Secrets of a Bollywood Marriage

Dev stopped toweling his hair when he thought he heard a whimper. He glanced at the bed. Tina was huddled in the middle with the twisted bedsheets cocooned around her.

“Tina?” Was she having another nightmare? She’d said she didn’t get them anymore. Dev rushed to the bed and saw that she held her hand over her face. It wasn’t a bad dream. She would thrash and kick out. Scream. At the moment she didn’t seem to have the energy to move. “Tina, what’s wrong?”

She grimaced and scrunched her eyes closed. “I don’t feel well.”

He remembered she’d had a stomachache last night. He’d thought it had been from the stress of dealing with Shreya. Tina was rarely ill and she hadn’t shown any signs of pain during the night.

“Was it the khichri?”

She opened one eye. “My khichri heals stomachaches, it doesn’t create them.”

He smiled at her offended tone. No one questioned her cooking. “Did you have anything at the party?”

“No.”

He tried to remember what she’d had the day before. She had visited her mother but he remembered the number one rule with Reema Sharma’s cooking: avoid it at all costs. Tina would know that. She once told him she’d learned how to cook as a matter of survival.

But there was one thing Tina couldn’t refuse when she visited that side of Mumbai. “Did you eat street food when you went to your mother’s?”

“Of course I did,” she said as she wrapped her arms around her stomach. “They have the best chaat.”

He placed his hand on her forehead. She looked pale but her skin wasn’t warm to the touch. “What did you have to eat?”

“Samosas,” Tina said and swallowed hard, as if the thought made her nauseated. “And channa chaat. I also had some of Meera’s dahi puri....”

He shook his head. “And you wonder why you’re not feeling well. If they were anything like the chaat stalls we’ve visited, you probably have food poisoning.”

She gradually opened her eyes. “I don’t think it’s the food.”

He didn’t know what else it could be and he wasn’t going to take any chances. Dev knew he was being overprotective but he hated seeing Tina in pain. “Come on,” he said as he reached for her hands. “Let’s get you to the doctor.”

She flinched and jerked back to avoid his touch. “No!”

He stared at Tina as her voice echoed in the large bedroom. He saw the hunted look in her dark eyes and the fear etched across her face. She was shutting him out again.

“I see,” Dev said as he slowly straightened to his full height, the pain radiating from his body. The hope shriveled inside once he realized nothing had changed between them.

“I don’t want a doctor,” she said quietly, unable to meet his gaze. “I hate hospitals.”

“No,” he corrected her, his voice cold and stiff as the biting hurt slashed his chest, “you don’t want me to help you.”

“That’s not it.”

“You don’t want my name or my protection. My connections? Yes. My concern? No.” Dev’s tone was harsh. “Now I’m not even allowed to look after you when you’re sick?”

Tina weakly closed her eyes. “I don’t know why I did that.”

“I do.” She was rejecting his help again. Rejecting him. “You trust me when I tell you I didn’t have an affair with Shreya. You trust me enough to share your bed, your body. But when it comes to taking care of you, you can’t trust me at all.”

“It was just a reaction,” she explained. “I wasn’t thinking about it.”

That made it worse. Dev clenched his jaw as he fought back the rising tide of anger.

“Go back to sleep, Tina,” he said wearily as he took a step away from the bed. “I’ll have Sandeep bring something up for you. He’ll check up on you throughout the day.”

“Where are you going?”

“Out.” Any other time, he would have thought she sounded like a wife. But he knew the concern wasn’t for him.

“Dev?”

There was something about her tone that pierced through his anger. Dev stopped at the bathroom door and looked over his shoulder. Her back was turned away from him. It was a familiar sight. “What is it, Tina?”

There was a long pause before she spoke. “Would you...stay...with me? Please?” she asked. She said the words slowly, as if they were dragged out from her. “I want you to look after me. No one else.”

It wasn’t true. She’d rather curl up in a dark corner alone than ask for help. Dev knew she was doing this for him. And yet she acted as if she expected he would reject her. What had he done to make her think that?