He put down his mug with a thud and stood up.
“I don’t know about you, sweet, but it’s killing me to think that Ajay Amir gets away scot-free while you have to kiss goodbye to everything you ever wanted. I want to pay him back.”
“Krish, don’t do anything hasty…”
“I’m just going out to do a bit of research. I think you should come with me.”
He beckoned her up from the couch and she followed him out to the street, now bare of crazed fans and photographers and back to its habitual terraced, blank-windowed mundanity.
“Why are we going to Nottingham?” asked Jas as the car bowled up the motorway across the flat, green plains of the East Midlands.
“I want to pay a call. I don’t like being dumped over the phone. I think I deserve a personal explanation, don’t you?”
“You’re going to see Anjali?”
“That’s right.”
“So, has she broken your heart?”
Krish chuckled, looking anything but heartbroken.
“No, she hasn’t. It wasn’t anything serious. I have this funny feeling I might have been targeted.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, she might have taken an interest in me because I was your brother. Or so she thought.”
“You think she’s that ambitious? She would use you to…I don’t know…get to me?”
“I don’t know anything, Jas. Just seems strange that she would be all over me when you were a threat to her, then drop me like a stone as soon as you weren’t.”
“Well, that makes her a bitch, but is it worth confronting her over?”
“Maybe, sweetheart, maybe.”
He keeps calling me ‘sweet’ and ‘sweetheart’. Is it because he feels sorry for me?
It was true that Jasmine’s whole world had shifted, her reality was up in the air, in fragments—but at the moment, as she drove along with Krish, things somehow didn’t seem so bad. She realised this was because she was in a sort of limbo, in between leaving the old hopes and dreams and discovering what lay beyond them, but limbo was good for now. Limbo was even better with Krishnan’s hand on the wheel and his reassuring, always-gorgeous-smelling, linen-suited presence beside her.
Goose Fair was still up on the field as they turned the corner into Anjali’s neighbourhood, but it was closed for the morning, looking monstrous and tangled in the light of day.
The car crawled up the hill, finding nowhere to park in the narrow streets until they located a small space a couple of roads away.
The neighbourhood, like Jas’ own, was distinctively Asian in character with a lively street life. Small children played with bikes and balls all over the pavements while their head-scarfed mothers chatted on the porches, keeping an eye out. Elderly men sat on their doorsteps watching the world go by while customers emerged from the local corner shop with bags of daikon radishes and Sindhi mangoes.
“Jasmeena!” one teenage girl called out from the corner of Anjali’s street, and her group of friends jingled across the road to crowd around her, chattering and quizzing, before Krishnan waved them away.
“Anjali will win anyway,” said one of them sulkily, slouching back to their little spot on the wall of the takeaway.
“I suppose they’re right,” said Jas briskly, following Krish through the gate to the front door of the tall, narrow, redbrick terrace that housed Anjali and her family.
Before they reached it, it was opened by a belligerent-looking bald man who stood, arms folded, staring forbiddingly at the pair of them.
“Anjali is out,” he said.
“Out where?”
“I don’t know. And she doesn’t want to see you anyway.”