The One She Was Warned About

by Shoma Narayanan

  ‘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—l
ike 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 p
op 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.