Secrets & Saris

by Shoma Narayanan

I can’t get through to you. Call me back whenever you can.

  Shefali switched the phone off again. Some things needed to be discussed face to face. It took her twenty minutes to get to Neil’s house, and she asked the auto-rickshaw driver to wait for her. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll take,’ she said, handing him a fifty-rupee note. ‘And I might need to go somewhere else if the person I need to meet isn’t at home.’

  ‘Neil Sir’s at home,’ the rickshaw driver informed her smugly. ‘His car’s parked in the driveway.’

  So it was. And of course the auto-wallah knew all about Neil—he probably even knew they’d had an argument. The joys of small-town life.

  Shefali’s hand trembled a little as she rang the doorbell. She had no idea what she was going to say to Neil—it was one thing telling herself that she needed to fight for their relationship to survive and quite another actually doing it. For a few seconds she contemplated going back home and calling him after all, but the door opened before she could do more than take a step back.

  Neil had obviously just come out of the shower—his hair was damp, and he was still doing up the buttons on his shirt. He was barefoot, and small droplets of water glistened on his perfectly muscled chest. Without thinking, Shefali put up a hand to touch his face. His skin was smooth and slightly damp, and she couldn’t help leaning closer, until Neil took her wrist and drew her inside, shutting the door behind her. Neither of them spoke, just reaching out for each other blindly, and Neil’s lips sought hers with a desperation that he didn’t even try to hide.

  Minutes later he drew away, cupping her face in his hands, his eyes troubled as he looked down into her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to grab you like that, but it was a surprise seeing you here and I lost my head a little.’

  ‘So did I,’ Shefali said, wondering how to continue.

  She hadn’t scripted this, and when she’d left home to come to Neil she hadn’t even been sure if she was meeting him to finalise their break-up or attempt a reconciliation. Right now all she felt like doing was holding on to him and never letting him go.

  ‘I’m so confused,’ she blurted out suddenly, and then blushed in embarrassment. Great—so much for being in control and mature.

  Neil didn’t seem to think the remark gauche or immature, though. He released her and stepped back, pushing his hand through his rumpled hair. ‘I know,’ he said, smiling ruefully. ‘We’ve made a bit of a pig’s breakfast of this, between the two of us.’

  Shefali could see what he meant, though she hadn’t heard the expression before—it took her a few seconds to dispel the image of a porker nosing around in a vat of kitchen slops.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ she asked, hoping she sounded level-headed and rational, and wondering what she’d do if he suggested never seeing each other again.

  ‘Let’s sit down and talk it through,’ he suggested. ‘Sensibly. Keeping our hands off each other and everything. Bela and Nina have gone next door,’ he added as Shefali looked around. ‘We’re alone.’

  No incentive for keeping her hands off him, then.

  Neil led the way into the dining room and they sat facing each other—as if they were at the United Nations, negotiating for world peace, Shefali thought a little hysterically.

  ‘I’m sorry I upset you,’ Neil said, and then there was a brief pause in which they stared wordlessly at each other.

  ‘I can’t understand why you feel the way you do,’ Shefali said finally. ‘But you’re wonderful with Nina. I’d have thought you’d like the idea of a large family.’

  ‘I didn’t have a choice with Nina,’ Neil said. ‘I love her to bits. But becoming a father at twenty-four isn’t something I’d recommend to anyone.’

  Shefali opened her mouth to say something, but Neil leaned across the table and gripped her hand.

  ‘I know I sound unreasonable,’ he said. ‘And I understand fully if you’ve decided you don’t want to marry me after all. But try and think of it this way—what if you found out that I couldn’t have children? What would you do?’

  ‘Is that...?’ Shefali said.

  Neil shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me. Not physically at any rate.’

  ‘No childhood attack of mumps?’ Shefali said, trying to lighten the mood a little. ‘Isn’t that what it always is in books?’

  Neil shook his head, his expression unchanged.

  ‘It’s not the same thing,’ she protested. ‘Not being able to have children is very different from deciding against having them.’

  ‘But the decision that you need to take is essentially the same,’ Neil said. ‘Marrying me, knowing I’m not in favour of having another child—I’m not willing to take the risk for myself.’

  ‘Right, so what if we agree on not having children until you’re sure that our marriage will last?’ Shefali said, striving to sound as emotionless as he did.

  There was another long pause, and Shefali could see a vein throbbing at his temple as he held her gaze with his steady smoke-grey eyes.

  ‘Why do you want to marry me?’ she asked abruptly. ‘Aren’t I turning out to be more trouble than I’m worth?’

  That got to him, she noted almost dispassionately, as Neil made a sudden movement of denial.

  ‘Well?’ she asked, her voice challenging, but something in his eyes made her stop and wait.

  ‘I want to spend the rest of my life with you,’ he said slowly, the words seemingly drawn out from him against his will. ‘I care about you, and...’

  ‘And?’ she prompted, but her voice was softer now. Neil shut his eyes briefly. ‘I can’t give you everything you want,’ he said, and his expression was bleak. ‘It’s only fair you have the chance to change your mind about marrying me. But if you do decide to go ahead with it I swear I’ll try to make it up to you in every other way possible.’

  He still hadn’t said that he loved her, but for the first time Shefali felt she could live with the omission.

  ‘Like I said, this isn’t what I wanted,’ she said quietly. ‘But I love Nina, and I do want to marry you.’

  At the last moment, her nerve failed her, and she wasn’t able to tell him that she loved him too, but it didn’t seem to matter. Neil was out of his chair in an instant, pulling her into his arms and holding her tightly, as if he never meant to let her go again.

  * * *

  Much later, when she was back home and getting ready to go to bed, the enormity of what she’d agreed to began to sink in. The sensible thing would have been to cut her losses and leave, rather than condemn herself to a lifetime of loving a man who didn’t love her back. But she was stupidly and irrevocably in love with Neil, and pretty much any kind of compromise seemed acceptable when the alternative was spending the rest of her life without him.

  Telling Neil that she didn’t want to marry him would have been pretty much like taking a butcher’s cleaver to her limbs—she’d never have been able to do it. She’d just have to figure out how to manage with what he was offering her and hope that he’d change his mind about having children. Or that a man who’d been careless enough to get one woman pregnant by accident would repeat the mistake.

  Smiling grimly at the thought, she finally fell asleep at around four a.m. and woke up with a start when her alarm rang three hours later.

  ELEVEN

  Neil left for Mumbai a few days later. Shefali was to join him in three weeks. As it turned out there was a vacancy in the Mumbai office of the playschool which was coming up around then. Also, Mrs Dubey was getting rather bored in Pune, and was more than happy to come out of retirement and return to Jabalpur to manage the school.

  ‘Frankly, I expected this would happen,’ Shefali’s boss told her when she rang the day she was leaving for Mumbai. ‘Mrs Dubey’s not the kind to
sit around in Pune keeping house for her son, and I knew you wouldn’t want to be in Jabalpur for more than a few months.’

  ‘But when I moved here I was planning to stay on for a few years at least,’ Shefali protested. ‘It’s just that I met Neil and...’

  ‘If it hadn’t been Neil it would have been someone else,’ her boss said cheerfully. ‘Or you’d have gone back to your parents. Now, are you going to stick at this Mumbai job or not?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ she said. ‘I’m just trying to figure out how far the school is from Neil’s flat.’ She typed both addresses into the internet—seven kilometers apart, the application informed her cheerily. ‘That’s not very close, is it?’ she asked, frowning at the screen.

  ‘It’s close enough by Mumbai standards,’ her boss said. ‘And you can put your step-daughter in the same school, so you won’t have to worry about her while you’re at work.’

  ‘She’s joining regular school this month,’ Shefali said. ‘I’ll ring off, Shwetank. I need to leave soon. Thanks for everything.’

  Step-daughter. It was the first time Shefali had heard anyone use the word for Nina, and it sounded cold and not quite real—as if Nina had just stepped out of the pages of Snow White or Cinderella. They’d decided to take things slowly at the beginning, to allow Nina to get used to the idea of having a ‘new mother’, but Nina would have none of it, insisting on calling Shefali Mamma as soon as the engagement was announced. Reema was still ‘Mum’, and Nina seemed to be handling the distinction very well.

  Shefali sighed as she heaved her bags onto the train. There was a fairly big contingent of people at the station to see her off—Mrs Dubey and most of the staff from the school, and quite a few tiny tots with their mums. She found herself getting a little teary-eyed as she waved to them from the steps as the train pulled out of the station, and she splashed a little water on her face before going to her seat in the first-class section. There was an elderly couple sharing her carriage, and she buried her face in a magazine to avoid being drawn into conversation.

  With the wedding just two days away, Shefali was in serious danger of succumbing to an attack of pre-wedding nerves. There were, of course, various reminders of the previous time she’d almost got married—the elderly and slightly eccentric aunt who’d called to ask if she’d mind if she was given the gift originally bought for her wedding to Pranav; the friend from the US who’d not heard about the break-up and was genuinely perplexed when she got an invitation for a second wedding. Even the tussle with her mother over what to wear for the reception had had nasty little undertones of ‘last time I did what you said, and look what happened’.

  But worse than that was her fear of things not working out. She was worrying about a million things. Whether Neil would ever change his mind about having children, whether they’d be compatible, even whether Nina would accept her or not. Pretty much everyone who had heard about the wedding seemed to think that teaching kindergarten for three years was completely inadequate preparation for step-motherhood. And now there was a bunch of new fears that hadn’t even occurred to her earlier—what if Reema turned Nina against her? What if Neil objected when she tried to discipline Nina? What if she couldn’t get along with Neil’s parents? In a way, her fears helped her stave off the worst demon of them all—that Neil didn’t love her. He’d never said he did. She’d just assumed that he must, given that he was marrying her in spite of all his misgivings. Maybe she’d been wrong all along?

  The thought kept cropping up at regular intervals, like a spectre at a feast, and she tried to distract herself with magazines and details of the wedding ceremony Barbara Mitra had sent her.

  She was still worrying twenty hours later as the train pulled into the erstwhile Victoria Terminus. The station was now called the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, after a famous Maratha warrior, she recalled, and tried to remember what he was famous for—fighting the British? The Mughals? Her history was weak at the best of times, and she had an unconscious phobia for all things related to Mumbai. Born and bred in Delhi, she had absorbed some of the true Delhi-ite’s discomfort at the bustling, business-driven life on the island city.

  It was a bright, sunny morning, but the condensation on the tinted windows of the air-conditioned train made it difficult to see out, and she couldn’t spot Neil anywhere on the platform. Disappointment clouded her eyes as the train ground to a halt and she still didn’t see him. Maybe he’d got delayed, or was waiting at the wrong section of the platform? She started putting her things together, wondering if she should call him before she got off the train. She’d turned to peer out of the window one last time when the door of her compartment slid open.

  ‘Looking for someone?’ a familiar voice asked, and she whirled around to see Neil standing at the doorway.

  Shefali jumped to her feet with an incoherent little cry and flung herself into his arms, hugging him fiercely. The elderly couple had got off at Dadar, so there was no one else in the carriage—Neil stepped in and shut the door behind him, crushing her lips under his in a kiss that had several weeks’ worth of pent-up desire in it.

  ‘God, I’ve missed you,’ he said throatily when they finally came up for air. ‘It feels like years since I held you last.’

  Shefali leaned her head against his chest for a few minutes, breathing in the fresh, clean scent of his skin, too overwhelmed to speak. Her doubts had receded into the background the instant she’d set eyes on Neil, but now she was in the throes of a serious case of lust.

  ‘Come on—let’s get out of here,’ Neil said. ‘We have a couple of hours before the rest of my family descends on us—let’s make the most of it.’

  He picked up her bags and got off the train, turning around to swing her down into his arms.

  ‘Travelling light this time, I see,’ he said teasingly. Most of her luggage had gone on ahead, and she had only a couple of cases with her.

  ‘Just stuff to last me till the wedding,’ she said. ‘My mum’s bringing a truckload of things from Delhi, though.’

  She couldn’t keep her eyes off Neil. As usual he was dressed in jeans and a white shirt, and he looked good enough to eat. He’d had a haircut, and she couldn’t help reaching up and ruffling his hair.

  He took her hand and pressed a quick kiss into the palm. ‘I’ve booked you into a hotel,’ he said, and, in answer to her unspoken question, ‘I’m staying there as well—for tonight at least. I wanted us to have some time with each other before the wedding, especially since our honeymoon’s not for a while.’

  Their honeymoon had had to be delayed because Nina had got a mid-term vacancy at a rather swanky South Mumbai school and would be joining immediately after the wedding. Neil wasn’t comfortable with being out of town while she was settling down, so they’d decided to push forward their trip to the Maldives by a month.

  ‘How’s Nina?’ Shefali asked, as Neil’s driver put the luggage into Neil’s SUV.

  ‘Excited,’ he said briefly. ‘That’s the other reason for the hotel—she’s not likely to give you a minute to breathe if you stay with us.’

  Shefali scooted a little closer to Neil, wanting to touch him again but very conscious of the driver’s presence in the car. Evidently not troubled by such scruples, Neil tipped her face up for a scorching hot kiss.

  ‘Not here,’ she mumbled, trying to push him away, but she succumbed as soon as his lips touched hers.

  She cast an embarrassed look at the front seat when Neil finally released her, but the driver was looking straight ahead, his face impassive. Obviously he was discreet, and Shefali couldn’t help wondering if he was used to his boss kissing women in the back seat of the car. A little shaft of jealousy shot through her. They hadn’t talked about it, but since his divorce it was unlikely that Neil had stayed celibate. And he must meet attractive women all the time in his line of work...

  ‘You’re frowning,’ N
eil remarked, leaning back against the headrest. ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘No, I was just thinking that there’s a lot to be done if we’re getting married tomorrow...’

  ‘Everything’s done,’ Neil said easily. ‘We’re getting married in the registry office, and the reception is at the same hotel you’re staying at. I called in a few favours and got a booking at short notice. And Rafiq and Priti pitched in to organise the decorations and the cake.’

  He took in her tense expression. She’d clearly used the wedding arrangements as a blind, but now she seemed really worried at the casual way Neil seemed to be taking everything.

  ‘Relax,’ he said. ‘Nothing will go wrong. Rafiq and I have organised events for ten times the number of people in half the time. And those were being telecast live.’

  ‘So a wedding reception is small change for you guys?’ Shefali muttered, remembering the months her mother had slaved over the tiniest details of the arrangements for her first wedding.

  Neil laughed and leaned across to kiss her again. ‘Absolutely,’ he said.

  There was a half-mocking, half-caressing note in his voice that made Shefali murmur, ‘Just you wait till I get you alone.’

  ‘Another ten minutes,’ he said huskily, deliberately misinterpreting the remark, and the sensual promise in his voice sent pleasurable shivers up Shefali’s spine.

  It took less than ten minutes to reach the hotel, but checking in took some time, and then the bellboy insisted on showing them to their suite and explaining how all the TV and air-conditioning controls worked.

  ‘I think we’ll figure it out,’ Shefali interrupted, taking two hundred-rupee notes out her purse and putting them into the young man’s hand.

  He took them, but didn’t leave the room. ‘Ma’am, I need to tell you where the fire escapes are,’ he said earnestly.

  ‘Isn’t there a map or something I can look at?’

  ‘Ma’am, it’s the hotel’s safety policy. I need to explain in person.’