The One She Was Warned About

by Shoma Narayanan

  ‘Stop thinking about work now,’ Nikhil said, putting his hands on her shoulders.

  Shweta went completely still as he started massaging her neck and shoulders gently. She could feel the tension seep out, but it was replaced by a set of entirely different sensations. She was acutely conscious of the strength in his lean hands. The temptation to turn into his arms was intense, and she felt positively bereft when he removed his hands after a few minutes.

  ‘Why were you asking me about Siddhant?’

  There was a little pause, then Nikhil said, ‘I have a theory about the two of you. Look, I’m sorry—it’s none of my business really.’

  Of course as soon as he said that she had to know more.

  ‘A theory about us?’ she asked, trying to sound casual and unconcerned. Somehow, she had a feeling she wasn’t fooling Nikhil one bit.

  ‘You don’t give a damn for him,’ Nikhil said bluntly. ‘But for some reason you’ve led him on to think that you’re interested.’

  Shweta flushed. Nikhil was only saying something Priya had been telling her for months, and there was no earthly reason she should feel the need to justify herself. She still found herself explaining, though.

  ‘We’ve been dating for a while,’ she said. ‘I was planning to say yes if he asked me to marry him. It’s only for the last month or so that I’ve not been so sure.’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked, his voice quiet.

  Shweta felt that a lot depended on her answer. ‘He’s a little...’ She’d been about to say judgemental, but it felt disloyal to be talking about Siddhant with Nikhil. ‘I don’t know what it is, really, but I don’t think we’d suit.’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  Her eyes widened at the bald statement. ‘You hardly know either of us!’ she said, and continued hastily when he raised his eyebrows, ‘You knew me a long while ago. I was just a kid then. I’ve changed!’

  ‘I’m sure you have,’ Nikhil said. ‘But you used to be a very straightforward person, and people don’t change fundamentally. So what I find difficult to understand is why you’d even contemplate marrying a man you don’t care two hoots about.’

  Shweta glared at him. ‘You just said it isn’t any of your business, and I wholeheartedly agree,’ she said. ‘Why are you so bothered about me and Siddhant, anyway?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to feel guilty when I do this,’ Nikhil said, bringing his head down to hers and kissing her mouth very, very gently.

  Shweta stood stock-still, frozen in shock. A kiss was the last thing she’d been expecting, but the sensation was incredible, his lips warm and teasing against hers. Her hands came up involuntarily to clasp him around the neck. Oh, but it felt so good—familiar, and wildly exciting at the same time. She clung to him as the kiss deepened, giving a little gasp of protest when he finally stepped back.

  ‘I’ve wanted to kiss you ever since I saw you yesterday,’ he said, the edges of his voice rough with desire. ‘It was all I could do to keep my hands off you.’

  Shweta looked up at him, too shaken to speak. The kiss had awakened a swarm of emotions in her and she wasn’t sure how to react.

  Nikhil gazed back at her, his dark eyes smouldering. It was taking all his self-control not to pull her back into his arms. Her inexperience showed, though, and until he was sure of his own feelings he didn’t want to go too far.

  ‘Maybe we should go back outside,’ he said, his voice softening as he put up a hand to touch her cheek. ‘I don’t trust myself alone with you for too long.’

  Shweta felt like crying out in frustration. She wanted to be alone with him, to take the kiss further—but she could hardly say so. Mutely she followed him out on to the deck of the boat.

  ‘The others should be on the boats by now,’ he said. ‘Do you want to wait till they catch up with us or go on to the village?’

  ‘Go on to the village,’ she muttered.

  The last thing she wanted was a bunch of her colleagues gawking at her—Priya at least would be sure to smell a rat. And Siddhant... She needed to make it clear to him that it was off between them. Only it would be a slightly difficult thing to put across, given that he hadn’t formally proposed in the first place.

  Nikhil came to stand next to her, his sleeve brushing her bare arm as he leaned against the handrail. ‘The boatman says we’ll reach it in fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘We’ll get some time to look around the village then.’

  Except that they didn’t, because his new team head who was supposed to be managing the project had a sudden attack of nerves and Nikhil had to step in to avoid a crisis.

  Left to her own devices, Shweta wandered around the little resort village, admiring the local handicrafts and watching a troupe of dancers rehearse their steps.

  ‘Nikhil Sir is calling you,’ one of the trainees said behind her, and Shweta turned to see Nikhil beckoning to her from the pier.

  ‘The boats are about to come in,’ he said as she joined him. ‘We have a little surprise planned.’

  He slung an arm casually around her shoulders and she had to fight the impulse to lean closer into his embrace. ‘What kind of surprise?’

  ‘Look,’ he said.

  The four large boats carrying the office gang were now lined up on either side of the narrow stretch of water.

  ‘Aren’t they docking?’ she asked, puzzled. The boats seemed to be waiting for something. Before Nikhil could answer her, she realised what they were waiting for. ‘The snake boats!’ she said. ‘But how’s that possible...? This isn’t the time of year for the races, is it?’

  But the snake boats were there—immensely long canoes, with almost a hundred rowers per boat wearing T-shirts in their team colours over veshtis.

  Shweta clutched at Nikhil’s arm in excitement. ‘I’ve always wanted to see the races!’ she said. ‘I used to watch them on TV when I was a kid, but this is the first time I’ve been to Kerala... Ooh, they’re off!’

  Nikhil smiled down at her, amused by her evident excitement. The snake boats were a pretty amazing sight. The teams of rowers, working in perfect synchronization, propelled them down the channel faster than the average motorboat. He was about to point out the finer points of the race when something caught his eye.

  ‘Damn,’ he muttered. Releasing Shweta’s arm, he sprinted to the makeshift dais at the end of the pier which his team was using to make announcements from. The girl he’d put in charge was holding the microphone idly, her entire attention focussed on the snake boats.

  Nikhil grabbed the mike from her. ‘Viewing boat Number Two—yes, you guys on my left—please don’t crowd near the guardrail. Your boat is tilting. We don’t want you to land up in the water. Especially since I see that many of you have taken off your life jackets.’

  There were some squeals of alarm from the occupants of the boat and they stepped back from the rail. The boat was still tilting a little, though not at quite such an alarming angle. Nikhil cast a quick eye around the other boats.

  ‘Keep an eye on them,’ he instructed, handing the mike back to his hugely embarrassed event manager. ‘Don’t panic them, but make sure the boat doesn’t go over. And once everyone’s on land call for a quick team meeting—this shouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘It wasn’t her fault,’ Shweta protested as Nikhil rejoined her. ‘How was she to know that everyone would go thronging to one side?’

  ‘It’s her job to know,’ he said, frowning. He’d been so distracted by Shweta that he’d lost sight of why he was really here. He should be with his team, making sure that nothing went wrong, but he hadn’t been able to tear himself away from her side.

  She was leaning forward a little now, her lips slightly parted as she watched the rowers put in a last furious effort to get the snake boats across the finish line.

  ‘I knew the purple team would win,�
�� she said, her eyes glowing with satisfaction.

  Nikhil wished he could pull her into his arms and kiss her. Instead, he put a casual arm around her shoulders, pretending not to notice the slight quiver that ran through her. ‘There’s still one more race to go,’ he said. ‘I bet the yellow T-shirts win this time.’

  ‘Purple,’ she said, aware that she sounded a little breathless. Nikhil’s proximity was doing strange things to her pulse-rate.

  ‘Dinner with me in Mumbai if yellow wins?’ he said.

  Shweta looked up at him. ‘And if they lose?’

  ‘If they lose I’ll take you out for dinner before we leave Kerala.’

  ‘A little illogical, that.’

  ‘Not really,’ he said, and his voice was like a caress.

  Shweta acted as if she hadn’t heard him. Flirting was not something she was good at, and she suspected that Nikhil was only flirting with her out of habit. She knew she hadn’t changed all that much from her schooldays—her glasses were gone, and she had a better hairstyle, but inside she was still the studious, slightly tomboyish and totally uncool girl she’d been fourteen years ago. The kiss she couldn’t explain away. It had felt as if the attraction was as red-hot on his side as hers, but he’d pulled away and hadn’t tried to get her alone afterwards. Of course they’d been under the gaze of his entire events crew—not to mention four boatloads of her colleagues.

  ‘Watch,’ he said as the snake boats lined up for the race.

  Shweta dutifully turned her eyes in the direction he was pointing. His arm was still around her, and she found it difficult to concentrate on the race. Except for the frazzled girl with the mike no one else seemed to share her problem—even the waiters and performers were crowding onto the landing stage to watch the race. As for her colleagues on the boats—they were going crazy, whooping and blowing paper trumpets, though this time they were careful to stay away from the guardrail.

  The yellow team won by a few metres and Shweta exhaled noisily.

  ‘Dinner in Mumbai,’ Nikhil said, looking down at her. ‘I’ll let you go back to your colleagues for today, then.’

  Was that a dismissal? It didn’t feel like one, and the thought that he’d be in touch when they returned to Mumbai made her pulse race a little faster.

  ‘Pretty impressive, Mr Nair,’ a voice said near them.

  Anjalika Arora was one of the Bollywood entertainers who’d performed for the team the day before. In her late thirties, she was still strikingly beautiful. She’d never really made it to the top in films—the few in which she’d played the female lead had flopped dismally at the box office, and over the last few years she’d appeared in glitzy productions with all-star casts where she’d been only one of four or five glamorous leading ladies with very little to do. The gossip magazines said that she made a fortune in stage shows, dancing to the songs from those movies.

  Shweta looked at her curiously. This was the first time she’d met even a minor celebrity face-to-face. Anjalika looked like anyone else, only a lot prettier—dressed as she was today, in denim cut-offs and a T-shirt, and with her hair tied up, she could have been a soccer mom, dropping her kid off for a game. Shweta tried to remember if she had children or not. Unfortunately the financial newspapers she took didn’t say much about the private lives of movie stars. She did remember picking up a magazine at the beauty parlour which had covered a high-profile reconciliation between Anjalika and her movie producer husband.

  ‘How was your morning?’ Nikhil asked, releasing Shweta as Anjalika gave him a socialite-type kiss on the cheek.

  ‘Oh, brilliant—I spent most of it in the spa,’ Anjalika said, giving Shweta a girl-to-girl smile. ‘It’s pretty good—have you been there?’ Before Shweta could respond she’d turned back to Nikhil. ‘Nikhil, I hate to bother you while you’re working, but I’m sure your amazing team can handle things. I have this teeny query which I need your help on...’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Nikhil smiled at Shweta. ‘I’ll be back in half an hour, OK?’

  Shweta nodded, and Anjalika gave her another brilliant smile before hooking an arm through Nikhil’s and drawing him away.

  ‘Wants a pay-hike, does she?’ one of Nikhil’s crew members muttered to another.

  The man he was speaking to shrugged. ‘It’s standard practice for her. She waits till the event’s underway and then starts haggling for more money. I don’t think Nikhil will buckle, though—he’ll sympathise, and say he’ll do what he can, but she’ll be lucky if he gives her even a rupee more than was actually agreed.’

  ‘Or maybe he’ll pay her in kind,’ the first man said in an undertone. ‘Take her back to the hotel and sweeten her up a bit. She must be gasping for it—her husband’s got a floozy on the side, and she isn’t as young as she used to be.’

  ‘Yeah, and he’s hot stuff with the women. That’s how he gets some of these star types to come in for the smaller events—gives them a good time in bed and they’re ready to do anything for him. Then, once the event’s done with, he’s off.’

  ‘OK—minds out of the gutter, please, and back to work.’

  Nikhil’s second-in-command, a hearty-looking lady called Payal, strode up to them—much to Shweta’s relief.

  ‘Let’s see if we can get this bunch off the boats and into the village without anyone falling into the water.’ She gave Shweta a friendly nod. ‘Where’s that idiot Mona? I believe she was busy gawking at the race while one of the guest boats was about to tip over.’

  ‘It wasn’t so bad,’ a scarlet-face Mona muttered. ‘I did let my attention wander a bit, but Nikhil stepped in.’

  ‘Well, you’re lucky he was in a good mood or you’d be hunting for a job right now,’ Payal said. ‘Come on—start announcing the docking order and get those snake boats out of the way now. I’ve had enough of them.’

  Wishing she hadn’t overheard the conversation, Shweta headed into the resort village. People always gossiped, and event management was on the fringes of show business, where stories were that much more outrageous—probably nothing of what the two men had said was true.

  * * *

  She’d just ordered a carved name-plate from one of the handicraft stores and the man had promised to have it ready in fifteen minutes. She was paying for it when Siddhant came up to her.

  ‘That’s beautiful,’ he said, smiling as he saw the hand-carved letters that the man had mounted onto a wooden base. ‘For your flat?’

  Shweta nodded. ‘My old one fell off and broke.’ She watched Siddhant as he picked up the name-plate and ran his fingers over the letters. Try as she might, she couldn’t summon up a smidgen of feeling for Siddhant. He was intelligent, and successful, and he’d probably make someone an excellent husband some day, but meeting Nikhil had driven the last doubts out of her head. Not that she was in any way serious about Nikhil, she hastened to tell herself. The conversation she’d overheard his team having had only underlined that she didn’t stand a chance with him.

  ‘I’ve hardly seen you since we got to Kerala,’ Siddhant was saying. ‘Let’s walk around the village a bit, shall we? Unless you’ve seen it already? You must have reached it some time before we did.’

  ‘Not seen much of it yet,’ Shweta said.

  She’d have to let him know somehow that it wasn’t going to work out between them—the distinctly proprietorial air he adopted when she was around him was beginning to bother her.

  THREE

  They were sitting down to lunch when Nikhil reappeared. Anjalika was nowhere to be seen—either she’d left, or was having lunch separately. Payal had mentioned to Shweta that her contract only included a stage performance, not mingling with the guests. Nikhil didn’t come across to her, however. He spent a few minutes talking to the resort manager, and then the firm’s HR head nabbed him.

  Shweta found herself gazing a
t him hungrily. His clothes were simple—an olive-green T-shirt over faded jeans—but they fitted perfectly, emphasising the breadth of his shoulders and the lean, muscled strength of his body. At that point he turned and caught her eye—for a few seconds he held her gaze, then Shweta looked away, embarrassed to have been caught staring.

  ‘This traditional meal business is all very well, but I wish they’d served the food on plates rather than on banana leaves,’ Siddhant was saying as he tried to prevent the runny lentils from spilling over on to his lap.

  ‘It wouldn’t be very traditional then, would it?’ one of the senior partners said dryly.

  Remembering that the man was South Indian, Siddhant rushed into damage-control mode. ‘Yes, of course. It’s just that I’m not used to it. The food’s delicious—we should seriously evaluate the option of getting South Indian food made in the office cafeteria at least once a week.’

  One of the other partners said something in response and the conversation became general. Shweta felt pretty firmly excluded from it, however. She was sitting between Siddhant and another colleague who was all too busy trying to impress his boss. Priya and the rest of her friends were sitting across the room, and they appeared to be having a whale of a time. Siddhant himself was making absolutely no effort to bring her into the conversation with the rest of the partners—evidently he felt he had done enough by inviting her to sit with them at the hallowed top table.

  Her phone pinged, and Shweta dug it out of her bag to see a message from Priya. You look bored out of your wits, it said, and Shweta looked across to see Priya miming falling asleep and keeling over into her banana leaf.

  Shweta took a rapid decision. She wasn’t very hungry, she’d finished all the food on her leaf—and the server was still two tables away. ‘Siddhant, I need to go and check on something,’ she said in an undertone during the next break in conversation.

  Siddhant looked a little surprised. ‘Right now?’ he asked, and his tone implied that she was passing up on a golden chance to hang out with the who’s who of the firm.