The Unexpected Son

by Shobhan Bantwal

  Alas, they were all dreams—fragile-as-glass dreams that had begun to shatter the instant she’d found out he was seeing another girl at the same time he was seeing her. Prema had mentioned it to her some weeks ago. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but rumor has it that Som is involved with Sulekha.”

  “Sulekha Sheth?” The girl was pretty, but she was so dense she could barely spell her own name. How could Som be interested in a girl like that?

  Prema had confirmed it with an emphatic nod.

  The news had dismayed more than stunned Vinita. She had seen less of Som in the last several days, and whenever they’d been together he’d been preoccupied. Nevertheless, she was loath to admit that she had failed to hold his attention. She still wanted to believe he was a changed man—because of her good influence. He’d said so himself a couple of times.

  She had also already begun to suspect she might be pregnant.

  But two weeks ago, that last smidgen of hope she’d been desperately clinging to was blown away like a piece of fluff disappearing into the wind. Prema had discovered that Som was spoken for—had been for years. Since his childhood he’d been unofficially betrothed to his cousin from Bijapur, his rich maternal uncle’s daughter. They were waiting for his cousin to turn eighteen, legally old enough for marriage, before announcing a formal engagement. And that was supposed to happen within the coming year.

  Vinita had shaken her head at first. “How can he marry his first cousin? That’s almost incest.”

  Prema had shrugged it off. “Happens all the time—even more frequently among rich people. It keeps the money within the family.”

  Recognizing the truth in Prema’s words, Vinita had burst into bitter tears. Prema had comforted her the best way she could while Vinita ranted. “Why did he lie to me, Prema? Why did he pretend I was the only girl in the world for him?”

  “He does this to every girl he gets involved with, Vini. He’s a heartless bastard. His affairs never seem to last more than a few months. Besides, you were…uh…Never mind.”

  Vinita had swiped at her tears with her palm and stared at Prema. “What?”

  “Nothing.” Prema’s lips had settled into that thin, familiar line.

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m sorry, but this is going to…upset you.”

  “I’m upset anyway. What’s a little more?”

  “All right, I heard that you were part of some kind of wager.”

  Blowing her nose and trying to keep the pieces of her fragmented ego from scattering, Vinita had turned to her friend in confusion. “Wager? As in betting?”

  “Apparently he had boasted to his friends that he could get any girl—even a serious girl like you who was focused on nothing but studies.”

  “You mean…he chose to target me because of some bizarre challenge?”

  “I understand his friends dared him to seduce a scholarly girl who was wrapped up in books and would be hard to distract. They were betting money on it.”

  It had taken a few seconds for the truth to register. She’d been a pawn in a mindless game.

  She’d turned on her heel and walked away from Prema. What little was left of her self-esteem had vanished, quiet as a puff of smoke.

  Chapter 6

  Som settled back in the chair to light a cigarette. He needed one after the long but satisfying day on the cricket field. It had been a tough game, but his team had triumphed in the end. Every muscle in his body ached from the workout. But his spirits were floating high, like a kite on a clear winter day.

  “You look like a mogul king on his throne, puffing away at his hookah.” His friend Rajendra, better known as Raju, sounded amused as he referred to the elaborate water pipe that emperors used to smoke in days gone by—at times with opium-laced tobacco. The hookah was often associated with decadent pleasures and royal depravity.

  “Why not?” said Som, blowing a ring of smoke through his puckered lips and watching it travel upward, the perfect O lazily distorting into an oval before disintegrating into a shapeless wisp. He felt like a king. Sometimes.

  Raju nodded wisely.

  “There’s nothing like a good cigarette after a challenging match…and a cup of coffee,” Som said to Raju, who sat across the table from him in Bombay Café, sipping his own steaming brew from a mug large enough to obscure his narrow face.

  Placing the mug on the table, Raju grinned at him, his perfect white teeth flashing in the light streaming in through the café’s window. His teeth were his only redeeming feature. A gangly man with a bad case of acne and a worse case of low self-confidence, Raju was a close friend and fellow cricketer. Som could ask him to do anything and Raju did it with few complaints—as long as it wasn’t illegal. The chap was sometimes annoyingly principled. In some areas.

  “Tell me something,” said Raju. “How do you juggle two girls with such diverse personalities?”

  Som lifted a shoulder and flicked the ashes from his cigarette into his empty coffee mug. “Girls are predictable.”

  “Really?” countered Raju with a puzzled frown. “I thought they were unpredictable.”

  “Not at all,” Som assured him. “If you know what makes them happy, it’s easy to get them to do what you want.”

  Admiration shone in Raju’s dark eyes. “I still can’t believe you got Vinita Shelke to fall for you, man.”

  Som raised an eyebrow. “You had doubts?” Poor Raju had lost ten rupees when he’d predicted she’d be impossible to win over.

  “Some,” admitted Raju, picking up his mug with both hands.

  “Patience, yaar. Patience is what it takes,” Som advised him. His four other close friends had lost ten rupees each. “I have her thinking she’s beautiful and sexy.”

  Raju’s forehead creased again for a moment. “Is she?”

  Som pretended confusion. “Is she what?”

  “Sexy.”

  He gave another casual shrug. He wasn’t about to give his friend any details, if that’s what Raju was fishing for. He preferred to keep the finer elements of his love life private. He had to.

  His aunt from Bijapur was a shrewish woman. If she got suspicious of what Som was up to, she’d descend on Palgaum and threaten to stop her daughter from marrying him. Not that it meant all that much to Som. His cousin, Neeraja, had the countenance of a constipated horse—wiry long legs, hardly there breasts, and a face only her mother could consider attractive.

  But Neeraja would come with an incredibly fat dowry, something Som’s father had been salivating over for years. His father would disown him if Som did something to prevent the girl from coming into the family as the cherished daughter-in-law.

  The fact that Neeraja was Som’s parents’ favorite niece made the situation more complicated. The only good thing was that Neeraja was a quiet, good-natured type of girl. She’d taken after her father. It could have been worse. She could have inherited her mother’s bulldog personality.

  “You mean you won’t tell me exactly what you’re doing with your two current girlfriends,” pouted Raju. He looked like a little boy who’d been denied a long-anticipated treat.

  Tossing his cigarette stub into the ashtray, Som shook his head. “There are some things a chap can’t talk about.”

  Sometimes Som wondered if Raju lived out all his fantasies vicariously through him. Poor Raju—he had neither the looks nor the gumption to even approach a girl, let alone enjoy some serious action. The man was desperate for it, and had to settle for looking at dirty magazines smuggled in from some obscure shop in Bombay. There were no adult shops in Palgaum.

  Raju sulked for a moment. “Not fair—especially after I lost ten rupees.”

  “All you need to know is that you lost the bet.” But Som had to admit Vinita had proved to be a tougher challenge than he’d presumed. Since she hadn’t paid attention to him after he’d whistled at her and made a few loud, complimentary remarks about her dancing talents, he’d had to come up with other ideas.

  He’d been forced t
o engineer accidentally bumping into her after her recital, then ply her with endless cups of coffee on a nearly daily basis before she’d agreed to go somewhere more private with him. And then it was a few more weeks before she’d let him kiss her. He’d never had to work so hard to get a girl before.

  After that things had become easier. Once he’d seduced her, it was like working on a clay sculpture. He could mold her in whatever shape he wanted, make her moan and beg for his body, like he wanted her to. And she was pretty good in that department, Som reflected—surprisingly good for a girl who considered a mathematics textbook more riveting than a thriller movie.

  And he’d won his bet.

  Vinita was the first bookworm type he had seduced, mainly because he hadn’t considered girls like her worth his attention. When there were so many pretty girls who were willing and easy, why bother with someone stiff and unapproachable like Vinita? But he loved a challenge.

  Nonetheless he had to admit she was a pleasant surprise. She’d even intrigued him a bit, something that almost never happened. Maybe it was because she talked about entirely different topics than other girls. She didn’t seem all that obsessed with fashion and shopping. She was a refreshing change from the typical self-centered and not-too-bright girls he’d been friendly with.

  “Hmm,” Raju admitted grudgingly, pulling Som back into the moment. “But don’t you feel guilty about breaking the heart of a sincere girl like her?”

  Som caught the waiter’s eye and ordered a second cup of coffee before replying, “Come on, yaar, who takes that sort of thing seriously? There’s very little entertainment in this town, so I’m doing girls like Vinita a favor.”

  “How?”

  “By introducing some excitement into their dull lives.” Looking at it honestly, though, he was feeling twinges of guilt in recent weeks, especially when Vinita looked at him with such adoration in her eyes. But he wasn’t about to admit that to Raju.

  “How long are you going to keep this up?” Raju almost sounded concerned. “Aren’t you supposed to get engaged to your cousin soon?”

  “Yes, but my life isn’t going to change all that much.”

  Raju’s shaggy brows rose. “Don’t you have to join your father’s business after you get married?”

  “That’s not until next year. Even then, I’m not worried. Once I give my wife a few children, she’ll be content.” Just like his mother was content.

  Besides, his father, Veerappa Kori, despite having a personable wife, had a few mistresses tucked away in various parts of town. No one had ever talked about it to Som, but he knew the women’s names and where they lived. As a teenager, curious to find out where his father disappeared to on certain evenings immediately after dinner, Som had hopped on his bicycle and followed his father’s car on various occasions. He’d seen and heard plenty of what went on.

  Back then, he’d been dismayed to discover his highly feared and respected appa was cheating on his wife, the woman he proudly escorted to social functions, the woman he shared a bed with every night.

  Well, the teens were a time to learn many of life’s lessons, and for Som, learning about extramarital sex was one of them. At least his father couldn’t punish him for something he was guilty of doing himself.

  “So you’ll make love to your wife at night and your latest girlfriends during the day?” demanded Raju, interrupting Som’s thoughts again. Raju looked scandalized.

  Som put a finger over his lips. “Shh! Not so loud.” There were fellow students seated at nearby tables. “You have a twisted mind, Raju.”

  “No, you’re the one with the twisted mind. Cheating on one’s wife is beyond twisted.” Raju gave him a blistering look of censure. “I plan to be faithful to my wife, no matter what she looks like.”

  The coffee arrived. Instead of taking umbrage at Raju’s reproachful words, Som lifted his mug in a mock salute. “To my good friend, who will always be faithful to his wife.” Even if she looks like a camel, he added silently. As he took his first scalding sip, he wondered if Raju was the luckier of the two of them. There was something to be said for living a bland, uncomplicated life. Fewer problems.

  And Som had his share of problems—too many, in fact. Vinita was in love with him and she was becoming too clingy and demanding. His own pinpricks of conscience were making him uneasy. It wasn’t like him to experience remorse. There was only one thing he could do. He had to stop seeing her.

  So how was he going to let her down gently?

  Raju continued to study him with the probing expression that Som disliked so much. It made him squirm. Despite the fact that Raju was a wealthy drifter like himself, Raju still lived by a different set of rules. He wasn’t joking when he said he’d be faithful to his future wife. Raju would also turn into a seriously committed businessman once he joined his father and two older brothers in their profitable timber business.

  At heart Raju was a good man. He had always been a loyal friend to Som—since they had been classmates and fellow Lingayats in a Catholic boys’ school, where there were only a handful of students of their faith at the time.

  Taking another thoughtful sip of the potent, bitter coffee, Som avoided Raju’s incisive gaze and turned his eyes to the scene outside the window instead.

  The sun was losing its luminescence, getting ready to set. The traffic was heavy—people going home from work. The nearby masjid, the mosque, called the faithful to their evening prayer.

  He had to work out a few things, he reflected, mostly concerning Vinita. Unfortunately, she was so damn serious and committed about everything, even something like having an affair. Why couldn’t she have some fun for a change?

  Once again Raju interrupted Som’s wandering mind when he put his empty mug down along with some money to pay for the coffee. “I have to go,” Raju said, thrusting his wallet into his pocket.

  Som absently lifted a hand to wave. “See you tomorrow.” He watched his friend walk out the door. Then he went back to brooding.

  He’d have to think of a way to tell Vinita that the thing they had together was over.

  Chapter 7

  The drizzle hadn’t let up in five days. It was well past the monsoon season, but a rare typhoon had traveled up the coast, bringing with it relentless rain, even as far inland as Palgaum.

  Vinita leaned a shoulder against the window frame of the small flat and watched it fall noiselessly, the moisture weighing down the blades of grass and the branches of the small tree in the courtyard. The window was open, so the chilly moisture traveled directly into the room with every gust of wind, making her shiver. She felt sick. Lately she felt that way most of the time.

  Dead leaves and other debris floated along with the muddy water that flowed into the street and ended up in the nearby sewer drain. If this rain continued, a flood was likely.

  She disliked cloudy days, and rainy ones even more. But the current weather suited her mood—gray, wet, miserable. She’d been doing a lot of weeping lately.

  “What do you mean it’s our responsibility?” Som’s words jerked her out of her grim thoughts and forced her to turn away from the window. The outrage in his golden eyes could burn laser holes in anyone who dared to be close enough. The eyebrows looked menacing.

  Nevertheless Vinita stood her ground and looked him in the eye, her legs shaking so badly she didn’t know how long they would hold her up. “You’re a big part of what’s been happening all these months, Som.”

  His jaw tightened. “As if I need reminding.”

  “To you it may have been some cheap bet, but to me it was serious.”

  All she got in reply was silence.

  This was not going well. He looked livid. But after she’d missed her third monthly cycle she’d decided that Som had to be told. She couldn’t handle the crisis alone. She was facing total disaster. And time was running out.

  He was in this as much as she—actually more than she, because he had pursued her. Hadn’t he deliberately orchestrated their collision the ni
ght of the dance recital? Prema had told her the truth about that, too. He had asked her out, then sweet-talked her straight into his arms, and eventually into his bed. So why should she have to suffer the consequences alone? The baby was his.

  He looked incredulous. “You’re sure this is not a joke?”

  She tossed him a blistering look. “Do I look like I’m joking? Being pregnant at nineteen is hardly a joke.”

  His face turned a curious shade of red, telling her the remark had struck home. Finally. He thrust his hands in his pockets and started to pace the length of the tiny sitting room of his friend’s flat.

  This was the place where they’d met on the sly at least once a week for the last few months. Adjoining this room was the bedroom, where the bed took up nearly the entire space.

  She had considered that bed a small piece of heaven as she’d lain beside Som and listened to his gruff smoker’s voice talk about his cricket team. She’d loved hearing him speak, and even come to appreciate the trademark scent of him—cigarette smoke combined with his bold aftershave. She could have picked him out in a crowd with her eyes shut, just by his smell.

  He turned to her with a frown. “Couldn’t you have protected yourself?”

  “So it’s my fault now? I was the inexperienced one in this relationship.” She pointed a finger at him. “You are the experienced fellow who’s had countless affairs.”

  “That’s not true!” he growled.

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t give me that, Som. You know you’re the Casanova of Shivraj College. And don’t even try to deny it.”

  “If you knew all that about me, why did you go out with me?” His nostrils flared. “I didn’t exactly abduct you. So why did you go to the café with me? Why did you sleep with me, damn it?”

  Clasping her hands tightly, she turned again and gazed at the falling rain, trying to keep her own temper under control. Angry outbursts were bad for the baby.