Fanfic: Talisman - Kalinda, Leela/OFC, Leela/Nick
Title: Talisman
Author: Schwarmerei1
Fandom: The Good Wife
Characters: Kalinda, Leela/OFC, Leela/Nick
Rating: M for adult content rather than sex
Warning: This contains suggestions of abuse and honour killing
Word Count: 1,800
Disclaimer: I mean no disrespect, CBS and the Kings own them
Summary: Kalinda - the things she owns and why
Written for the sweetjamielee "It's a Lockhart-Gardner Tradition" 2012 Summer Ficathon from the demoka prompt: Alicia/Kalinda - worship
A very lateral thinking take on the prompt, because the second thing that came to my mind is that Archie Panjabi’s full name Archana means worship. Then my mind wandered... And it’s not A/K, except that everything about Kalinda is about Alicia these days.
Kalinda did not like stuff. Stuff did not pass its expiration date in her pantry. She bought only what she ate and ate what she bought. When something she owned broke or wore out, it became stuff to her and she got rid of it. Her closet had no upper shelves filled with clothes she used to wear and might again someday. If she did not use it, she gave it away.
Kalinda did however like things, some things. Things were useful to her. And they could be useful in a practical sense like a car or shampoo. Or they could useful to her because they gave her pleasure like tequila or a beautiful piece of furniture. Sometimes they were could be both, like her boots and her jackets and her orange notebooks.
Things could also be symbolic. And because Kalinda did not keep stuff, the few things in her life were able to be seen and remind her why she chose to have them without disappearing under clutter.
_________
When Alicia got rid of her, Kalinda’s first instinct after the shock was Sophia. Sophia was casual and easy in all the ways that Alicia was constant and difficult. But then the new job rebounded on her and so did Sophia. Kalinda did not believe that the universe sent messages intentionally, but when something happened, you should pay attention.
So the day after she left Sophia in the hotel room she bought herself a ring and slid the solid band of silver around her thumb to remind her. It would remind her that her actions had consequences, ones that might not be known for years. And it would remind her to not discount pieces of knowledge because they didn’t seem important. Sophia was casual and easy. For all Kalinda knew Sophia had an arrangement with her husband who was hardly ever around and there wasn’t any broken trust. What propelled Kalinda out of that hotel room was not the fact that Sophia was married, but that she had forgotten that she had ever known it. She’d become a lazy cop who focused too early on a suspect and pitted evidence that didn’t fit his theory.
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When Kalinda had run from Toronto the first thing she did was find a place to hole up in and become Kalinda. The first thing she bought that was not a necessity was her necklace. She chose a horseshoe not because she wanted to be lucky, but to remind herself that she already was lucky. She was lucky to have gotten away, lucky to have had the mental strength to leave, lucky to have herself to rely on. And getting out had been her plan since she was seventeen, although the plan at that time had been different.
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When Leela became Kalinda she burned down Nick’s house. Kalinda took only two things with her besides the clothes she was wearing and the contents of small bag. One belonged to Nick, it was a check for $21,000. It was to be Kalinda’s insurance. If she were ever against the wall she would cash it, buy a plane ticket to a far off country and start over a second time. But Kalinda found her feet and never had to use it. The other belonged to Leela and it was the thing she had owned the longest. She didn’t buy it for herself, it had been given to her.
When Leela was seventeen she had a plan. She also had someone she loved, such as one could love a person when you were that old. But sometimes you could and Leela loved a girl called Priyanka and Priyanka loved her back. One day when they were both seventeen they went to a market together. Leela bought a ring for Priyanka with a design of a silver swan because that was the symbol of Saraswati and if ever someone was wise, studious and top of their class at St Mary’s it was Priyanka. Priyanka bought Leela a ring with a design of a sun, because “that’s you,” she said. “Fiery, beautiful, you nourish me and I worship you.” When Priyanka told her that, Leela was embarrassed that she’d been so literal in her choice for Priyanka.
Later, alone in Priyanka’s bedroom when her parents were out shopping they put the rings on each others’ middle fingers (not their ring fingers because everyone would have known then) and kissed each other and then made love. When Leela was seventeen that was what she called it to herself, because that was what it felt like. Afterwards as they held each other and looked at their fingers intertwined Priyanka whispered to her “Do you know how lucky we are to have found each other?”
Leela and later Kalinda could never think of those words without feeling like someone’s hand was closing around her throat.
Because Priyanka was a good girl, she was above suspicion. She was top of their year and would get the A levels she needed to study medicine and become a doctor. Because Priyanka was above suspicion even someone like Leela was allowed to spend time with her. Leela who had obviously hatched from a cuckoo’s egg and even if her parents could not say how she was not made right, they still instinctively knew. But because Priyanka was above suspicion, Leela was allowed to spend time with her alone at her house, in the library after school, on the bus each day back and forth from St Mary’s. And Leela learned from her. That being quiet and going unnoticed allowed you to make a plan that would get you away and let you be who and what you wanted to be once you pulled it off. A plan would help you get what you wanted in the way that countless small acts of defiance with a spray can or a cricket bat would not. So together they planned how they would get away, go to university, live in a little flat together, be able to earn their own money, not have to depend on their families and the endless web of cousins and uncles and ties of kinship, obligation and the one right way to be.
Leela was not above suspicion and because of that she was always cautious. When she had been younger her rebellion had gotten her into trouble. When she got older she learned to take care not to get caught. But because Priyanka was above suspicion she never needed to be careful, no one was watching to see if she slipped up. But people did watch Leela. So one day when they were waiting for the bus home from school and Priyanka put her arms around Leela’s neck and then kissed her, the person who drove past in his car was someone who knew Leela and also knew her father.
When they climbed off the bus at their stop both their fathers were waiting for them. When Leela’s father seized her arm and dragged her towards their house she looked around and could see that Priyanka’s father was doing the same thing. That was the last time she saw Priyanka.
While Leela sat in a chair in their kitchen, her mother sobbed and her father called her every name he could think of. Upstairs she could hear the sounds of furniture being moved and an electric drill being used. Eventually she was dragged up the staircase and shoved into the bedroom she used to share with her younger sister and heard the sound of a padlock being snapped shut. Where her little sister’s bed had stood was a bare patch where the carpet was pressed flat.
The next day Leela’s brother opened the door, and placed the local newspaper inside. Buried a few pages in was the story of an accidental death of a promising student at St Mary’s who had fallen in the shower and hit her head. It included a warning to take care of slips and falls in bathrooms and other tiled areas. Leela was too numb to cry and even though she felt so cold she thought her bones would crack she didn’t think to pull the blankets of her bed over her.
Two weeks later her mother opened the door, took Leela to the bathroom and told her to shower. When she was finished her mother made her dress and took her and a suitcase of her clothes downstairs. Sitting in their kitchen and drinking tea with her father was Nick.
Leela knew who Nick was. Nick was an octopus with tentacles that stretched across the oceans from Canada to England to India and twisted them around things like construction rorts and loan sharking. Someone in Leela’s family owed him money, in the way that there was always someone in the family who owed someone money. People knew who Nick was, and they also knew the other things he did. Which was why the time Leela saw Nick two years earlier in her uncle’s kitchen accepting an envelope of money and saw his leer when he looked at her, her skin had crawled.
Leela watched her father give Nick a birth certificate that said Leela was eighteen, a certificate of marriage (Leela had never been to a registry office, but someone who looked like an eighteen year old Indian girl had) and a passport. They shook hands. And that was how Leela became Nick’s to do with whatever he wanted.
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Priyanka was the reason Leela’s ring was the only thing of Leela's Kalinda kept. And her ring was the reason she chose the name Kalinda to call herself because Priyanka was the only part of Leela that Kalinda wanted to keep.
Author’s note: I know this is culturally stereotyping (in a way that sort of makes my head hurt), but honour killings do happen in the UK (about a dozen women a year) and not only in Muslim families. And homosexuality is still a massive cultural taboo in Indian society.
And in case you're not the sort of person who went and looked it up when you got obsessed by the show, Kalinda means "the sun."