by Sheila Kumar
Samar stopped, looked around till he located Karishma and then walked up to her table, pulling out the chair beside her. Sitting down, he looked across and directed a slow, warm smile towards the three girls. Mini and Leena carolled, ‘Hi, Samar,’ while Nina stared down at her plate of idlis, noticing that she hadn’t finished eating them. All of a sudden, she lost interest in the food; now all she wanted to do was to leave. Mini and Leena soon got into their favourite pastime, arguing over the choice of movie they were to see this evening, along with Mini’s husband Raj and Leena’s boyfriend Rohan Varma. Usually Nina went along with them, mostly for the English movies but for the occasional Hindi film, too; this evening, however, she was due at Alan’s house for dinner.
Another resolution crept into her mind: I will not look at him. Except she had the distinct feeling that she was being watched. So she looked up, only to lock eyes with Samar. He was looking at her intently but quite expressionlessly, his eyes glittering like agate. She gave him a tremulous smile and he quirked one eyebrow at her in response.
I wonder if that satanic look becomes more pronounced when he is making love to a woman, Nina thought, then caught herself up short. Now where had that come from? But she knew where that had come from; the way her body reacted every time she saw Samar, it was clear she was in sexual thrall to the man. I badly want to jump his bones, she thought wryly to herself. Maybe I need exorcism. Then as Mini and Leena rose to leave, she got up too.
Samar watched Nina walk away, his eyes on her shapely bottom and made a sudden unwelcome discovery … he was aroused. Yeah, like you are back in high school, Singh, he derided himself, bringing his attention back to what Karishma was saying. And trying to banish all thoughts of blue-blue eyes set in a heart-shaped face. Not an easy task, which was another unwelcome discovery he made.
TWO
LATER THAT EVENING, NINA drove the slightly beat-up but sturdy Chevrolet Beat which was on loan from Alan up the flower-edged driveway of his eighteenth-century bungalow. It had taken her a while to discover that in India, guests invited to dinner were expected to turn up well after 8 p.m. Tonight, though, there were several cars parked along the drive already and from the sounds emanating from the house, it was clear the party was happily under way.
She rang the doorbell and was met by Alan Pereira and his wife Sita. It was their anniversary, and Nina handed over the gift she’d brought for Sita, kissing the older woman’s cheek. She liked Sita, whose dry wit and often brusque manner concealed a caring heart. Sita took under her wing just about anyone she felt needed looking after, from the gardener’s son, the milkman and the cleaning woman, to a motley collection of geese, dogs and cats. Alan, though, hated animals so the geese, dogs and cats were housed in the outhouse. The rest of her charity cases he put up with simply because Alan adored Sita.
Sita was a reed-thin woman with huge eyes that dominated an elfin face, and always wore her thick hair in one fat braid that went well past her hips. She also wore handloom saris all the time, bright swathes of green, teal, gold and orange. Paired with outsized earrings and stacks of brightly coloured bangles on both wrists, Sita Pereira made a very striking picture.
‘How many years down, Sita?’ Nina asked teasingly, and Alan answered for his wife, in a tone of mock horror, ‘Ask me! I’ve had to put up with this woman for twenty-seven years, would you believe it?’
Even as Nina opened her mouth to reply, a deep voice from behind Alan said, ‘You mean Sita has had to put up with you for twenty-seven years? You poor thing, Sita.’ And Samar Pratap Singh came up from behind Alan, shooting Nina a look full of hostile meaning, a meaning which was totally lost on Nina.
His animosity was hard to ignore. Now what have I done, thought Nina, in some confusion, then decided Samar was just having a bad day. Maybe Karishma Jhala and he had had an argument. Except, if that was the case, she didn’t know why he chose to take his ill temper out on her, Nina. To her horror, Sita said, ‘Samar, take Nina inside, give her a drink and introduce her to whoever she doesn’t already know.’ Samar stepped forward, unsmiling and offered his arm in a distinctly mocking way. She stared at the arm like she was facing a snake. I can’t touch him, she thought frantically. I can’t.
Alan and Sita had moved on to greet other guests. The silence stretched, became fraught and then Samar asked in a puzzled voice, ‘Nina? Shall we go in?’ Nina stood immobile till he took her arm to guide her inside the house.
The moment his hand touched her, it was like an electric charge hit them both. He breathed in sharply, audibly, then dropped Nina’s arm like it was a burning shard. Nina looked up, her heart pounding so hard she thought he could hear it. Bright blue eyes locked with brown for a long minute, then he seemed to snap out of it and repeated, ‘Shall we go in?’ And both of them noticed that his voice was unsteady.
A while later, it seemed to Nina that the wretched evening would never end; her jaws were beginning to ache with all the smiling and meaningless chatter she was forcing herself to indulge in. Usually, she enjoyed parties and quite liked the paper’s frequent get-togethers where everyone talked shop as hard as they discussed politics. Food and drink appeared at these dos with almost clockwork precision, and was wolfed down at an incredibly rapid rate.
Samar had retreated to the bar with the paper’s political bureau chief and they seemed immersed in deep discussion. But Nina knew better, she sensed those amber eyes frequently on her, literally burning into her. She had no explanation for what had happened. She had known that when he touched her, she would go up in flames. And that was what she had done. But then, he had gone up in flames too, she could not have just imagined that. They were both still reeling from the shock.
Samar Singh watched the woman in the russet dress broodingly. He had no explanation for what had happened by the front door. Or rather, he had one. It was purely sexual – he had been attracted to her ever since he had first met her some months ago. He had tamped it down but touching her had stoked the embers. Dammit, he thought savagely, just take her to bed and be done with it.
‘What are you scowling about, Singh?’ asked the bureau chief in mild surprise, and Samar ground out, ‘Exorcism.’ Which of course led the other man to believe he was on a witch-doctor special feature and he immediately demanded all details. Can’t let a girl addle your brains, even one so lovely as this one, Samar thought savagely to himself before swallowing his impatience and giving his full attention to the other man.
Meanwhile, Nina moved towards the dining table which groaned under a delectable mix of seafood from Mangalore, the nearest coastal town, and local vegetarian fare, prepared by the cook under Sita’s eagle eye. A south Indian Brahmin, she had created quite a scandal in her orthodox family by marrying Alan, who was a Mangalorean Christian.
However clichéd it came off as, Nina was in equal parts fascinated and puzzled by India. It was the mix that stumped her. On the one hand, vintage Bella Freud sweaters could be found in shops discreetly tucked off the shop-lined Commercial Street. On the other, large slum tenements virtually dotted the city. As in most developing countries, here too the wealthy were seriously wealthy and the poor were dreadfully poor, and Nina was still struggling to come to terms with this dichotomy.
The beautiful Kashmiri carpets had been rolled back in the parlour to allow for dancing. Couples were already on the floor when Rohan came up. ‘Come on, Nina, let’s dance,’ he said, pulling at her hand. Nina moved onto the makeshift dance floor with him, trying her best to lose herself in the techno beat pounding through the room.
She was conscious that from the dungeons, only a couple of people from personnel, and Rohan and she herself had been invited; Alan obviously respected the editorial crowds’ none-too-warm sentiments towards the sales lot. ‘Sharks in sharp suits,’ she’d heard a journalist growl once. ‘Better that than being a bagwalla,’ someone from the marketing team had riposted, making a scornful reference to the cloth bag that had once been the mandatory accessory of all newsmen and women.
Rohan Varma was uncomplicated, fun to be with and had been seeing Nina’s friend Leena Nair, who was part of the sales team for a while now; what’s more, Rohan and Leena simply adored each other. He was also a marketing genius, someone Nina found it a pleasure to work with. Okay, time to let go, thought Nina, throwing herself into the spirit of having fun. If she worked at it hard enough, she wouldn’t feel a pair of eyes the colour of molten amber on her.
She thought she had succeeded in having a good time and, a good many dances later, decided to go say her farewells to Alan and Sita. The music was now a languorous slew of slow numbers and many people were in clinches on the floor, with the lighting strategically darkened … that would be Sid’s work, she thought with amusement. Siddharth was the crime reporter, a gentle soul who had a perpetually pained expression when returning from covering the city’s daily dose of drunken misdemeanours, burglaries and murders. His overweening passion was music and theatre, and he was forever pestering Alan for a transfer to the culture beat. Alan, however, was an expert in ignoring what he didn’t want to hear, as well as being a closet chauvinist, or so Nina suspected. And so Sid continued to record the city’s rocketing crime rate while a couple of girls did the round of cultural activities, art shows, fashion shows and restaurant debuts.
Samar Singh was nowhere to be seen and Nina wasn’t sure whether that was good news or bad news. She said her byes and moved onto the patio, her hand going into her purse to search for the car keys, just as a figure stepped into the light from the shadows near the railing. Even before she saw him, her body knew who it was. Every cell in her body tightened as she looked at Samar Pratap Singh. There was something different about him, his customary sangfroid having fallen away from him. ‘Leaving already, Nina?’ he asked, the lazy smile in his voice intertwined with something else, something undefinable. ‘I was just about to come find you and ask you for a dance.’
Nina fought for composure and won. ‘Too late now, Samar,’ she managed to say in a calm tone.
He walked right up to her and leaned forward, his handsome face just inches from her own. ‘Afraid, Nina?’ he asked, a distinct rasp in his voice. ‘Were you afraid we’d have a repeat of what happened earlier?’
Nina stared at him, momentarily at a loss for an answer. Samar’s eyes glinted like caramelized gold as he stared at her, his body taut as a bowstring. She sensed he was fighting some battle with himself. Then he groaned, ‘Let’s put it to the test, shall we?’ and pulled her hard against him. So hard, Nina felt the breath slammed out of her. She didn’t mind, she didn’t want to breathe, she didn’t feel the need to breathe.
Samar drove his mouth down hard on hers and as their lips fused, it was as if they were born for this moment. His mouth tasted of cigarettes, of whiskey and of him, a musky, tangy taste that filled her mouth and her senses. The way he had grabbed her had been decidedly lacking in finesse; his kiss more than made up for that. It was a deeply sensual kiss, a complete kiss. Gently placing his mouth on hers, coaxing her lips open, he slid his tongue into her mouth even as he clamped her closer to him. As their tongues mated in an erotic dance, Nina slid her arms almost convulsively around his neck, her fingers feeling the shape of his head beneath the silky hair.
Samar’s hand moved up to cup her taut silk-covered breast, his thumb probing a nipple which had sprung to life, and Nina groaned. He was aroused; she could feel him hard against her. If he took her there, right there on that dimly-lit patio, she would have given herself to him without a whimper. The kiss went on and on and on, neither of them breaking contact, ignoring the very real danger of asphyxiation. And then Alan’s voice was heard, telling Sid to go check if the liquor supplies needed replenishing, and Samar tore his mouth from Nina’s with an expletive.
And Nina Sabharwal, her composure in shreds, her mouth swollen from Samar’s kiss and her heart beating like it was about to burst from her body, fled into the night.
THREE
ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT, Nina tossed and turned in her bed, contorting her linen bed sheets into one tangled mess. Samar Singh and she had kissed like there was going to be no tomorrow! Where did they go from here? She needed to be cool about what had happened, given his own cool quotient. Of course, what little Nina knew about his ‘cool quotient’ came from those Page Three snippets. Samar had gone to university in England, he owned a house in Belgravia, and he travelled inside and outside India a great deal. This was a man who dated many women – sophisticated, soignée women. And then, there was Karishma Jhala.
Well whatever, Nina thought gloomily as she turned over in a desperate attempt to sleep.
She was definitely not looking or feeling her best the next day and was positively dreading the next meeting with Samar Singh. She was also mortified at a fate that earlier had let weeks go by before she caught a glimpse of him and which now threw him into her path virtually every day. However, when she did come face-to-face with him, it was almost a week after Alan’s party and Nina had enough work on her plate not to sit around brooding much; so, it was not half as bad as she had thought it would be.
She was in the conference room upstairs, waiting for Alan and the news editor to come for a sales-editorial meeting. Rohan was busy and she was there in his place, carrying all the facts and figures in a fat folder. Alan was going to throw a fit when he heard about the planned advertising campaign that required a Page One slot for the next six weeks. The slot was for an ad which ostensibly discussed public issues but was actually a far-from-subtle plug for the paper, by the paper, and it would take up a quarter of the front page. For forty-two days. As for the news editor, he was going to get hysterics … Mr Murthy was a stiff and starchy man, not the most popular news ed but Nina kind of liked him. Time and again, he’d told Nina bitterly that the sales people were under the impression that a newspaper existed to carry less news and more ads. She had the feeling that the man was under the impression that Nina was behind this blasphemous behaviour of newspapers, particularly of this newspaper. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that management all over the world as well as at India! was, alas, more concerned with sales figures than with meaningful editorial content. This was a sad fact, but a fact nonetheless.
Idly flicking through a magazine she’d picked up from the pile lying on the conference table, she came upon a series of photographs that arrested her attention. These were black and white exposures, far removed from what Nina’s Indian friends ruefully called the ‘bare brown bottom’ perspective, which was all about poverty glorified through the camera lens, meant exclusively for the edification of the Western observer. These photographs were taken in a desert-fringed village in Rajasthan, celebrating life in a harsh but evocatively beautiful environment.
The snapshots showed women in voluminous skirts which billowed against the sand dunes, women with pots on their heads as they made the miles-long walk towards water, gaunt hawk-eyed men, children with serious eyes and tall, lissom women sitting beside their tents, leaning against camels. The photographs were so vivid, they transcended their black-and-white format. The suggestion of colour was so strongly captured that Nina could almost see the gold of the sunlit dunes, the azure of the relentless skies, the vermilion of the skirts, the terracotta brown of the pots, the glistening tan of the camels’ saddles.
The photographer, she read from the breathless prose of the blurb, was young, handsome Rajput royal Samar Pratap Singh, and the series had won him a prize from the nation’s top photography magazine. She read that he was thirty years old, played a mean game of tennis and liked rock music, the old-fashioned kind.
‘Me, too,’ she said aloud.
‘Me too, what?’ asked Samar lazily from behind her. She hadn’t heard him come into the room but now that familiar scent, part him and part something subtle from a designer bottle, drifted across to her, affecting her as it always did. He walked on past her to pull out a chair a few seats ahead, settling himself into it, stretching lazily in a very feline gesture. The thin linen shir
t he wore did nothing to hide the tautening of his abdomen, and Nina felt her mouth go dry. She stared hypnotized at the rippling interplay of muscles. God, he is so sexy, she thought. At the moment, she would give almost anything to go over to him, slip her hands under that shirt and run her fingers over his torso, feel the muscles clench under her touch.
Their eyes met and an indefinable message passed between them. Strangely enough, Nina found herself relaxing, imperceptibly letting go of some hidden tension and said, ‘I like old-fashioned rock. Pink Floyd, The Who, CCR, CSNY…’
‘Really? That’s rock slightly off the beaten track, isn’t it?’ Samar asked on a note of interest and Nina threw him a sweet smile, refusing to go into explanations. ‘I grew up on that music and never really grew out of it,’ he said with a grin. ‘Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman, played here in Bangalore last year. What a show! Were you around?’
‘No, I was back in London taking a brief vacation then, but I did see the photographs you had taken for Rolling Stone mag; that set of snaps got you some award, didn’t it?’ Nina asked. He nodded, then leaned back, angling himself so he could look at the magazine in her hand. ‘These are superb,’ Nina said rather shyly.
He grinned. ‘It was on home turf. I shot them when I was visiting my mother in Jaisalmer. I don’t know if you know this, but Jaisalmer is a fortress town, sprawled on the outskirts of the Thar Desert. Beautiful place but too dashed hot to live there all the time. My mother stays in New Delhi but keeps the family home functioning. Says it’s her home and she’ll take it heat, sand, desert storms and all.’