Читать книгу The One She Was Warned About - Шома Нараянан - Страница 9

ONE

‘That,’ Priya said, pointing dramatically, ‘is the hottest man I have ever seen in my life.’

It was the first evening of their annual office convention and Shweta was already exhausted. The flight from Mumbai to Kerala was short, but it had been very early in the morning and she’d not slept much. Then the day had been crammed with intensely boring presentations that she’d had to sit through with a look of rapt attention on her face.

‘At least look at him!’ Priya was saying, and Shweta looked in the direction of her pointing finger.

A jolt of recognition made her keep staring for a few seconds, but there was no answering gleam in the man’s eyes—clearly he didn’t remember her at all. Not surprising, really. She’d changed quite a bit since they’d last met.

She shrugged, turning away. ‘Not my type.’

Priya gave her a disbelieving stare. ‘Delusional,’ she said, shaking her head sadly. ‘You’re so out of touch with reality you can’t tell a hot man from an Excel spreadsheet. Talking of spreadsheets—that’s one guy I’d like to see spread on my sheets...’

Shweta groaned. ‘Your sense of humour is pathetic,’ she said. ‘Every time I think you’ve reached rock-bottom you find a spade and begin to dig.’

Priya took a swig from her glass of almost-neat vodka. ‘Yours isn’t much better,’ she pointed out. ‘And, pathetic sense of humour or not, I at least have a boyfriend with a pulse. Unlike that complete no-hoper Siddhant...’

‘Siddhant is not...’ Shweta began to say, but Priya wasn’t listening to her.

‘Ooh, he’s looking at you,’ she said. ‘I bet you can’t get him to come and talk to you.’

‘Probably not. I’m really not interested.’ The man had given her a quick glance, his brows furrowed as he obviously tried to place her.

‘You’re a wuss.’

‘This is childish.’ She’d changed a lot since he’d last seen her—if he’d recognised her he’d have definitely come across.

‘Bet you a thousand rupees.’

Shweta shrugged. ‘Sorry, not enough. That pair of shoes I saw last week cost...’

‘OK, five thousand!’

‘Right, you’re on,’ Shweta said decisively.

The man across the room was looking at her again. Shweta took a comb and a pair of spectacles out of her purse. By touch she made a middle parting in her hair and, with little regard for the artfully careless style she’d spent hours achieving, braided it rapidly into two plaits. Then she scrubbed the lipstick off her lips with a tissue and put on the spectacles. She still had her contact lenses in and the double vision correction made everything look blurry.

Even so, Priya’s look of horror was unmistakable.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she hissed. ‘You look like the Loch Ness monster. Where did you get those spectacles from? They’re hideous!’

Shweta cut her off, nodding at the man, who was now purposefully headed in their direction. ‘Mission accomplished,’ she said, and Priya’s jaw dropped.

She was still gaping at him as he came up to them. Close up, he was even more breathtaking—over six feet tall, and exuding an aura of pure masculinity that was overwhelming. He was looking right at Shweta, and the quirky, lopsided smile on his perfectly sculpted mouth made him practically irresistible.

‘Shweta Mathur!’ he said. ‘My God, it’s been years!’

He’d thought she looked familiar, but until she’d put on the spectacles he’d had no clue who she was. It was fifteen years since he’d seen her last—they’d been in middle school then, and if Shweta had been the stereotypical hard-working student, he’d been the stereotypical bad boy. He hadn’t changed much, but Shweta had blossomed. She’d always had lovely eyes, and with the spectacles gone they were breathtaking, drawing you in till you felt you were drowning in them.... Nikhil shook himself a little, telling himself he was getting over-sentimental as he neared his thirtieth birthday. But the eyes were pretty amazing, even if you looked at them with a completely cynical eye. Her features were neat and regular, her skin was a lovely golden-brown, and even in her prim black trousers and top her figure looked pretty good. Somewhere along the line she’d even learnt how to use make-up—right now, in her bid to make him recognise her, she’d scrubbed off all her lipstick, and the vigorous treatment had made her unexpectedly lush lips turn a natural red.

‘Hi, Nikhil,’ Shweta said, holding her hand out primly.

Nikhil disregarded it, pulling her into his arms for a hug instead.

Shweta gave a little yelp of alarm. She’d recognised Nikhil the second she’d seen him—the slanting eyebrows and the hint of danger about him were pretty much the way they had been when they were both fourteen. But back then his shoulders hadn’t been so broad, nor had his eyes sparkled with quite so much devilry. There was something incredibly erotic about the feel of his arms around her and the clean, masculine scent of his body. Shweta emerged from the hug considerably more flustered than before.

‘You cheated!’ Priya wailed. ‘You crazy cow, you didn’t tell me you knew him!’

Nikhil raised his eyebrows. ‘Does it matter?’

Priya turned to him, eager to vent her ire on someone. ‘Of course it bloody does. You looked at her a couple of times and I bet her five thousand she wouldn’t be able to get you to come across and introduce yourself. She should have said she knew you.’ She glared at Shweta. ‘You’re not getting that five grand.’

‘Fine. And the next time your mother calls me to ask where you are I’ll tell her the truth, shall I?’

Shweta and Priya shared a flat, and Shweta had spent the last six years making up increasingly inventive excuses to explain Priya’s nights away from the flat every time her mother called to check on her.

Priya’s eyes narrowed. ‘Wait till I catch you alone,’ she said, and flounced off in deep dudgeon.

Nikhil grinned and tweaked Shweta’s hair as she shook it out of the braids. ‘Still not learnt how to play nicely, have you?’

Oh, God, that took her back to her schooldays in an instant. And the feel of his hands in her hair... Shweta shook herself crossly. What was wrong with her? She had known Nikhil Nair since kindergarten, when both of them had been remarkably composed four-year-olds in a room full of bawling children. They’d grown up together, not always friends—in fact they’d fought almost constantly. A dim memory stirred of other girls sighing over him as they reached their teens, but she didn’t remember thinking he was good-looking. Maybe she’d been a particularly unawakened fourteen-year-old. Looking at him now, she couldn’t imagine how she had ever been impervious to him.

He was still laughing at her, and she tossed her head. ‘And you are quite as annoying as you ever were,’ she said, realising that she was willing him to comment on her hugely improved looks since the last time he’d seen her. He was looking at her intently, and as his gaze lingered around her mouth she wished she hadn’t rubbed off the lipstick. She put up her hand self-consciously. Given her general clumsiness, she’d probably smudged the stuff all over her face and now looked like Raju the circus clown.

He smiled slightly. ‘It’s all gone,’ he said, and then, almost to himself, ‘Little Shweta—who’d have thought it...? You’re all grown-up now.’

‘You haven’t shrunk either,’ she blurted out, and then blushed a fiery red.

Thankfully he didn’t come back with a smart retort. ‘I lost track of you after I left school,’ he said instead, his eyes almost tender as they rested on her face.

Ha! Left school! He’d been expelled when the headmaster had found him smoking behind the school chapel.

‘What have you been doing with yourself?’

‘Nothing exciting,’ she said ‘College, then a chartered accountancy course. Shifted from Pune to Mumbai. And I’ve been working here ever since.’ The ‘here’ was accompanied by a gesture towards the stage, where her firm’s logo was prominently and tastelessly displayed. ‘How about you? How come you’re here?’

She didn’t know everyone who worked in the firm—actually, she didn’t know more than two or three of the people from the Delhi office—but she would have bet her last rupee that Nikhil hadn’t buckled to convention and become an accountant. School gossip had pegged him as the boy most likely to become a millionaire—it had also estimated that he was the one most likely to go to jail. Not because he was a cheat or a thief, but he had always had a regrettable tendency to get into fist fights.

‘I’m helping organise the convention for your firm,’ he said.

Shweta looked surprised. ‘You work with the event management company, then?’ she asked. ‘Leela Events?’

Nikhil nodded. ‘Sort of,’ he said.

Leela Events was big, and organised everything from Bollywood movie launches to corporate bashes. This was the first time her firm had engaged them, but she remembered the HR director saying that it had been quite a coup getting them in for a relatively small event.

The doors of the banquet hall opened and Nikhil touched her briefly on the arm. ‘I’ll catch up with you in a bit,’ he said. ‘I need to go and start earning my living.’

Shweta watched him go, her senses in turmoil. She had never been affected so strongly by a man, and even all the alarm bells clanging in her head weren’t enough to stop her wanting to pull him back to her side.

‘He owns Leela Events,’ Priya said, reappearing by her side. ‘Hot and loaded. If you’re thinking of making a play for him, now’s the time.’

Shweta turned away, coming abruptly back to earth. She should have guessed that Nikhil wouldn’t be working for someone else. Owning a company at twenty-nine. Wow! So, definitely on the millionaire path, then—if he wasn’t one already.

‘I’m with Siddhant,’ she said, her tone turning defensive as Priya raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, kind of....’

Siddhant Desai was the youngest partner in the accounting firm Shweta worked for. They had been dating for a while, and things were on the verge of getting serious, though Siddhant hadn’t actually popped the question yet.

‘Don’t marry him,’ Priya said impulsively. ‘He’s beady-eyed and boring and he...’ She wound to a stop as Shweta glared at her. ‘He’s just not right for you,’ she said lamely.

‘I don’t want to discuss it,’ Shweta snapped, but she had a niggling feeling that Priya was right. She’d never pretended even to herself that she was in love with Siddhant, but he was nice, her father would approve of him, and she’d thought that she could make it work. Of late, though, he’d begun to get on her nerves with his constant carping and complaining if things didn’t go exactly as he’d planned.

‘Talk of the devil...’ Priya said, and made herself scarce as Siddhant came up to join Shweta.

He was good-looking in a conservative kind of way, and right now he was in an excellent mood. Shweta gave him a critical look. He was safe, she decided. That was what had drawn her to him. But safe could be boring sometimes....

‘Sweetheart, you shouldn’t be drinking that muck,’ he said, smiling at Shweta and trying to take her glass away from her. ‘Let me get you a proper drink.’

‘Apple juice is a proper drink,’ Shweta said, stubbornly holding on to her glass. She never drank at office parties—alcohol had the effect of disastrously loosening her tongue. There was a very real risk of her mortally offending a senior partner and finding herself without a job. ‘Look, they’re about to begin,’ she said, pointing at the stage to distract Siddhant.

It was set up on one side of the banquet hall, and designed to look like a giant flatscreen TV. A rather over-enthusiastic ponytailed male MC was bouncing around exhorting people to come and take their places.

‘I’m back,’ Nikhil announced, materialising at her side so suddenly that Shweta jumped.

‘I thought you’d gone off to earn your living,’ she said.

‘Just needed to do a quick check and see that everything’s on track,’ he replied. ‘I have a relatively new team working on this event—good guys, but I thought I should be around in case something goes wrong.’

The team was still very raw, and normally he wouldn’t have left their side for a moment—only he hadn’t been able to keep himself away from Shweta. He tried to figure out why. While she’d metamorphosed into quite a stunner, he met equally good-looking girls every day in his chosen profession. It was the tantalising glimpses he could see of the gawky, independent-minded girl he’d known in school that drew him to her. He’d always liked her, in spite of the unmerciful teasing he’d subjected her to. At fourteen, though, he’d never consciously thought of her as a girl. Now it was impossible not to think of her as a woman, and the change was singularly appealing.

‘You’re not the nagging kind of boss, then?’ Shweta asked.

It sounded as if she approved.

‘You don’t hover over your people telling them what to do and how to do it, when they should have it done...?’

Nikhil laughed. ‘It’s a little difficult to be like that in my business,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of planning involved, but people need the freedom to take spot decisions.’

Siddhant cleared his throat and Shweta realised guiltily that she’d completely forgotten he was standing next to her. Nikhil noticed him as well, giving him a friendly smile as he held out his hand.

‘Nikhil Nair,’ he said.

Siddhant took his hand, sounding almost effusive. ‘Yes, of course. Manish mentioned you’d be here. I’m Siddhant.’

Priya had been right, then—Nikhil had to be loaded. Siddhant was this friendly only with the very successful or the very rich.

‘You’re one of the partners in the firm, aren’t you?’ Nikhil asked with a quick smile. ‘I understand you guys are putting on a performance for the team?’

Oh, God. The firm’s senior partner, Manish, had come up with the brilliant idea of all the partners dancing to a Bollywood number. On stage. Manish himself could dance well, though he was grossly overweight, most of the rest were terrible—and that was putting it mildly. Siddhant wasn’t as bad as some, only he was very stiff and self-conscious. Shweta cringed at the thought of watching him make a fool of himself in public.

‘It’s just something Manish thought would make us seem a little more approachable to the team,’ Siddhant was saying. ‘That becomes a problem sometimes in an industry like ours. By the way—marvellous arrangements this morning. Your team did a fabulous job. The elephants and the Kathakali dancers welcoming everyone...and that flash mob thing at lunchtime was also a fantastic idea.’

The flash mob had been brilliant. Shweta conceded that much. But Siddhant was sounding a little sycophantic. Maybe Manish had asked him to make a pitch to Nikhil. She had only a vague idea of how event management companies operated, and it was unlikely Manish knew more than her—he usually operated on the principle that any company that made money needed accountants.

‘Thank you,’ Nikhil said, clearly amused. ‘Can I borrow Shweta for a minute?’

Siddhant looked a bit taken aback, and Shweta hastened to explain. ‘We were together in school—met again after years today.’ Borrow her, indeed. He made her sound like a library book—and a not very interesting one at that.

‘Oh, that’s good,’ Siddhant said. His eyes darted between the two of them as if he was registering for the first time that Nikhil could pose some kind of threat to his slow-paced courtship. ‘But aren’t you staying for the performances? I thought there were some Bollywood stars coming down...’

‘Seen them many times before,’ Nikhil said, a quick smile flashing across his face. ‘I’ll try and be back before you guys go on stage. Wouldn’t want to miss that.’

He slung a casual arm around Shweta’s shoulders as he drew her away and she felt her senses instantly go on high alert. He must have touched her in school, she thought, confused, but she didn’t remember feeling anything like this—what was wrong with her? He’d changed, of course, but how had he turned from the wild tearaway schoolboy she remembered to someone who drove her crazy with longing without even trying—it was totally unfair.

‘Is Siddhant your boss?’ Nikhil asked once they were some distance away. When Shweta shook her head he said, ‘Hmm...something going on between you guys, then? He looked quite possessive for a bit back there.’

‘He’s just a friend,’ Shweta said, but the colour flaring up to her cheeks betrayed her yet again.

Nikhil grinned wickedly. ‘Just a friend, eh? He’s still looking at us. OK if I do this?’ He bent his head and brushed his lips against her cheek. It was a fleeting caress, but Shweta felt her heart-rate triple.

Nikhil stepped back a little and gave her a considering look. ‘Will he come charging up and challenge me to a duel?’ he asked.

She shook her head mutely.

‘OK—what if I do this?’

Shweta swatted his hands away as he brought them up to cup her face. Feeling all hot and bothered, she said, ‘Stop playing the fool, Nikhil!’

He stepped back, raising his hands in laughing surrender. ‘I’ve stopped...I’ve stopped. You’re dangerous when you lose your temper—I don’t want you giving me another scar.’

‘Rubbish!’ she said.

‘Not at all.’ Nikhil pushed his shaggy hair off his forehead with one hand and she saw it—a thin white scar across one temple that stood out against his tanned skin. ‘The last time I annoyed you I ended up with this.’

Shweta remembered it quite vividly. She’d grabbed a wooden blackboard duster off the teacher’s table and thrown it at him. But it still hadn’t wiped the mocking grin off his face. A thin ribbon of blood had trickled down one side of his face and he’d mopped it off with a grimy handkerchief. He’d been laughing all the while. Right, so that was one time she remembered touching him—evidently he hadn’t had the same effect on her then as he did now.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said awkwardly. In retrospect she was—a few centimetres the other way and she could have blinded him.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ he said. ‘From what I remember I was quite an obnoxious little beast—you helped knock some sense into me. And every time I look in the mirror now I think of you....’

He lowered his voice to a sexy rasp for the last part of the sentence, and Shweta felt a visceral reaction kick in. It wasn’t fair—he was just playing around without realising what he was doing to her. And with Siddhant watching...

Belatedly, she remembered Siddhant’s existence, and turned around to look for him.

‘Too late,’ Nikhil said. ‘He gave you a minute and then he went in, looking like a thundercloud. You’ll have to grovel to get him to forgive you.’

‘Fat chance,’ Shweta said shortly.

Nikhil’s accurate reading of Siddhant was unnerving, though. Right from when they’d first started dating Siddhant had given the impression that he was assessing her against a set of strict criteria. Rather like the way he screened job applicants, actually. At all times she was conscious of his approval or disapproval. He rarely lost his temper, retiring instead into a stately silence that she had to coax him out of. Completely out of the blue she wondered what a relationship with Nikhil would be like. Unpredictable, definitely, but lively—she could imagine impassioned arguments followed by equally passionate reconciliations.

‘Dreaming of something?’ Nikhil asked teasingly.

Her eyes whipped back to him. She shook her head, trying to stop thinking of what a passionate reconciliation with him would be like.

‘Look, are you really keen on watching the show? It’d be nice to catch up, but I’m leaving tomorrow morning. Want to sneak off with me somewhere?’

Oh, yes, she did want to sneak off with him. Put like that, it sounded deliciously wanton—also, no one had ever suggested sneaking off with her before.

Shweta tried not to look over-eager. ‘I can slip away. I’m not terribly keen on the Bollywood dancers anyway.’

‘Maybe you should tell Siddhant you’re leaving,’ Nikhil suggested.

But Shweta had decided to spend at least one evening free of his petty tyranny. ‘He’s not even my boss,’ she said. ‘I’ll message Priya so that she doesn’t get worried.’

It was only once they were in the black SUV that Nikhil had hired for the day that it occurred to Shweta to ask where they were going.

‘It’s a place where the locals hang out,’ he said. ‘Good music, and the food’s to die for. Not too swanky. But we can go to one of the five-star hotels around here if you’d prefer that?’

‘Yes—like I’d choose the five-star hotel after that introduction,’ Shweta said. ‘And you should know I’m not the swanky restaurant type.’

‘You might have changed,’ Nikhil said. ‘You don’t look the same—for all I know you might have turned into a wine-sipping socialite, scorning us lesser mortals...’

Shweta punched him in the arm and he laughed. ‘Still violent, I see,’ he said, but his tone was more tender than mocking. She felt her heart do an obedient little flip-flop in response. At least now her reactions to him weren’t coming as a surprise. All she had to do was work harder at concealing them.

They were on the outskirts of the city now, and driving down a narrow lane flanked by fields and coconut trees.

‘OK if I roll down the window?’ Nikhil asked.

When she nodded, he switched off the air-conditioning and got the windows down.

‘We’re lucky it’s not raining,’ he said. ‘Kerala gets most of its rains in winter...’

‘I know. I used to pay attention in Geography,’ Shweta said pertly. ‘Unlike you.’

Nikhil gave her a mocking smile. ‘You were such a gooooood little girl,’ he said, dragging his words out. ‘Of course you paid attention.’

Shweta carefully controlled an urge to hit him on the head with a high-heeled shoe. ‘And you were such a baaad boy.’ She copied his tone as closely as she could. ‘Of course you paid attention to no one and were good for nothing.’

‘Bad boys are good at some things,’ he murmured suggestively.

Shweta flushed as all the things he was probably very, very good at sprang to mind. God, was he doing it on purpose? Probably he thought it was fun, getting her all hot and bothered. There was no way he could be actually flirting with her—or was he?

‘Do you know where you’re going?’ she asked in her best auditor voice—the one that Priya swore made entire finance departments quake in their shoes.

Nikhil nodded. ‘Almost there.’

The road had developed some rather alarming twists and turns, and he was concentrating on his driving. In Shweta’s opinion he was going too fast, but she’d boil her favourite shoes in oil before she said anything—there was no point giving him an opportunity to make remarks about fraidy-cat accountants. She fixed her eyes on Nikhil instead, hoping the man would take her mind off his driving. It worked. The moonlight illuminated his rather stern profile perfectly, throwing the planes and angles of his face into relief.

He was really quite remarkably good-looking, Shweta thought. It was a wonder she hadn’t noticed it in school, but she had an explanation. In those days she’d been completely obsessed by a rather chocolate-faced movie star, and had unconsciously compared everyone she saw with him. Nikhil was the complete opposite of chocolate-faced—even at fourteen his features had been uncompromisingly male. Her eyes drifted towards his shoulders and upper body, and then to his hands on the steering wheel. He had rather nice hands, she thought, strong with square-tipped fingers. Unbidden, she started to wonder how those hands would feel on her body, and she blushed for probably the twelfth time that evening.

The car negotiated a final hairpin bend, after which the road seemed to shake itself out and lose steam. It went on for a couple of hundred metres through a rather dense copse of coconut trees and ended abruptly on a beach.

‘Are you lost?’ she enquired. He shook his head. ‘Come on,’ he said, opening his door and leaping down lightly.

He was at her door and handing her down before she could protest. Locking the car with a click of the remote, he put an arm around her shoulders and started walking her to the beach.

Their destination was a small, brightly lit shack thatched with palm fronds. There were small tables laid out in front, some of which were occupied by locals. Nikhil chose a table with a view of the beach. The moon had risen now, and the sea had a picture-postcard quality to it. A motherly-looking woman in her fifties bustled out, beaming in delight when she saw Nikhil. She greeted him in a flood of Malayalam which Shweta didn’t even bother trying to follow. She wasn’t particularly good at languages, and Malayalam was nothing like Hindi or any other language she knew.

‘Meet Mariamma,’ Nikhil said. ‘She’s known me since I was a kid.’

Shweta smiled and Mariamma switched to heavily accented English. ‘Am always happy to meet Nikhil’s friends,’ she said, dispelling any notion that this was the first time Nikhil had brought someone here with him. ‘Miss Shweta, do sit down. I’ll get you a menu.’

‘I thought you didn’t have one?’ Nikhil murmured.

Mariamma said chidingly, ‘You haven’t been in touch for a long while. We got a menu printed—Jossy designed it on his laptop.’

‘I’d love to see it, but I know what I want to order,’ Nikhil said. ‘Shweta, any preferences?’

‘If you could order for me...’ Shweta said, and Nikhil promptly switched back into Malayalam and reeled off a list of stuff that sounded as if it would be enough to feed the entire state for a week.

Mariamma beamed at both of them and headed back to the kitchen, her cotton sari rustling as she left.

‘You come here often?’

‘I used to—when I was a child. My grandparents lived quite near here, and Mariamma was one of my aunt’s closest friends.’

‘Your grandparents...?’

‘Died when I was in college.’

Nikhil was frowning, and Shweta wished she hadn’t asked.

‘Are you in touch with anyone from our class in school?’ she asked hastily.

He began to laugh. ‘You need to be more subtle when you’re changing the topic,’ he said. ‘No. I e-mail some of my old crowd on and off, but I haven’t met up with anyone for a long while. Ajay and Wilson are in the States now, and Vineet’s building a hotel in Dehra Dun. How about you?’

‘I’m not building a hotel in Dehra Dun,’ Shweta said, and made a face. ‘I’m in touch with Vineet too. He’s difficult to avoid. And a couple of other people as well.’

‘Have they got used to your new avatar?’ He was still finding it difficult to reconcile Shweta who looked like a million bucks but sounded like the old tomboyish Shweta he’d known for most of his adolescent years.

Shweta frowned at him. ‘What avatar?’

‘I remember you as a serious, pigtailed little thing, very grim and earnest all the time—except when you were climbing trees and challenging me to cycling races.’

‘And now?’

‘And now...’ He smiled and leaned back in his chair. ‘Well, you’ve chosen a grim and serious profession, all right, but in spite of that...something’s changed. You’ve been rebelling, haven’t you? You look different, of course, but that’s just the contact lenses and the new hairstyle.’

A little piqued at his dismissal of the change in her looks, she said firmly, ‘Well, I haven’t been rebelling.’

‘Sure?’ he asked teasingly. ‘You came away with me instead of staying back with that extremely eligible, extremely boring young man.’

‘I haven’t seen you for fifteen years,’ she pointed out. ‘I see Siddhant every day.’

‘And your shoes...’

She looked down at them defensively. They were rather lovely shoes—high-heeled green pumps that struck a bright note against her sombre black trousers and top. She was wearing a silver hand-crafted necklace studded with peridots—the stones perfectly matched the shoes. In spite of having read a dozen articles that condemned matching accessories as the height of un-cool, she found it difficult to stop herself, especially when it came to shoes. Speaking of which...

‘What’s wrong with my shoes?’

‘Nothing,’ he said, looking amused. ‘They’re...very striking, that’s all. But otherwise you’re very conservatively dressed.’ Before she could protest, he said, ‘Sorry, I’ve been reading too many articles on pop psychology. But I stick by what I say—it’s a slow rebellion, but you’re rebelling all the same. I always thought your father was way too strict with you.’

‘I’ve been living away from home for over seven years,’ Shweta said indignantly. ‘All my rebelling is long over and done with. And he’s changed. He’s not the way he used to be.’ Her father had been a bit of a terror when she was younger, and most of her classmates had given him a wide berth. It had taken Shweta herself years to muster up the courage to stand up to him.

‘If you say so.’ Somehow seeing Shweta again had brought out the old desire in Nikhil to wind her up, watch her struggle to control her temper—except she was now all grown up, and instead of wanting to tug her pigtails and trip her over during PE class he wanted to reach out and touch her, to run his hands over her smooth skin and tangle them in her silken hair...

Realising that his thoughts were wandering a bit too far, he picked up the menu and started leafing through it. A thought struck him. ‘You haven’t turned vegetarian, have you?’

He looked relieved when Shweta shook her head. ‘Thank heavens. I’ve ordered mutton stew and appams and prawn curry—I just assumed you’d be OK with all of it.’

‘Of course I am. I’ve always loved prawn curry. Your mom used to cook it really well, I remember.’

‘Which mom?’ he asked, his mouth twisting into a wry smile.

Shweta felt like kicking herself. Nikhil was illegitimate, and had always been touchy about his family. His father had taken a mistress after ten years of a childless marriage, scandalising everyone who knew him, and Nikhil was his mistress’s son. Perhaps it would have been less scandalous if he’d tried to keep the affair secret, but when he’d found out that Ranjini was pregnant he’d brought her to live in the same house as his wife. Until he was four Nikhil had thought having two mothers was a perfectly normal arrangement—it was only when he joined school that he realised he lived in a very peculiar household.

‘Veena Aunty,’ Shweta said.

Veena was Nikhil’s father’s wife. If they’d been Muslims Nikhil’s father could have taken a second wife, but as a Hindu he would have been committing bigamy if he’d married Ranjini. Veena had taken the whole thing surprisingly well. People had expected her to resent Ranjini terribly, even if she couldn’t do anything about having to share a house with her, but Veena appeared to be on quite good terms with her. And she adored Nikhil, which perhaps wasn’t so surprising given that she didn’t have children of her own. In his teen years at least Nikhil had been equally attached to her—all his sullenness and resentment had been directed towards his parents.

‘How’re they doing?’ Shweta asked. ‘Your parents, I mean.’ She’d met them only a few times—her father had made sure that she didn’t have much to do with Nikhil.

Nikhil shrugged. ‘OK, I guess. I haven’t seen them for over four years.’

Shweta’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Aren’t they still in Pune, then?’

‘Dad has some property in Trivandrum. They moved there when Dad retired. They’re still there—though now Amma is pretending to be a cousin and Mom tells everyone that she’s married to Dad.’

The words came out easily enough, but Shweta could see his jaw tense up and was very tempted to lean across the table and take his hand, smooth away the frown lines. He’d always called his own mother Mom, while his father’s wife went by the more affectionate Amma.

‘I guess it’s easier that way,’ Shweta said. ‘Rather than having to explain everything to a whole new set of people.’

‘Pity they didn’t think of it when it really mattered.’ His voice was tight, almost brittle. ‘I don’t know why Amma is letting them do this.’

‘I’m sure she has her reasons. Maybe you could visit them now that you’re already in Kerala?’ Shweta believed strongly in women standing up for themselves—in her view Veena was quite as responsible for the situation as Nikhil’s parents.

‘Not enough time—I’ve got to be back in Mumbai for another gig. Plus I’m not on the best of terms right now with my father.’ He was still frowning, but after a few seconds he made a visible effort to smile. ‘While we’re on the subject of parents, how’re your dad and aunt?’

‘He’s retired, so now he bosses the gardener and the cleaners around instead of his patients,’ Shweta said, and Nikhil laughed.

Shweta’s father had been a doctor in a fairly well-known hospital in Pune, and he’d inspired a healthy respect in everyone who knew him. Shweta’s mother had died quite suddenly of a heart attack when Shweta was three, and her father’s unmarried older sister had moved in to help bring up Shweta.

‘And your aunt?’

‘She’s still keeping house for him. Though she grumbles about him to whoever’s willing to listen—wonders how my mother put up with him for so many years.’

A lot of people had wondered that, but Nikhil didn’t say so. He’d met Shweta’s father several times—he’d been on their school board, and had chaired the disciplinary hearing that had led to his final expulsion from the school. Nikhil didn’t hold that against him. He’d been on a short wicket in any case, given that the smoking incident had followed hard upon his having ‘borrowed’ their Hindi teacher’s motorbike and taken his best buddies out for a spin on it. But he had resented Dr Mathur telling Shweta not to have anything to do with him.

The food arrived and Mariamma came across to ladle generous portions onto their plates. ‘Eat well, now,’ she admonished Shweta. ‘You’re so thin—you girls nowadays are always on some diet or the other.’

‘I can’t diet to save my life,’ Shweta said. ‘I’m thin because I swim a lot.’

Mariamma sniffed disapprovingly, but Nikhil found it refreshing, being with a woman who wasn’t obsessed with her figure. His job brought him into contact with models and actresses, all of whom seemed to be afraid to breathe in case the air contained calories. In his view Shweta had a better figure than all of them—she was slim, but not stick-thin, and her body curved nicely in all the right places.

‘Like the food?’ he asked, watching her as she dipped an appam into the curry and ate it with evident enjoyment. For a few seconds he couldn’t take his eyes off her lush mouth as she ran her tongue over her bottom lip—the gesture was so innocently sexy.

‘It’s good,’ she pronounced.

He dragged his eyes away from her face to concentrate on his own untouched plate before she could catch him staring.

‘Everything’s cooked in coconut oil, isn’t it? It adds an interesting flavour to the food.’

Nikhil thought back to the last time he’d taken a girl on a date to a restaurant in Mumbai that served authentic Kerala cuisine. She’d hardly eaten anything, insisting that the food smelt like hair oil. She’d been annoying in many other ways as well, he remembered. Rude to waiters and refusing to walk even a few metres to the car because the pavement looked ‘mucky’. Not for the first time he wondered why he chose to waste his time with empty-headed women like her rather than someone like Shweta. He didn’t want to delve too deeply into the reasons, though—self-analysis wasn’t one of his passions.

‘Can I ask you something?’ Shweta said as she polished off her last appam. ‘Why were you out to get me in school? We used to be good friends when we were really little—till you began hanging out only with the boys and ignored me completely. And when we were twelve or something you started being really horrible. You used to be rude about my clothes and my hairstyle—pretty much everything.’

‘Was I that bad?’ Nikhil looked genuinely puzzled. ‘I remember teasing you a little, but it was light-hearted stuff. I didn’t mean to upset you. Maybe it was because you were such a good little girl—listening to what the teacher said, doing your homework on time, never playing truant... It was stressful, studying with you. You set such high standards...’

He ducked as Shweta swatted at him with a ladle. ‘Careful,’ he said, his voice brimming over with laughter as drops of curry sprayed around. ‘I don’t want to go back looking like I’ve been in a food fight.’

‘Oh, God—and your clothes probably cost a bomb, didn’t they.’ Conscience-stricken, Shweta put the ladle down. ‘Did I get any on you?’

Nikhil shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. If I find any stains I’ll send you the dry-cleaning bill.’

She looked up swiftly, wondering whether he was being serious, but the lurking smile in his eyes betrayed him. ‘Oh, you wretch,’ she scolded. ‘I’ve a good mind to throw the entire dish at you.’

‘Mariamma will be really offended,’ he said gravely. ‘And if you throw things at me I won’t buy you dessert.’

‘Oh, well that settles it, then. I’ll be nice to you.’ He hadn’t really answered her question, but she didn’t want to destroy the light-hearted atmosphere by pressing too hard. ‘But only till we’re done with dessert.’