The One She Was Warned About

by Shoma Narayanan

  ‘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.’

  TWO

  ‘Aren’t you going to wear something under that? A churidaar or leggings?’

  ‘It’s a dress, Siddhant,’ Shweta explained patiently. ‘It’s supposed to be worn like this.’ Dresses had come back into fashion a couple of years ago, but evidently no one had informed Siddhant.

  ‘I like you better in salwar kameez,’ he said. ‘Or even jeans. You look—I don’t know—sort of weird in this. And the shoes...’

  Shweta surveyed herself in the huge mirror in the hotel foyer. The simple pale yellow cotton dress set off her golden-brown skin and lovely black eyes to perfection. And the shoes were her favourite ones—flat open-toed white sandals with huge yellow cloth flowers on the straps. The flowers were even of the same genus/sub-species as the white printed ones on her dress, and until she’d come downstairs she’d been pretty happy with the overall effect.

  During her childhood she’d been forced to wear truly horrible clo
thes—her aunt had had absolutely no sense of colour or style, and had usually bought Shweta’s clothes at discount stores or got them made up by the local tailor. It didn’t help that the tailor was the same one who’d made Dr Mathur’s shirts. All her clothes had ended up with boxy cuts and mannish collars. She’d tried complaining to her father, but he’d told her she shouldn’t be bothering about something as frivolous as clothes, and she’d been too much in awe of him to protest. It had only been when she was in college that she’d started choosing her own clothes and, while she knew her taste wasn’t perfect, she hated anyone criticising what she wore.

  ‘They’re very nice shoes,’ she told Siddhant firmly. ‘Actually, all in all, I think I look pretty good.’

  ‘I agree,’ a voice said behind her.

  She spun around to meet Nikhil’s smiling eyes. Brilliant—now he probably thought she was needy and totally hungry for reassurance.

  ‘I wasn’t intending to criticise your clothes,’ Siddhant said, after nodding stiffly to Nikhil. ‘I just thought that jeans might be more practical, given that we’re going sightseeing.’

  He himself was dressed in khaki trousers and a crisp white short-sleeved shirt. Somehow, though, he managed to look a little stiff-necked and conservative next to Nikhil’s rugged good looks.

  Nikhil gave him an easy smile. ‘We’re driving to the backwaters and we’ll spend the next few hours on a boat. It’s hardly a Himalayan trek. Shweta—I came to ask you... You said you wanted to pick up some spices for your aunt, right? I’ve decided to stay back for another day, and I’ll be taking the SUV out again—you can ride with me. We’ll stop at a spice garden I know—you’ll get much better stuff there than you do in the stores.’

  Shweta nodded happily. The alternative was to ride in a bus with the rest of the office crowd. Siddhant would be with the other partners in a specially rented van. Not that they were trying to be elitist, as he’d hastily clarified, but they had some urgent business to discuss, which was confidential, and it would be a pity to waste the travel time when all of them were together anyway.

  He didn’t look at all happy about Shweta going off with Nikhil, but there was little he could do about it. ‘I’ll see you at the boats, then,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, we should be there in a couple of hours,’ Nikhil said. ‘Come on, Shweta, we should leave now. See you in a bit, Siddhant. I was taking a look at the video of yesterday’s dance, by the way—not bad at all. I wish I could have made it back in time for the actual performance.’

  ‘Don’t make fun of him,’ Shweta said in an undertone as they waited for the car. ‘He was pretty uncomfortable with this whole dance thing, but it was his boss’s idea and he couldn’t wriggle out of it.’

  There was genuine surprise on Nikhil’s face as he replied. ‘I wasn’t. OK, he isn’t India’s answer to Michael Jackson, but he did a good job. Must have practised a lot.’

  ‘He’s a bit of a perfectionist,’ Shweta muttered.

  She still hadn’t figured Nikhil out. Maybe he’d been telling the truth the night before—he’d only been teasing her back then in school and she’d overreacted. An incipient persecution complex—that was what her father would call it.

  ‘So is it serious, then?’ Nikhil asked after a pause.

  ‘With Siddhant? I don’t know—we’ve not talked about it. We’ve been dating for a while, so I guess there’s a good chance of us ending up together.’

  ‘Are you in love with him?’

  Startled, she felt her gaze fly up to his face. ‘With Siddhant?’ she asked again, stupidly.

  He smiled. ‘No, with that traffic policeman over there. Of course with Siddhant, you dimwit.’

  ‘No,’ she said, and then bit her lip. Impulsive frankness was all very well, but sometimes she wished she had more control over her tongue. ‘I mean, I’m very fond of him, but it’s a little too early. We’ve not actually...’ Her voice trailed off as he began to smile. She must be sounding like an utter idiot to him. He’d already made it pretty clear that he didn’t have a very high opinion of Siddhant, and her dithering was probably amusing him no end. Rapidly she moved the battle into enemy territory. ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Are you in love with...well, whoever people might think you’re in love with?’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ he said, his lips twitching.

  A valet brought his black SUV around and Nikhil helped her in before heading around to the driver’s side. The powerful engine purred to life as he turned the key in the ignition, but to her surprise he didn’t start driving right away. Instead he was looking at her, his expression unfathomable.

  ‘How keen are you on this spice-buying thing?’

  ‘It’s one of the must-dos if you’re in Kerala, isn’t it? Why? Is there a problem?’

  ‘Well, the proper spice gardens are up in the hills,’ he said. ‘It’s just that we had a good time yesterday—or at least I did—and I thought it would be good to hang out for a while without the rest of your group.’

  Shweta took a few seconds to digest this. On the one hand there was something incredibly flattering about Nikhil wanting to spend more time with her. On the other the thought of slipping away for a clandestine rendezvous was a little unsettling. She hadn’t got over her crush on Nikhil. If anything it was worse today—her stomach was going quivery just from her looking at him. Telling her stomach firmly to behave itself, she frowned at Nikhil.

  ‘So there isn’t a spice garden here at all?’

  ‘There is.’ Nikhil’s smile was self-deprecatory. ‘We can go there if you really want. Or we can go directly to the backwaters.’

  ‘But we’ll get there a lot earlier than the others,’ Shweta pointed out. ‘They haven’t even started getting into the buses, and you drive like a maniac—you’ll take half the time they will.’

  ‘We’ll take one of the small houseboats out,’ he said. ‘Just the two of us. It’ll be more peaceful than joining a hundred accountants.’

  ‘You really don’t like accountants, do you?’

  ‘I like some.’

  His smile deepened as he looked right into her eyes, and Shweta said hurriedly, ‘OK, we’ll take the boat,’ before she could start blushing again.

  Only later did she realise that he hadn’t asked her if she wanted to come with him—he’d just assumed she would.

  Once they reached the pier Shweta was glad Nikhil had made the choice for her. The small boat he was pointing out was a hundred times more charming than the double-decker monstrosities that were lined up for the rest of the group. And the backwaters were lovely—a network of canals opening into a huge, still expanse of water flanked by rows and rows of coconut trees. Little houseboats were moored by the banks, and there were water birds all around, gracefully swooping through the air to land on the water.

  ‘Time slows down here,’ Shweta said wonderingly as their boat was cast off and negotiated through one of the narrow channels into a wider stretch. ‘It seems so far away from Mumbai.’

  ‘It is pretty far from Mumbai.’ There was a smile twitching at Nikhil’s lips. ‘Almost two thousand kilometres. But I know what you mean.’

  ‘And people actually live in these boats?’

  ‘These ones are mainly for the use of tourists,’ he said. ‘Take a look at the inside, if you want.’

  The inside wasn’t really all that impressive—it was just a small room with cane furniture, and in spite of the slow speed they had to be careful not to rock the boat by moving around it too much. And the bed in the centre was all too suggestive.

  Suddenly very conscious that she was alone with Nikhil, Shweta said, ‘It was nicer outside, wasn’t it?’

  ‘This isn’t bad either,’ Nikhil said. He was sprawled lazily on a cane chair, with a beer in one hand. ‘Stop hopping around like a jittery kitten and sit down. I don’t bite.’

>   ‘I should have brought my work phone,’ Shweta said. ‘There’s an e-mail that’s supposed to come in this morning from a client and I totally forgot.’ She looked fretfully at her little yellow clutch purse. ‘It wouldn’t fit properly into this.’ But the purse had perfectly matched her outfit, and she’d decided to leave her phone behind.

  ‘You work very hard, don’t you?’

  It didn’t sound as if he meant it as a compliment, and Shweta immediately went on the defensive. ‘I don’t work any harder than my colleagues do.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with working hard,’ he said. ‘It’s just that you don’t seem to take any time out to have fun.’

  He stretched out the word a little, and it was quite evident what kind of fun he had in mind. Despite herself, Shweta felt her cheeks growing warm.

  ‘Don’t make assumptions,’ she snapped. ‘I have enough fun, thank you very much. I needed to reply to this e-mail as soon as it comes in—that’s why I’m worried.’

  Nikhil got up and came to stand behind her. ‘Do you want to go back?’ he asked. ‘We can if it’s really urgent.’

  For a second Shweta almost said yes. Not because the e-mail was all that urgent, but because Nikhil’s proximity was throwing her nicely ordered world into turmoil. Then the ridiculousness of it all struck her and she shook her head.

  ‘I’ll phone him,’ she said. ‘It’s just that this particular client is a bit picky—he calls up my boss for the smallest thing.’

  As it turned out, though, the client was on a camping trip in Alibagh and had completely forgotten to send the e-mail before he left. He even had the grace to apologise for the delay.

  ‘So that’s OK, then,’ she said after she rang off. ‘I hate having work stuff hanging over me like that.’