Tea for Two and a Piece of Cake

by Shenoy, Preeti

  Tea for two and

  a piece of cake

  Tea for two and

  a piece of cake

  PREETI SHENOY

  RANDOM HOUSE INDIA

  Published by Random House India in 2012

  Copyright © Preeti Shenoy 2012

  Random House Publishers India Private Limited

  Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B,

  A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, U.P.

  Random House Group Limited

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

  London SW1V 2SA

  United Kingdom

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 9788184001273

  For Satish,

  who makes it all worthwhile with his

  unwavering faith in me.

  This one is for you, my love.

  Our share of night to bear,

  Our share of morning,

  Our blank in bliss to fill,

  Our blank in scorning.

  Here a star, and there a star,

  Some lose their way.

  Here a mist, and there a mist,

  Afterwards—day!

  —Emily Dickinson (1830–86)

  Contents

  Prologue

  Waiting for Saturday Night

  Luck Be a Lady

  Twist of Fate

  All Nightmare Long

  Some You Win, Some You Lose

  The Unnamed Feeling

  Happily Unhappy

  Like a Hurricane

  Slave to Love

  Sound of Silence

  It Must Have Been Love

  With a Little Help From My Friends

  I Can’t Make You Love Me

  Leaving on a Jet Plane

  Alone in a Crowd

  Every Rose Has Its Thorn

  November Rain

  Brand New Start

  Something’s Happening

  Straight to Nowhere

  Trust in Me

  My Friend of Misery

  Lean on Me

  Speak Softly Love

  To Live Is to Die

  Thorn Within

  Nothing Else Matters

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Something More

  Prologue

  I am bathing our seven-month-old baby boy when my husband calls to tell me that our marriage of eight years is over. I rush out of the bathroom, wrap the baby in a towel and am cradling the phone in my ear, with one hand on the baby to prevent him from rolling over the bed, and go crashing to the floor. My hands are still wet, and I wipe them hurriedly as I pick up the phone. When my husband tells me in a calm voice that it is over and he is leaving me, I fail to comprehend.

  Then my heart starts beating at what feels like a thousand beats a minute. No, it starts pounding and all I can hear is his steely calm voice saying, ‘Hello—you there?’

  If this was a scene in a movie, this would probably be the moment when I drop the phone and collapse in shock on the bed while a melancholic soundtrack is introduced in the background. But this is real life and all I feel, at least right now, which is the beginning (but I am yet to know it), is that he is playing some sort of a cruel joke on me. But it isn’t the first of April and it is the steeliness and edge in his voice that shakes me up.

  I do not know what to say. So all I do is answer his question.

  ‘Yes, I am here,’ I hear myself say, my hand still on baby Rohit, who is gurgling in delight as he always does after a warm bath.

  ‘I am sorry it has to come to this,’ he says. But the steel in his voice does not go away. And he does not sound sorry at all. In fact, there is no trace of emotion in his voice.

  ‘Look, Rohit needs his feed and nap. I have to go,’ I say and hang up, choosing to ignore this sword that has been driven right into me. But there is a silent scream inside my head which I am unable to stop. It continues in the background like a supporting orchestra.

  I carry Rohit to his high chair and strap him in. I prepare his baby food on auto mode. I even manage to sing his favourite rhyme and make him have his full quota of baby cereal. ‘He would make a good model for an advert of baby food,’ I think to myself. He is chubby and bubbly and the twinkle in his eyes refuses to dim, a lot like his dad.

  I try to think of everything besides Samir’s phone call to me. I cannot believe him having said something like this. Ours is a happy marriage. Or so I had thought. This has come as a total bolt from the blue. Or perhaps the signs were already there, but I had chosen to ignore them, subtly brushing them away under the bliss of domesticity, amidst Rohit’s giggles and seven-year-old Tanya’s endless chatter. I don’t know.

  But surely our marriage isn’t so bad? Conversations like these happen only when there are years of hurt, years of pent-up frustration, and years of fighting. We haven’t even been fighting of late. I don’t even remember when we fought the last time. I have always been patient and, whatever be my weak points, one of the greatest strengths I pride myself on is never losing my temper.

  I am lying next to Rohit, patting him absent-mindedly. He is a good baby and drops off to sleep within minutes. Thoughts are whirling around in my head. I realize I am involuntarily holding my breath. I exhale slowly with a deep, long sigh. What have I been missing? Why is this happening to me? How can he say something like this? I have no clue. I have always tried hard to please him. I have kept our sprawling home immaculately clean. I have never complained about his late-night office parties. Above all, I have been a good wife and a great mother, even if I may say so myself. Yes, I admit I may have put on a bit of a weight since baby Rohit came, but surely nobody leaves a spouse for this reason?

  I truly do not know what to do. Tanya’s school bus will be arriving anytime now and once she comes, it will be a mad rigmarole of trying to divide my time between two children and trying to get dinner organized, issuing instructions to the cook and overseeing that the vegetables and rotis are made just the way Samir likes them. He is fussy about his food, but a sweet guy otherwise.

  The kind of sweet guy who has just told his wife of eight years that their marriage is over.

  And he has chosen to do it over the phone.

  Is there another woman in his life? Does the cliché ‘the wife is always the last to know’ hold true after all? I have no idea.

  All I know is Rohit and Tanya need me right now. So I forcefully shove aside the disturbing phone call and pick up Rohit who has now woken up from his nap. Holding him in my lap, I open the door to let Tanya in, greeting her chirpily as she enters.

  I am frightened, upset, hurt. I am not yet shattered or devastated. That is to come later. Yet I am not angry. My world as I know it has just come crashing down, but I am still smiling, still pretending, and still being a perfect mummy, hugging Tanya, listening to her chatter, serving her a snack as though nothing is amiss.

  Time has never crawled this slowly before. I keep glancing at the clock, waiting for him to come home to make sense of it all. I am so afraid to call him. I am terrified of what he is going to say. I have no guts to face him or this fireball that he has bombarded me with. I want to duck, but I am frozen.

  So I wait, going through all the motions required of being a good mother, glad to have something to keep me
busy.

  It is only when I finally put both kids to bed after dinner that I realize that maybe he is not coming back tonight after all.

  The night sky is littered with a thousand twinkling stars and I gaze at them from the balcony of my living room on the fifteenth floor. I pace the length of the balcony restlessly. The cool night breeze caresses my cheeks. I walk inside. I continue to wait, engulfed by the darkness in the drawing room, and go sit on the leather armchair where I usually read my morning paper, too afraid to call, too afraid to try to make sense of it all, and too afraid to look, for fear of what I will find as my life hangs in suspension. And as I wait for my husband to come home, my mind races back to that time in my life before I became a wife and a mother, the time when he had first walked into my life and swept me off my feet.

  Waiting for Saturday Night

  February

  2001

  Mumbai

  When you are twenty-six, slightly plump, and have never been on a date before, a chance date with the office hunk sounds like manna from heaven. Well, it is not really a date, but still, I am going out alone with Prashant Mathur to the Taj Hotel, no less.

  Prashant—the casanova whom women swoon over and will give an arm and a leg to go out with. And he will be taking me, Nisha—the plain Jane. Actually that should be Nisha-the-plump-plain-Jane.

  Okay, so this is not a real date, but it still is the closest that I have come to one.

  The travel agency where I am employed has received an invite from Magellan International, one of the big players in the travel industry, for a grand party happening at the Taj hotel. Our agency, Point to Point, is a very minuscule one, small fry in comparison to the big players in the business. All we do is pass on our ticketing requirements to them and they do the bookings for us. We are simply a collection and drop-off point for passports and visa requirement forms. We are not even a proper travel agency in the truest sense of the word, but I absolutely love my office, my job, and my colleagues.

  There are just six of us employed here—three men, Prashant, Sanjay, and Akash, and three women, Chetana, Deepti, and me. We don’t even have an office peon. And among the men, Prashant is without doubt, a very goodlooking man. He is nearly six feet tall and slim built, with hair stylishly slicked back. His phone is always ringing off the hook, but he makes himself deliberately ‘unavailable’ to prying girls through us. At times, he talks in a low voice and we know instantly that he is fixing up a date.

  If our measly salaries could afford a mobile phone, I think he would have been on it all the time. But back then, mobile phones were just playthings of the rich, and so we continue taking Prashant’s personal calls, making excuses for him when he does not want to talk. Sanjay already has a girlfriend, and as soon as office gets over, he rushes off to meet her. The guys are all on the sales team. Their job is to go out and get business for the agency and file reports at the end of the day. The girls man the counters, which means we mostly answer phone calls and smile sweetly at whosoever comes to the agency. My job may not be the greatest in the world, but it means the world to me. It is my very first job and I landed this after a travel and tourism course. The pay isn’t much but I love the sense of belonging I have here. It is also the first time in my life that I am earning my own money, giving me a sense of achievement.

  ‘Hey Nisha, want to grab a cup of coffee?’ asks Akash.

  ‘That sounds good. Give me two minutes,’ I say, as I note down the booking details of a client.

  ‘I am coming too. I badly need one. Who else is coming?’ asks Chetana.

  No one responds, so the three of us cross the road to the coffee shop across, which is our usual haunt for breaks. Akash is the youngest amongst us. He is just twenty years old and fresh out of college. But he is smart, clever, and talks well, which is probably the reason why he got the job at Point to Point.

  Chetana, with her stylish haircut, flawless complexion, easy laugh, and eyes that twinkle, is easily the best-looking girl in our office. Usually, she is dressed to kill, her wardrobe consisting of mostly short skirts and wellfitted tops. She is from a wealthy family and is just biding her time in this travel agency, as it will give her a chance to tell people that she is ‘working’, till she gets married. We are all certain she will get married to a wealthy businessman from her community and live in the lap of luxury for the rest of her life, or she will get married to someone from the US and migrate there for good.

  Just as we are midway through the coffee, Sanjay calls out from across the road and says, ‘Guys, get back! Bulging cover alert,’ as we all gulp down our remaining coffee and hurry back to office.

  ‘Bulging cover alert’ is our code for our boss, the lady who owns the travel agency. She is a rich, affluent lady by the name of Parinita Sachdev, who mostly comes to office just once a week, clack–clacketying her six-inch heels and looking down upon all of us disdainfully as she walks into her cabin which is almost always kept locked in her absence. She then ‘checks accounts’ for an hour or so and hands out any communication (usually she carries a huge envelope stuffed with papers, thus earning herself the name ‘bulging cover’) and walks out as swiftly and smartly as she arrives. She is pencil thin, with a perfect hairdo, perfectly manicured hands, and the looks of a model straight from the pages of Vogue magazine. If rumour mills are to be believed, she is the mistress of Jairaj Singhania, one of the co-founders of Singhania Hotels—a large chain of luxury hotels.

  Jairaj Singhania is a well-known public figure who makes regular appearances on Page 3 columns in newspapers. Rumours abound that he has bought Parinita Sachdev not just an apartment in Lokhandwala Complex, but also this travel agency, where we all work, to give her something to do, so she can play boss lady and order minions like us around, when he really should be devoting all his time to his hotel industry and his wife and kids.

  None of us know if there is any truth in these rumours, but we are inclined to believe them as Parinita seems unbelievably wealthy, and anyone with even half a brain can figure out that a measly little travel agency cannot be her sole source of income. She always arrives in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. The driver almost trips over himself as he rushes to open the door for Her Highness as she climbs out of the car. Even street dogs seem to stand at attention when she arrives.

  I shift uneasily in my chair when she arrives, wishing I could somehow smoothen out the layers of fat on my body, which I usually manage to somewhat conceal with clever clothing. But the moment Parinita Sachdev walks in, I feel inadequate.

  That morning, she doles out the invite from Magellan International (the one that will change the course of my life, but I am yet to know that), and before she marches out breezily, she says, ‘Oh, you all decide amongst yourself, which two will attend this party. I have no interest in it.’ She drops the invite like a used tissue on our counter and marches out, leaving a trail of expensive perfume in the air.

  As soon as she leaves, all of us eagerly gather around the invite.

  ‘Oh wow! It’s at the Taj!’ exclaims Deepti.

  ‘Not bad!’ says Chetana.

  ‘Let’s decide by draw of lots which two get to go,’ suggests Akash. Akash is the practical one in the group.

  Deepti writes out the guys’ names first and when Prashant’s name is pulled out, he looks very pleased, as Akash and Sanjay congratulate him.

  Next it is the women’s turn. I cannot believe my luck when my name is pulled out. I have never won anything before this, not even at those school raffles. But unlike the school raffle tickets, the chances of my name emerging are of course one third here. Still, I never thought I’ll get lucky. I am very pleased too, till I steal a quick glance at Prashant’s face. He looks positively disgusted now.

  I am certain Prashant has been hoping to go with Chetana. To all of us (except Chetana perhaps), on our ridiculously low salaries, a chance to party at a five-star hotel is hard to pass on. But after seeing Prashant scowl, I have half my mind of passing on my chance to Chetana.r />
  I take her aside and ask her, ‘Hey Chetana, do you want to go instead of me? Just look at his face.’

  ‘No, Nisha. Your name has been drawn fair and square. It is really a chance for you. You must go. Just watch me. I know how to handle the likes of Prashant.’

  ‘Hey, Prashant, what is with you? Can’t you be a gentleman for once and be nice to Nisha?’ she says sweetly to him, in a half-coquettish way.

  Her frankness and open confrontation without any animosity takes him completely by surprise, but he quickly recovers. He would have jumped off a mountain cliff if Chetana had asked him to. That was the effect Chetana had on most men.

  ‘Of course, Chetana. I don’t mind going out with Nisha,’ he answers.

  Then he turns towards me and squeezes my arm and says, ‘Hey babe, you will have fun. Wear something nice.’

  I am shocked and surprised and also very pleased, even though I know he is just obliging Chetana. The excitement in me refuses to die down.

  Throughout my way home, I smile in anticipation of attending a party with Prashant Mathur. I live with my father in Parel and I have to travel to Andheri to reach the travel agency in Lokhandwala. That works very well for me, as it works against the maddening rush-hour traffic both times in the local trains of Mumbai; when people are always rushing towards the city, I rush towards the suburbs and so getting here as well as getting back home are easy.

  My father does not care in the least bit about my whereabouts. I lost my mother to cancer when I was five and my father never remarried. He instead employed an old lady, whom I fondly called Malati Tayi, to look after me. She passed away when I was sixteen, leaving a gaping hole in my heart. I was too young to have remembered my mother’s death. My father, I have been told, changed a lot after my mother’s death. I have no memories of how he had been before she died. He had loved her dearly and had done all he could to save her. I have studied her photographs and she is pretty. I think I look a lot like my mother (except that my mother was very slim), and perhaps looking at me is a painful reminder to him of happy memories which he could never have with her. So he mostly left me alone, and I grew into a lonely child, with hardly any friends to play with.