Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
“I ’m sorry,” Nisha said, sniffling. “I hate being seen like this. Especially by you .”
“Says the woman who’s using my jacket as her own personal Kleenex,” Arjun replied.
She laughed weakly. “I’m sorry,” she said again. She swabbed her red-tipped nose with Arjun’s collar.
“It’s all right.” Without thinking, he wiped the tears from her cheeks with his thumb. “We don’t have to talk about it, if you don’t want to.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I can tell you.” His arm was still wrapped around her. She looked around the office. “Can it not be here, though?”
He nodded and stood, then helped her to her feet. “Come on,” he said. “I know just the place.”
“Are you sure you didn’t bring me here to murder me?” Nisha asked, panting as she hiked up the steep hill behind Arjun.
“Why would I want to murder you?” he laughed.
“I don’t know. Finally get that office to yourself?”
He smiled. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
They arrived at a large wooden sign that said, in bright-white letters, BUENA VISTA PARK. Nisha groaned, staring up at the incline ahead of them. “Another hill?”
“Come on,” said Arjun, extending a hand behind him. She took it and followed him up.
Stairs roughly hewn from wood ascended to the top of a massive hill. Eucalyptus and oak trees towered over the hillside; cypress bushes crept along the meandering, sand-swept paths. The air here smelled sacred, prehistoric, as though this place had been here forever and would continue to be long after the city below fell away. “I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this place before,” said Nisha, craning her neck to look up at the trees. “It’s like a forest in the middle of the city.”
“And we’re not even at the best part yet,” said Arjun. “Come on, we’re almost there.”
They continued forward through a tunnel made of dark-green foliage. Finally, the dense canopy parted, and the steel-colored sky became visible through the trees. They had reached the summit, an expansive meadow laced with dirt trails. There was an old wooden bench in the shadow of a tall cypress tree, and Arjun and Nisha sat.
San Francisco unfurled before them, the vista framed by branches. Arjun could see almost the entire city: skyscrapers huddling in the distance, rows of houses washed in pastels—muted purples and warm yellows, baby blues and terra-cotta reds. The Golden Gate stood tall against the sky, the rusty red bridge winding a curve around the distant green hills. Sunlight glinted off the dark waters of the bay. Nisha shook her head in wonder. “Wow.”
“This is my favorite place in the city,” Arjun told her, leaning back and draping his arm over the back of the bench. “When things get overwhelming, I come to this park and just sit for a while.” He looked at her. “I can sit here with you, if you want. Or I can let you be alone.”
Nisha shook her head. “Stay.” Arjun’s right hand was resting on his thigh, and she laid her hand on his and gave it a squeeze.
Birds chittered in the trees. Across the park, Arjun heard a little girl shrieking in delight, being chased by her brother. Wildflowers dotted the hillside, purple and yellow and orange, and Arjun saw a jewel-green hummingbird darting between the petals.
He took a deep breath. Her hand was still resting on top of his. He glanced over at her and saw that her eyes were closed. It looked almost as though she was meditating.
He had nearly forgotten what Nisha looked like in the daylight. She was beautiful, the sharp line of her nose limned in sunlight. Arjun heard a new sound now: his own heartbeat, a metronome keeping time against the whispering breeze.
Finally, she broke her silence. “I miss it,” she said. “Being a writer, I mean. I grew up devouring romance novels: Jane Austen, the Bront? sisters, basically anything from Harlequin. My favorite, though, was Edith Wharton. Have you ever read The Age of Innocence? ”
Arjun shook his head. “I can’t say that I have.”
“Anyway…she had a way of creating characters that felt so real , you know? Like they could walk off the page and exist in our world, just like you and me. All my life, I wanted to write books like that.”
“You did,” Arjun told her. “Nisha, I’ve never read anything like The Kiss of Eternity .”
She smiled softly. “It only took me three months to write,” she said, her voice swelling with pride. “It just poured out of me, Arjun. Like it wasn’t me writing it; it was like a ghost was driving my fingers over the keyboard.”
She paused, and when she stared out into the distant hills, it was like she was staring not across space but across time— viewing the past version of herself as through a fogged window. “Do you know what I do now?”
He shook his head.
“I sit at my computer—and I just wait. Sometimes, I stare at the document for hours, just watching the cursor blink. Like a candle sputtering until, finally, it goes out.” Arjun saw a tear glittering in the corner of Nisha’s eye. “I don’t have it anymore, Arjun,” she said. Her voice sounded far away, like it was coming from across the bay.
“The married me, she was the writer,” Nisha continued. “ She was the one who could draft up a manuscript in a few weeks, the one whose head was swimming with ideas. You can’t conjure emotions out of thin air; they have to come from somewhere. When I was with my ex-husband, I had a love story that was all mine. It was a deep well of emotions to draw on, and I channeled it all into The Kiss of Eternity. When I got a divorce, that well dried up. And seeing that book now reminds me of everything I lost.”
She sighed. “After the split, I wanted to get as far away from Denver as possible, so I took the first out-of-state job I could find. Part of me thought San Francisco would be a reset for me. A way to get back to where I was. But I still feel irretrievably broken.”
Arjun shook his head. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
Nisha shrugged. “I’m never getting married again,” she told him, her voice full of steely determination. “I mean, if you really believe in true love, it means you don’t believe in second chances, either. And, if you don’t believe in love at all anymore—then what’s the point?”
“The past is the past,” said Arjun, wishing that he could take his own advice. “And, it’s just a feeling I have, but maybe San Francisco is the place to find what you’re looking for. Being here could help remove whatever blockage is stopping you from writing.”
Nisha smiled wanly. “That’s a nice thought, Arjun. But San Francisco is just a city.”
He shook his head. “You’re wrong, Nisha,” he told her. He pointed off into the distance. “They call this place ‘The Golden City,’” he said. “Maybe it’s because, for a long while, there really was gold in these hills. Or maybe it’s because of the bridge, or the way the sunlight seems to gild the streets in the early evening. But do you know what the real treasure is here?”
Nisha’s green eyes sparkled like distant stars. “What is it?”
“ Opportunity ,” he said. “Because San Francisco, more than anywhere else in the world, is a place where people come to make their own destiny. From the gold rush to gay rights, to the startup boom: whatever the future holds for you, this is the best place to grab life by the ears and take it where you want to go.”
Arjun looked into Nisha’s eyes, as green as life itself. “There really is magic here. You just have to look for it.”
Her breath made a small white cloud in the air. Arjun was suddenly aware of how close they were. He could feel the warmth of her body, could smell the citrus scent of her hair. Was it just him, or was she leaning closer? He felt his pulse quicken, felt his breath catch in his chest.
“I’m getting an arranged marriage,” he blurted. “I haven’t told anyone. But it’s happening.”
Nisha nodded. “Okay,” she said.
She turned towards the city, and she rested her head on his shoulder. For a long while, she and Arjun just sat there on that bench, admiring the view.