The One She Was Warned About

by Shoma Narayanan

  Feeling a little awkward and out of place, Shweta ordered a drink and sipped at it gingerly, surveying the room. The whole building had been redecorated recently—the bar had a high wooden ceiling with fake beams and lots of faux-antique wooden furniture and panelling. Shweta wrinkled her nose a little. She couldn’t see why places that weren’t really old tried to look that way.

  ‘You don’t look pleased,’ Nikhil observed as he walked up to her.

  Shweta jumped, spilling a bit of her drink. ‘It’s the way this place is done up,’ she confided. ‘They’ve tried to make it look like an old English pub, but it’s not old and it’s not English—and anyway the roof’s all wrong. Pubs have low ceilings normally.’

  ‘I’ll tell the architect if I ever meet him,’ Nikhil said, sounding amused. ‘I’d apologise for being late—but I’m not, am I?’

  ‘No. I have a pathological fear of being late myself,’ Shweta said, ‘so I end up being early for everything. I’ve even gone to weddings where I’ve reached the venue before either the bride or the groom. You’re looking nice, by the way.’

  That last bit had just slipped out—but he was looking exceptionally good. Nice didn’t even begin to cover it. He’d had his hair cut since she’d seen him last, and the new, shorter hairstyle suited him. He was wearing a striped button-down shirt open at the collar, and black formal-looking jeans. The shirt was rolled up at the sleeves, and she could see his strong forearms, with a smattering of hair covering them. The temptation to reach out and touch was overwhelming.

  ‘So are you,’ Nikhil said, sounding more amused than ever. ‘That’s a lovely dress.’

  ‘But most of the other women are wearing black,’ she said. ‘I’m feeling terribly out of place.’

  Nikhil shrugged. ‘Black is like a uniform,’ he said. ‘Pretty boring, if you ask me. Come on—let me get you another drink.’

  Shweta hadn’t even noticed that her first drink had gone. Something was not quite right. Nikhil seemed a lot more formal than he had when he’d met her last—and, while he was smiling a lot, the smile didn’t reach his eyes.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ she asked.

  Nikhil sighed and rubbed at his face. ‘It’s been a crazy week,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I’m tempted to throw this whole thing over and go and do something else. Maybe work in an office—it’s got to be simpler.’

  ‘More stars throwing tantrums?’

  He shook his head. ‘I wish. That’s the easiest thing to handle. No, some of my clients are delaying payments. Big corporates. Apparently they hadn’t got all the internal approvals in place before they hired me, and the bills aren’t getting cleared. I’ve had to threaten legal action in two cases to get them to pay up. It isn’t hurting me right now, because business is doing well, but unless I play hardball with these guys I’ll have other clients trying to take me for a ride.’

  Shweta was looking mildly shocked.

  He laughed. ‘Let’s change the topic before your eyes glaze over and you fall asleep on the table. How was your Pune trip?’

  ‘Pretty good,’ she said cautiously. Nikhil still looked on edge, and she would bet anything that it wasn’t about a few missed payments.

  ‘Your dad happy to see you?’

  ‘I guess so.’ Her father rarely displayed any emotion, but he’d cancelled his weekly bridge game to spend time with her, and that was saying a lot. ‘He’s growing old,’ she said. ‘He was forty when I was born, so he’s pushing seventy now... I get a little worried sometimes.’

  Shweta had grown up without a mother, and losing her father was one of her biggest fears. She rarely spoke about it, not acknowledging it even to herself, but the expression in Nikhil’s eyes showed that he understood.

  She hurried on before he could say anything. ‘How’s Veena Aunty doing?’ she asked. She knew how fond Nikhil was of his stepmother—he was probably closer to her than to his own mother.

  Nikhil’s face clouded over. ‘I haven’t seen her for a while,’ he said tightly. ‘I had a bit of a bust-up with my parents. She lives with them, and I’m not keen on going there if I can help it. Amma’s taken their side on the whole thing.’

  ‘Maybe she has her reasons,’ Shweta couldn’t help saying. She’d always thought that Nikhil was a bit too hung up on the whole being illegitimate business. She could see why it had bothered him during his growing up years, but surely it was time to let go now?

  Nikhil didn’t seem to have heard her. ‘I asked her to move here and stay with me,’ he said. ‘I have a decent flat, and I could hire someone to look after her during the day. It would be so much more dignified than letting those two take care of her. I told you, didn’t I, that she’s pretending to be Mom’s cousin now?’

  ‘Go to Kerala and try speaking to her,’ Shweta said. ‘You don’t need to talk to your parents unless absolutely necessary.’

  ‘My father’s told me not to come near until I’ve apologised to him for what I said during our last argument,’ he said. He stared broodingly into space for a few minutes.

  Having run out of useful suggestions, Shweta stayed silent.

  After a while Nikhil shook himself and seemed to come back to earth. He took a largish swig out of his glass and turned to Shweta. ‘I’m not the best of company today, am I?’ he asked, forcing a smile. ‘It’s just that you know the whole story—it’s so much easier talking to you than to anyone else...’

  Of course it was. For a few seconds Shweta felt such an acute sense of disappointment that she could hardly speak. That explained why Nikhil was seeking her out, she thought. He must have kept all this stuff about his parents bottled up for years, and it would be a relief being able to pour it out to someone who knew all about it—save him the embarrassment of having to tell whoever his current friends were that he was illegitimate.

  But after the first wave of anger ebbed she was able to think about it more rationally. It was natural, his wanting to talk to her. And the kisses and dinner dates—perhaps he sensed how attracted she was to him and those were his means of keeping her hooked. Unbidden, her thoughts went back to that conversation she’d overheard between members of his team.

  ‘I’ll have another drink, I think,’ she said.

  Her mind was working overtime, she knew—maybe she was imagining things. Nikhil got up and went to the bar to fetch a refill, and she watched him silently.

  ‘I resented you for a long time, you know,’ he said quietly after handing her the glass. ‘That’s why I used to give you a hard time. You were the first person who made me realise that there was something wrong with my family.’

  ‘Me?’ Shweta’s voice was incredulous. ‘What did I do?’

  ‘You asked me who my real mother was,’ he said. ‘I told you that both of them were my moms, but you said, “Whose tummy did you live in before you were born?” Until then I think I’d believed implicitly in the “babies are a gift from God” story. So it was a revelation in more ways than one.’

  ‘I don’t even remember,’ Shweta said remorsefully. ‘But I can quite imagine myself saying that. I went around once telling the whole class that Santa Claus didn’t exist—some of the kids actually started crying.’

  ‘Now, that I don’t remember,’ he said, and the smile was back in his voice. ‘Maybe I got off lightly, then.’

  ‘I thought it was very unfair,’ she said after a brief pause.

  Nikhil raised his eyebrows. ‘What was? No Santa Claus?’

  ‘You having two moms when I didn’t have even one,’ she said.

  There was an awkward pause, and then Nikhil said, ‘I never thought of it that way.’

  The realisation that he was illegitimate had tainted most of his childhood. He’d grown up in a stolidly middle-class neighbourhood and the very fact that most of the rigidly conventional people around him had felt sorry for him had bee
n a constant thorn in his flesh. It had never occurred to him that Shweta had envied him.

  ‘It must have been tough for you, losing your mom when you were so young.’ As soon as the words were out, he wished them unsaid. Shweta’s face had closed up in an instant.

  ‘I hardly remember her,’ she said. ‘And my aunt was there. She took good care of me.’

  She’d always been like that when her mother was mentioned, Nikhil remembered. Something made him look down at her hands and he noticed a familiar mannerism—just like she’d used to in school she was tracing out words on her left palm with the fingers of her right hand. It was something she did when she was tense. Unconsciously he leaned a little closer, to try and make out the words, but her hands clenched into little fists, and when he looked up she was scowling at him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice gentle.

  ‘You’re so annoying!’ she burst out. ‘You used to do that when we were kids—try and read what I was scribbling into my hand. I hate it! No one else—’

  She broke off, realising that she sounded impossibly petulant and childish. No one else had ever noticed the habit, though she did it all the time. Not her father, or her aunt, or her boss, or Siddhant. Somehow that made her feel even more annoyed with Nikhil.

  ‘Aren’t we getting late for dinner?’ she asked, sounding stiff and ungracious even to herself. ‘I thought you had a reservation for nine o’clock?’

  Nikhil nodded and got to his feet. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  She didn’t even feel hungry, Shweta realised as she went down the stairs.

  The ground floor of the restaurant was full now—and several people seemed to recognise Nikhil, turning to wave as he escorted her to the outdoor seating area. The women gave her curious looks, and she felt acutely conscious of her off-the-rack dress and casually done hair. Everyone else was dressed far more expensively than she was, and that somehow made her feel worse than ever. The evening was turning out to be a total disaster—the quicker she left the better it would be for both of them.

  ‘I’m not really very hungry,’ she muttered, glancing down at the menu.

  Supposedly the food was Indian, but she hadn’t even heard of half the dishes before. Probably they were designed to appeal to the large number of foreigners who were thronging the place. Shweta cast a quick look around. Most of the tables were occupied by glitzy types, except for one where a bunch of older people were celebrating someone’s fortieth birthday. They were expensively but casually dressed, and seemed very comfortable in their own skins. The woman whose birthday it was caught Shweta’s eye and gave her a wink. Instantly she started feeling better.

  ‘I like the look of that group,’ she told Nikhil. ‘Especially the husband of the birthday girl. He’s cute.’

  ‘He’s twice your age,’ Nikhil said, following her gaze.

  ‘But so what? He looks nice. I bet he was quite a heartbreaker when he was younger. And look at him now—he’s so wrapped up in his wife, and she must be about the same age as him...’

  Nikhil reached across and firmly took her glass out of her hand. ‘I agree. They’re very cute. But you need to stop staring,’ he said. ‘And they’re forty—not eighty. It’s perfectly normal to be wrapped up in each other even at that age. I didn’t know you were such a romantic.’

  ‘I’m not romantic at all!’ Shweta gave him an indignant look. ‘And I’m not drunk either. So you can give me back my glass, thank you very much.’

  ‘I didn’t say you were drunk,’ Nikhil said, and gave her the glass back. ‘Shall I order for you? You’re holding your menu upside down.’

  ‘It makes the same amount of sense both ways,’ she said, and he laughed out loud.

  After he’d finished ordering and the waiter had gone away, he reached out and took her hand across the table. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘The evening’s not gone the way it was supposed to, has it?’

  ‘I’m not sure how it was supposed to go,’ she said, meeting his gaze squarely across the table. ‘But if it was supposed to be a date it’s not been very date-like so far.’

  Nikhil toyed with her hand for a few seconds without looking up. Then he lifted it and gently kissed her fingers one by one, his lips lingering against her skin. Completely taken by surprise, she watched him as if turned to stone. There was something incredibly erotic about the gesture—quite suddenly the date was living up to expectations after all.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ she asked when he finally looked up, and her voice was trembling slightly.

  He took his time answering, bending to press one more kiss on her palm before he spoke. ‘You looked like you could do with a kiss,’ he said. ‘And you’re too far away for me to kiss you properly. We’ll have to wait until we’re out of here for that.’

  She tried to be annoyed at being told that she looked as if she needed kissing, but she was so strung up at the thought of getting to kiss him properly later that she couldn’t bother to be upset. The rest of her appetite seemed to have disappeared as well, but she obediently picked at her food when it arrived. After the first few mouthfuls she discovered that the taste was out of the world—and that she was hungry after all.

  ‘I like watching you eat,’ Nikhil said. ‘You look like you’re enjoying the meal, not counting calories.’

  ‘I’ll probably be as fat as a tub by the time I’m forty,’ Shweta said.

  She said no to dessert, however, and Nikhil asked for the bill. Shweta was almost jigging around in impatience while he waited for his credit card to be swiped and then signed the charge slip.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said finally, and she slipped her arm in his to walk out of the restaurant.

  ‘I’ll drop you home,’ he said. ‘But first...’

  The path to the car park was deserted, and Nikhil pulled her into his arms and kissed her very, very thoroughly. ‘I’ve been dreaming about this,’ he said huskily. ‘It drove me crazy, waiting two weeks till I could see you again.’

  Shweta nodded in agreement before fisting her hands in his hair and pulling his head down for another kiss. This was one situation where his new haircut wasn’t an improvement—it had been so much easier to get a grip when his hair was longer. Still, she did the best she could, and he reciprocated admirably. Both of them were a little breathless when they broke apart a few minutes later.

  ‘I wish I could take you home with me,’ he said. ‘But it’s too soon—I don’t want to rush you.’

  One part of Shweta’s brain was quite sure that she didn’t mind being rushed—the other part, however, grudgingly admitted that he was right.

  ‘I’ll call the car,’ he said.

  Shweta gave him a curious look. ‘You mean you’ll whistle to it and it’ll come to you? Like in a Bond movie?’

  Nikhil laughed. ‘No, I brought my driver along because I knew I’d be drinking,’ he said. ‘Come here—we have time for one last kiss.’

  And what a kiss it was. Shweta thought of protesting that she was in no hurry, that they could spend the rest of the night in the car park as far as she was concerned, but she had to bite the words back. Also, the kisses were getting a little too much for her self-control—another few and she’d be clawing the clothes off him. It was probably best that she go home before she completely disgraced herself. Either he wasn’t quite as attracted to her as he said he was, or he had super-human self-control, she thought resentfully as they waited for the driver to bring the car around.

  Once they were in the car Nikhil kept his hands off her completely. After he’d foiled her first two attempts to get closer to him Shweta sat grumpily in one corner, resisting his attempts to make polite conversation.

  ‘Are you free next weekend?’ he asked as she got out of the car.

  She nodded. Definitely not as attracted as she was, she thought. Next weekend seemed like aeons awa
y, with the week yawning like a bottomless abyss in between.

  ‘Only I don’t think I can wait that long to see you again,’ he said, with a laugh in his voice as if he’d gauged exactly how frustrated she was feeling. ‘OK if I pick you up after work on Tuesday?’

  ‘Tuesday sounds good,’ she said politely. ‘Dinner again?’

  He thought it over. ‘Well, I guess we would need to eat,’ he said. ‘Though it wasn’t exactly dinner that I had in mind...’

  In her high heels she was almost as tall as he was. She stood on tiptoe and put a hand to the side of his face. Slowly she brought her lips close to his mouth and pressed them there. For a few seconds he stood frozen. Worried that he’d move away, she moved her hands up to clasp his head and deepened the kiss, leaning into him, her body pressed provocatively against his. This time his response was far more satisfactory and he returned the kiss, his lips hot and hungry against hers, while his arms held her in a possessive embrace.

  A piercing whistle from an upstairs window make them break apart and look up. Priya was leaning out of the window, waving madly.

  ‘Stupid cow,’ Shweta said crossly, once she’d got over her initial embarrassment. She made a face at Priya and gestured to her to go back inside. Priya gave her a huge grin, and mimed kissing. It took a particularly hard glare to get her to shut the window and go inside.

  ‘I’ll see you on Tuesday,’ she said to Nikhil, but he gave her a quizzical look. ‘Why do you and Priya share a flat? You don’t seem to like each other much.’

  Shweta stared at him. ‘She’s my best friend,’ she said sharply. ‘I thought you’d be able to figure that out without me having to tell you.’

  She was unlocking her front door when she heard his powerful car start up and she gave a little groan. She’d been stupid, she realised, snapping at him like that. But Priya was the closest thing she had to a sister, and she’d reacted without thinking.

  ‘You’re a pestilence and a disease,’ she told Priya crossly as Priya came out of her room with a big grin plastered on her face. ‘A foul blot on humanity. A Nosey Parker. The worst excuse for a flatmate in all creation. The only—’