower, and then up at him again. She nodded solemnly, like she understood the gravity of this moment. She wouldn’t tattle. Then, closing her fingers around the flower, she slipped out of the conference room, shutting the door quietly behind her.
CHAPTER 28