Secrets & Saris

by Shoma Narayanan

  ‘Brute,’ she said politely.

  ‘You started it.’

  ‘You did, with your horrible one-liners.’

  ‘Well, OK, but you started being violent.’

  Very conscious of his hard body pressed against hers, and his smoke-blue eyes looking right into hers, she rallied. ‘This is an immature discussion.’

  ‘Very,’ he said, squeezing her a little closer and doubling her pulse-rate.

  ‘No one would think you’re the father of a four-year-old,’ she said.

  Neil laughed wryly, releasing her and sitting up. ‘A four-year-old who might march in any minute, demanding to know what we’re doing,’ he said, pushing his hand through his hair. ‘You’re right. Time to start acting like a responsible adult.’

  Not sure if she’d upset him, Shefali countered, ‘She’d probably insist we marry immediately. Even a pretend engagement won’t be enough.’

  ‘It’s a tempting thought,’ he said, leaning down to give her a hard kiss. ‘I’ll go and get breakfast. See you in ten minutes.’

  Her head in a whirl, Shefali stared at the closed door. Did he mean that the idea of marrying her was tempting? Or was it a remark he’d just thrown out, not bothering about the implications?

  She kept thinking about it while she showered and changed. Marrying Neil... She’d not considered the idea seriously till now, because he’d made it very clear all along that a long-term relationship wasn’t on the cards. And she’d thought she didn’t want anything long-term either—just a short fling to help her get over Pranav. Somewhere along the line that had changed. Being with Neil was no longer just about the sex—she’d started caring far more than she should.

  Shefali’s hand stopped halfway through combing her hair as the word ‘love’ popped into her head, and she stared at her reflection in horror, almost as if she expected to see a gargoyle looking back at her. Where had that come from? She wasn’t in love with Neil. She couldn’t be.

  Frantically she started ticking off the reasons one by one. It was only a few months since she’d been about to marry another guy. Right. But that didn’t mean anything, did it? Pranav hadn’t been the love of her life to begin with, and his betrayal had hurt her pride more than anything else. Next, she hardly knew Neil. On the other hand she’d started sleeping with him after knowing him for only two weeks. If anything, that proved that she was in love. Scratch that thought. So, OK, the attraction between them was red-hot, and he was fun to be with, and her heart seemed to shrivel up whenever she thought of him going away—but that didn’t mean she was in love, surely? She found the way he pulled her leg annoying, and she had come close to hating him when he’d stopped asking her out once they’d slept together. But hate was a strong emotion too, wasn’t it?

  Feeling very troubled, she put the comb down and went to find Neil. He was in the living room, on his knees, doing up the little hooks and eyes at the back of Nina’s kameez. Both of them looked up as she entered the room, and identical smiles lit up their faces. Shefali’s heart did a sudden little skip of happiness.

  ‘You wore the green kameez!’ Nina was saying, as she ran towards Shefali to stand next to her.

  ‘The parrot ladies,’ Neil said, standing up. ‘Don’t blame me if someone offers you birdseed instead of bhog at the pandal.’

  Nina stuck her tongue out at him and he gave her a mock glare. They seemed to be back on their normal easy footing with each other, and Nina wasn’t treating Shefali any differently either. Maybe she’d forgotten about the whole thing—at her age it wouldn’t be surprising if she had.

  ‘I’ll go and shower,’ Neil said. ‘By the way, Bela Mashi is hell-bent on coming with us. If you can help her get ready, that’d be great.’

  Nina waited till Neil had left the room and said, ‘I’m not supposed to talk about you staying in Dad’s room.’ So she’d not forgotten, then. ‘And Dad says I can’t bother the two of you and ask you if you’re getting married.’

  ‘OK,’ Shefali said, and the response sounded weak even to her own ears. No wonder Nina was giving her a slightly exasperated look.

  ‘I’d really like it, though,’ Nina said after a pause. ‘So would Bela Mashi.’

  ‘Like what?’ Shefali asked, feeling stupid. She’d been lost in thought, still trying to gauge her own feelings for Neil, and had completely lost the thread of what Nina was saying.

  ‘If you married Dad,’ Nina said.

  ‘Nina...’ Shefali said helplessly.

  Nina shook her head. ‘Bela Mashi said you don’t have to say anything. I should just tell you.’

  Feeling as if she was the four-year-old, Shefali nodded obediently. Bela and Nina had obviously decided everything, and they expected Shefali and Neil to sort out the minor problem of their own confused feelings for each other.

  ‘I’ll go and help Bela Mashi,’ Shefali said, hoping Bela wouldn’t be quite as forthright as Nina was. As it turned out, she was in luck. Bela was more worried about organising the contents of her massive handbag and making sure she had enough money for prasad and donations to the temples they were visiting.

  Getting Bela Mashi and her wheelchair into the car was a mammoth exercise. Finally Neil had to bodily lift her into the back seat of the SUV and strap the folded wheelchair to the roof. He didn’t complain once, or tell Bela off for being so adamant about this whole Durga Puja thing.

  Shefali thought of all the other men she knew. Not one would have hesitated to tell a paid employee that they were being a nuisance and couldn’t come along. But that was the thing. Neil might pay Bela a hefty salary, but he treated her like one of the family. Also, he made sure that Nina did the same. Shefali had discovered that a lot of teachers and other parents actually thought that Bela was Nina’s grandmother, not her nanny. One more point in Neil’s favour, Shefali thought as she got into the passenger seat next to him. He was a good person. And nowadays how many people could one say that about?

  She gave him a quick look. He was wearing one of the two kurtas he’d bought the day before, over jeans, and he looked gorgeous. The dark blue set off his tanned skin perfectly and the colour deepened the grey-blue of his eyes. She had seen him almost every day for the last few weeks, but today it felt as if she was seeing him for the first time all over again.

  ‘Bade hot lag rahe ho,’ she said very fast in Hindi. You’re looking really hot. Bela’s Hindi was rudimentary, and that was putting it politely, and Nina wasn’t paying attention.

  He gave her a quick smile in acknowledgement, the corners of his mouth quirking up sexily.

  ‘Not so bad yourself,’ he said in an undertone, and the look in his eyes made Shefali’s toes curl up in delight.

  The Durga Puja pandal was noisy, cheerful and jam-packed with happy, excited families dressed in their very best clothes. Neil manoeuvred Bela’s wheelchair as close to the huge painted idol of the goddess and her children as possible. It was rough going as the marquee and wooden stage that made up the pandal had been put up on one side of an unused football field. But the look on Bela’s face was worth the effort of pushing the wheelchair over metres and metres of uneven clumps of grass. She gazed up into the beautiful, proud face of the mother goddess with such reverence that a lump came to Shefali’s throat.

  ‘She’ll be like this for a while,’ Neil said, sotto voce. ‘Do you want to come and grab something to eat? Neither of us has had breakfast.’

  Shefali nodded and followed Neil, while Nina stayed back with Bela to listen to stories about the goddess. There was a row of food stalls at one end of the field, and they stopped at one serving hot puris with chickpea gravy. The stall owner said something to Shefali in Bengali, and she gave him a blank look. Neil intervened, answering him in rapid Bengali to the man’s evident surprise. They continued to talk for a few minutes while the man fried their puris and served them up.

 
‘What was he saying?’ Shefali asked, breaking off a piece of puri and dipping it into the gravy.

  Neil shrugged. ‘Usual stuff. Where did I learn Bengali, I don’t look Indian, etc, etc.’

  ‘Do you get a lot of that?’ Shefali asked.

  He nodded. ‘From pretty much everyone I meet. Depending on how sophisticated they are, they either start asking questions the minute they see me or they wait and try to weave it into the conversation. I think I prefer the people who ask directly.’

  Shefali tried to think what she’d done. She’d noticed his unusual looks, of course, but when she’d met him she’d been too caught up in her own troubles to bother about other people’s racial make-up. Her thoughts must have shown very clearly on her face, because Neil laughed and reached out to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear.

  ‘That’s one of the things I liked most about you when I met you,’ he said. ‘You weren’t interested enough to ask nosy questions.’

  Shefali flushed. ‘I might have asked if I hadn’t been obsessing about my debacle of a wedding,’ she said, not wanting to take credit for either very high levels of uninterest or for complete lack of curiosity.

  ‘Well, you didn’t,’ he said. ‘And afterwards...I found lots more to like about you anyway.’

  Their eyes met and held for a few seconds, and Shefali felt the little dial in her head swing purposefully towards the ‘In Love’ indicator. After all, what wasn’t there about him to love? Gorgeous, sexy, amazing in bed, fun to be with, kind to little children and old women—he was pretty much perfection walking around on two legs. Feeling a sudden surge of feeling swamp her, she looked away quickly. It wouldn’t do to let him know how she felt unless she was one hundred percent sure about it herself. And, more importantly, until she knew whether he returned her feelings.

  The frenzied sound of a drum reached their ears and Shefali turned towards the sound, glad of the distraction.

  ‘That’s an interesting beat,’ she said as they discarded their empty paper plates and began walking back to the pandal. ‘It’s a dhol, isn’t it?’

  ‘A dhak,’ Nina corrected her as she bounced up to meet them. ‘It’s a Bengali instrument—right, Dad?’

  ‘Right,’ Neil said. ‘Is Bela Mashi OK? Why’ve you left her there?’

  ‘She’s talking to Sinjini’s mum and grandma,’ Nina said.

  Shefali gritted her teeth. Sinjini was in the same class as Nina, and her mother was only a few years older than Shefali. Sinjini’s father travelled a lot for work, and Debjani was often stuck in the house with her daughter and her battleaxe of a mother-in-law. She’d made a lot of effort to be friendly with Shefali, but Shefali had avoided her, finding her shallow and very gossipy.

  Debjani raised her eyebrows as she saw Shefali with Neil.

  ‘So nice to see you, Shefali,’ she said, her eyes darting towards Neil and back to Shefali. ‘I didn’t know you had friends here—but, no, this is Nina’s father, isn’t it?’

  Very tempted to say that Neil was a person, not an ‘it’, Shefali gave her a neutral smile.

  ‘Hi, Debjani,’ she said. ‘Good to see you here.’

  Debjani was clearly dying to be introduced to Neil—Shefali gave it exactly two seconds before the nosy questions began.

  ‘Oh, I come here every year. It’s a big festival for us. I am so surprised to see you here—you’re Punjabi, aren’t you? Though of course you celebrate Durga Puja in the North too, don’t you? Except the idols of the goddess have four pairs of arms, not ten.’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Shefali said, not wanting to get pulled into a completely pointless ‘my goddess has more arms than yours’ debate.

  ‘And you’re not Bengali either, are you?’ Debjani asked, turning to Neil.

  ‘No,’ he said, smiling politely, but with a hint of steel in his gaze.

  Debjani’s mother-in-law called to her just then, and she hurried away, clearly still dying of curiosity.

  ‘Friend of yours?’ Neil asked, his eyebrows raised.

  ‘Can’t stand her.’

  ‘Hmm, I wonder why? Come on—let’s get back to Bela Mashi.’

  They passed Debjani and her mother-in-law, who were chattering away in Bengali. In spite of Debjani’s complaints about her mother-in-law the two women seemed on very good terms—perhaps fuelled by their common love for gossip.

  Shefali had almost reached Bela when she realised that Neil wasn’t next to her any more. Turning, she saw him confronting Debjani and her mother-in-law. His expression was thunderous, and from the completely gobsmacked expression on the two women’s faces it looked as if he was giving them the talking-to of their lives.

  Bela turned around just at that point. ‘You’re back!’ she said, smiling—until she looked past Shefali and spotted Neil. ‘My goodness—what’s happening there?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Shefali said faintly, though she could guess. ‘Should I go and find out?’

  Bela grabbed her hand in a surprisingly firm grip. ‘Don’t,’ she advised. ‘Neil loses his temper very rarely, but when he’s like this it’s better to stay out of his way. Don’t worry,’ she said, laughing at Shefali’s expression. ‘He’ll cool down pretty fast. But those women must have done something really nasty for him to lose it like that.’

  Neil had turned his back on a very weepy looking Debjani and was striding towards them.

  ‘What happened?’ Bela demanded.

  ‘I heard those two ladies, say something about Shefali. They didn’t bother to lower their voices because they thought neither of us would understand,’ Neil said, his voice low and very fierce.

  ‘You told them you’re not Bengali,’ Shefali said, torn between shock and amusement. She’d never seen this side of Neil before, but it added to his charm, if anything. And the thought that he’d been made so angry by something Debjani had said about her felt almost more like a compliment than anything he’d ever said directly to her.

  ‘What did they say?’ Bela Mashi demanded, looking almost as annoyed as Neil. She’d developed quite a soft spot for Shefali over the last few days.

  Neil shook his head. ‘Just common nastiness. You don’t need to know.’ He swung a chair around and sat down, looking up at Shefali. ‘But Shefali does need to know what I said in return.’

  Shefali sat down opposite him. The dhak was taking a break, and they no longer had to shout to be heard. She looked at Neil curiously and he took a deep breath.

  ‘Well, here goes. What they were saying wasn’t wrong, as far as facts go, it was just the way they said it.’ His face clouded over for an instant, and then he shook his head as if to clear it. ‘And I was really, really angry...’

  ‘We noticed,’ Shefali and Bela interjected simultaneously.

  ‘Yes—so I told them that we’re engaged,’ he said.

  ‘Engaged!’ Shefali said, and her expression was so horrified that something died inside Neil.

  After their discussion that morning he’d thought of several more reasons to justify a mock engagement—even a real one—but he hadn’t expected Shefali to be quite so upset.

  Shefali had found her voice again, and she bubbled into speech. ‘But, Neil, that’s just... You’ll have to go back and tell them it isn’t true.’

  ‘No chance,’ he said tersely.

  ‘I’ll go and speak to them, then,’ Shefali said, and she turned and started hurrying across the pandal.

  She’d hardly gone five metres when Neil caught up with her, grabbing her arm and turning her to face him.

  ‘What’s the issue?’ he asked.

  His voice was so harsh that Shefali flinched back. ‘We’re not engaged,’ she wailed. ‘And I told you that I didn’t want to lie about it. News travels so fast—someone’s bound to tell everyone I know in Delhi, and then when we don’t get ma
rried they’ll just think I’ve been dumped again! It’ll be a world record—getting jilted twice within two months. I can ask around—there might be someone who’s willing to jilt me next month, and I’ll have a complete hat-trick to boast about in my old age.’

  A huge weight lifted off Neil’s shoulders and he put his hand against Shefali’s mouth to stem the tide of words.

  ‘We don’t need to split up immediately,’ he said. Then he paused and took a deep breath, voicing the thought that had been clamouring to be heard all morning. ‘We don’t need to split up at all, for that matter.’

  That got her to stop and think.

  ‘Not split up at all?’ she said slowly. ‘You mean go through with it? Actually get married?’

  ‘It’s an idea,’ he said. ‘Of course if you don’t like it we can just stay engaged for some time, and then you can do the jilting. As publicly as you like.’

  He looked very serious, and Shefali had an absurd urge to giggle. ‘We need to talk properly,’ she said finally. ‘We can’t stand here in the middle of a couple of hundred people and sort this out.’

  The dhak started up again, as if on cue, and Neil shrugged in exasperation, going back to Bela Mashi and saying something in her ear. Bela nodded, and he turned her wheelchair around to move towards the exit.

  ‘Are we leaving already?’ Nina asked, sounding disappointed. ‘I haven’t even had anything to eat.’

  ‘Here—you can eat a piece of sandesh,’ Bela said, taking a sweet out of the little leaf-wrapped parcel she was carrying.

  Neil frowned. ‘Is that OK for her to have? Where’d you get it from?’

  ‘It’s prasad,’ Bela said serenely. ‘Anything that’s been offered to the goddess is pure.’

  Nina had already taken the sweet and popped it into her mouth, and Neil didn’t argue further. They’d reached the car, and he repeated his earlier manoeuvre with Bela and the wheelchair, lifting Nina into the back seat with Bela before folding up the wheelchair and getting it onto the roof.