The One She Was Warned About

‘I know. I used to pay attention in Geography,’ Shweta said pertly. ‘Unlike you.’

Nikhil gave her a mocking smile. ‘You were such a gooooood little girl,’ he said, dragging his words out. ‘Of course you paid attention.’

Shweta carefully controlled an urge to hit him on the head with a high-heeled shoe. ‘And you were such a baaad boy.’ She copied his tone as closely as she could. ‘Of course you paid attention to no one and were good for nothing.’

‘Bad boys are good at some things,’ he murmured suggestively.

Shweta flushed as all the things he was probably very, very good at sprang to mind. God, was he doing it on purpose? Probably he thought it was fun, getting her all hot and bothered. There was no way he could be actually flirting with her—or was he?

‘Do you know where you’re going?’ she asked in her best auditor voice—the one that Priya swore made entire finance departments quake in their shoes.

Nikhil nodded. ‘Almost there.’

The road had developed some rather alarming twists and turns, and he was concentrating on his driving. In Shweta’s opinion he was going too fast, but she’d boil her favourite shoes in oil before she said anything—there was no point giving him an opportunity to make remarks about fraidy-cat accountants. She fixed her eyes on Nikhil instead, hoping the man would take her mind off his driving. It worked. The moonlight illuminated his rather stern profile perfectly, throwing the planes and angles of his face into relief.

He was really quite remarkably good-looking, Shweta thought. It was a wonder she hadn’t noticed it in school, but she had an explanation. In those days she’d been completely obsessed by a rather chocolate-faced movie star, and had unconsciously compared everyone she saw with him. Nikhil was the complete opposite of chocolate-faced—even at fourteen his features had been uncompromisingly male. Her eyes drifted towards his shoulders and upper body, and then to his hands on the steering wheel. He had rather nice hands, she thought, strong with square-tipped fingers. Unbidden, she started to wonder how those hands would feel on her body, and she blushed for probably the twelfth time that evening.

The car negotiated a final hairpin bend, after which the road seemed to shake itself out and lose steam. It went on for a couple of hundred metres through a rather dense copse of coconut trees and ended abruptly on a beach.

‘Are you lost?’ she enquired. He shook his head. ‘Come on,’ he said, opening his door and leaping down lightly.

He was at her door and handing her down before she could protest. Locking the car with a click of the remote, he put an arm around her shoulders and started walking her to the beach.

Their destination was a small, brightly lit shack thatched with palm fronds. There were small tables laid out in front, some of which were occupied by locals. Nikhil chose a table with a view of the beach. The moon had risen now, and the sea had a picture-postcard quality to it. A motherly-looking woman in her fifties bustled out, beaming in delight when she saw Nikhil. She greeted him in a flood of Malayalam which Shweta didn’t even bother trying to follow. She wasn’t particularly good at languages, and Malayalam was nothing like Hindi or any other language she knew.

‘Meet Mariamma,’ Nikhil said. ‘She’s known me since I was a kid.’

Shweta smiled and Mariamma switched to heavily accented English. ‘Am always happy to meet Nikhil’s friends,’ she said, dispelling any notion that this was the first time Nikhil had brought someone here with him. ‘Miss Shweta, do sit down. I’ll get you a menu.’

‘I thought you didn’t have one?’ Nikhil murmured.

Mariamma said chidingly, ‘You haven’t been in touch for a long while. We got a menu printed—Jossy designed it on his laptop.’

‘I’d love to see it, but I know what I want to order,’ Nikhil said. ‘Shweta, any preferences?’

‘If you could order for me...’ Shweta said, and Nikhil promptly switched back into Malayalam and reeled off a list of stuff that sounded as if it would be enough to feed the entire state for a week.

Mariamma beamed at both of them and headed back to the kitchen, her cotton sari rustling as she left.

‘You come here often?’

‘I used to—when I was a child. My grandparents lived quite near here, and Mariamma was one of my aunt’s closest friends.’

‘Your grandparents...?’

‘Died when I was in college.’

Nikhil was frowning, and Shweta wished she hadn’t asked.

‘Are you in touch with anyone from our class in school?’ she asked hastily.

He began to laugh. ‘You need to be more subtle when you’re changing the topic,’ he said. ‘No. I e-mail some of my old crowd on and off, but I haven’t met up with anyone for a long while. Ajay and Wilson are in the States now, and Vineet’s building a hotel in Dehra Dun. How about you?’

‘I’m not building a hotel in Dehra Dun,’ Shweta said, and made a face. ‘I’m in touch with Vineet too. He’s difficult to avoid. And a couple of other people as well.’

‘Have they got used to your new avatar?’ He was still finding it difficult to reconcile Shweta who looked like a million bucks but sounded like the old tomboyish Shweta he’d known for most of his adolescent years.

Shweta frowned at him. ‘What avatar?’

‘I remember you as a serious, pigtailed little thing, very grim and earnest all the time—except when you were climbing trees and challenging me to cycling races.’

‘And now?’

‘And now...’ He smiled and leaned back in his chair. ‘Well, you’ve chosen a grim and serious profession, all right, but in spite of that...something’s changed. You’ve been rebelling, haven’t you? You look different, of course, but that’s just the contact lenses and the new hairstyle.’

A little piqued at his dismissal of the change in her looks, she said firmly, ‘Well, I haven’t been rebelling.’

‘Sure?’ he asked teasingly. ‘You came away with me instead of staying back with that extremely eligible, extremely boring young man.’

‘I haven’t seen you for fifteen years,’ she pointed out. ‘I see Siddhant every day.’

‘And your shoes...’

She looked down at them defensively. They were rather lovely shoes—high-heeled green pumps that struck a bright note against her sombre black trousers and top. She was wearing a silver hand-crafted necklace studded with peridots—the stones perfectly matched the shoes. In spite of having read a dozen articles that condemned matching accessories as the height of un-cool, she found it difficult to stop herself, especially when it came to shoes. Speaking of which...

‘What’s wrong with my shoes?’

‘Nothing,’ he said, looking amused. ‘They’re...very striking, that’s all. But otherwise you’re very conservatively dressed.’ Before she could protest, he said, ‘Sorry, I’ve been reading too many articles on pop psychology. But I stick by what I say—it’s a slow rebellion, but you’re rebelling all the same. I always thought your father was way too strict with you.’

‘I’ve been living away from home for over seven years,’ Shweta said indignantly. ‘All my rebelling is long over and done with. And he’s changed. He’s not the way he used to be.’ Her father had been a bit of a terror when she was younger, and most of her classmates had given him a wide berth. It had taken Shweta herself years to muster up the courage to stand up to him.

‘If you say so.’ Somehow seeing Shweta again had brought out the old desire in Nikhil to wind her up, watch her struggle to control her temper—except she was now all grown up, and instead of wanting to tug her pigtails and trip her over during PE class he wanted to reach out and touch her, to run his hands over her smooth skin and tangle them in her silken hair...

Realising that his thoughts were wandering a bit too far, he picked up the menu and started leafing through it. A thought struck him. ‘You haven’t turned vegetarian, have you?’

He looked relieved when Shweta shook her head. ‘Thank heavens. I’ve ordered mutton stew and appams and prawn curry—I just assumed you’d be OK with all of it.’

‘Of course I am. I’ve always loved prawn curry. Your mom used to cook it really well, I remember.’

‘Which mom?’ he asked, his mouth twisting into a wry smile.

Shweta felt like kicking herself. Nikhil was illegitimate, and had always been touchy about his family. His father had taken a mistress after ten years of a childless marriage, scandalising everyone who knew him, and Nikhil was his mistress’s son. Perhaps it would have been less scandalous if he’d tried to keep the affair secret, but when he’d found out that Ranjini was pregnant he’d brought her to live in the same house as his wife. Until he was four Nikhil had thought having two mothers was a perfectly normal arrangement—it was only when he joined school that he realised he lived in a very peculiar household.

‘Veena Aunty,’ Shweta said.

Veena was Nikhil’s father’s wife. If they’d been Muslims Nikhil’s father could have taken a second wife, but as a Hindu he would have been committing bigamy if he’d married Ranjini. Veena had taken the whole thing surprisingly well. People had expected her to resent Ranjini terribly, even if she couldn’t do anything about having to share a house with her, but Veena appeared to be on quite good terms with her. And she adored Nikhil, which perhaps wasn’t so surprising given that she didn’t have children of her own. In his teen years at least Nikhil had been equally attached to her—all his sullenness and resentment had been directed towards his parents.

‘How’re they doing?’ Shweta asked. ‘Your parents, I mean.’ She’d met them only a few times—her father had made sure that she didn’t have much to do with Nikhil.