Secrets & Saris (10 page)

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 married 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.

‘We’ll talk once we’re home,’ he promised Shefali.

The talk didn’t happen, however. They were halfway home when Nina started to complain that she was feeling sick.

‘Hang on till we get home,’ Neil said, sounding harassed.

Shefali took an empty plastic bag out of her purse. ‘Here—use this if you can’t hold on till we get there.’

Bela smoothed Nina’s hair gently—the little girl was looking very wan and woebegone.

Shefali turned around to smile at her. ‘Another five minutes,’ she said, and Nina nodded. ‘Should I put the radio on? Will that help?’

Nina nodded again, and Shefali put it on, tuning into a channel that was playing Nina’s favourite Bollywood song.

Neil frowned. ‘I hate her listening to this stuff,’ he said.

Hmm, the lyrics
were
rather unsuitable, Shefali thought as she listened to the song a little more closely. But the tune was catchy, and if it kept Nina from throwing up in the car before they reached home it would have served its purpose.

Nina was still holding on when the car pulled up in front of the house. Shefali jumped out and went to her door to help her down. ‘Can you manage Bela Mashi?’ she asked Neil. ‘I’ll take Nina in.’

‘OK,’ Neil said, handing her the keys for the house.

Nina was looking distinctly wobbly, so Shefali picked her up and raced to the door. They’d just about made it to the bathroom when Nina threw up, retching miserably all over the bathmat. Shefali held her head and patted her gently till it was over, getting her to brush her teeth and wash her face before carrying her to her room and tucking her up.