Secrets & Saris

After a bit, he asked, ‘Tell me again—why aren’t you getting the painting done by someone else?’

‘Too expensive,’ Shefali retorted. At the disbelieving look he gave her, she said, ‘The school doesn’t pay me a fortune, you know.’

Neil frowned. ‘I would have sworn you were pretty well-off.’

‘My parents are. But I’m not really on talking terms with them any more. They weren’t OK with the idea of my leaving Delhi to come and live here. So I need to live within my means.’

He was still frowning. ‘Are you seriously saying you’re planning to spend the rest of your life here, managing the school?’

‘I haven’t started thinking about the rest of my life yet,’ Shefali said. ‘I’m still trying to come to terms with the fact that I’m not going to be Mrs Shefali Mehrotra. I was brought up to be a pampered trophy wife, and I don’t really know what I’m going to be now that Pranav Mehrotra’s out of the picture.’

‘Pranav is the guy you were going to marry?’ Neil asked, and then, almost in the same breath, ‘Pass me the smaller brush for the corners, please.’

Shefali nodded and passed him the brush. Clearly the story of her life wasn’t engrossing enough to capture Neil’s full attention.

He carefully finished doing the corner between the ceiling and the wall he’d just finished painting, and then got down from the stepladder.

‘Arranged marriage?’ he asked, picking up the ladder to move it in front of the next wall.

‘Yes,’ Shefali said. ‘Only in the end Pranav figured he’d rather be cut off from his parents and marry his ex-girlfriend than marry me and be heir to his family’s millions.’

‘Pretty courageous decision to take,’ Neil said thoughtfully.

Shefali looked at him, so indignant that she was at a complete loss for words. Whose side was he on?

Neil went on, ‘Why did that make you leave home, though? The break-up wasn’t your fault, and you couldn’t have been in love with the guy.’

Put like that, her decision to move did seem rather drastic. ‘He chose the day of the wedding to let me know,’ Shefali said tightly. ‘Everything was ready—I’d even changed into my wedding lehnga when his father called mine to say that Pranav had left Delhi with his ex. It was...’ She took a deep breath. ‘It was the most humiliating experience of my entire life. Most of the guests had arrived already, and we had to tell them all the wedding was off. My parents had spent a fortune on the arrangements, and that went to waste as well. It was worse afterwards—there were people sniggering and pointing fingers wherever I went. I couldn’t take it any more.’

‘What about your parents?’ Neil asked. ‘Weren’t they supportive?’

‘My parents were soon pushing me to marry another guy,’ she said. ‘One of Pranav’s friends—he proposed pretty soon after Pranav didn’t turn up for the wedding. It was ridiculous. One of my aunts actually suggested that we go ahead with the wedding, only with this other man as the groom.’

Neil winced. He could see now why she’d left, and while she might not appreciate being told so right now he thought she’d had a lucky escape.

‘So you wanted to get away from it all?’ he asked.

‘Sort of,’ Shefali muttered. ‘I was already working for the playschool in Delhi—the owner of the chain is a friend—and my Dad thought it a “suitable” job till I got married. So I asked my boss if I could have my old job back, and then it occurred to me that it might make more sense to move out of Delhi for a while. My parents went mental when they heard. They said it was like an admission of defeat, that I should get married as soon as I could and there were already people spreading rumours that the break-up was my fault. So I told them to stuff it and left.’

Neil smiled briefly. ‘Good decision.’ He hesitated a little. ‘Listen, if you need help on anything at all, don’t hesitate to ask me. I’m sorry I made fun of you about doing the painting yourself—I didn’t realise you were short of cash.’

Not wanting him to labour under a false impression, Shefali shook her head. ‘I’m not poor or anything—my grandma left me a heap of money when she died, and I’ve got that tucked away safely. It’s just that when all this happened I realised that I had to prove to myself at least that I could manage on my own. Even without my grandmother’s money. And, let’s face it, she would have left that to my brother rather than to me if she hadn’t had a massive quarrel with him.’

Embarrassed at having said so much, Shefali picked up her paintbrush and started slathering paint on the wall.

Neil went back up the stepladder, but after while he said softly, ‘You’re pretty amazing—you know that?’

Startled, Shefali almost dropped her brush as she turned to look at him.

He gave her a quick smile. ‘I mean it. I’m not the kind of person who hands out empty compliments.’

That she could believe—if anything, he erred on the side of brutal frankness.

‘Thanks,’ she said, and Neil grinned at her.

‘Let’s get the last wall done with and then I’m off,’ he said. ‘I need to pick Nina up from a friend’s house.’

FOUR

‘So he said that when my hair grew out I should tie the front part of it back and the layers would become more defined,’ Shefali said, peering into the mirror worriedly. ‘That doesn’t seem to be happening.’

Neil tried valiantly to control his expression, failed, and burst out into laughter.

‘Get it cut,’ he said. ‘I’m sure the city has at least one decent hairdresser.’

‘But I always...’ Shefali said, and then, seeing the ridiculous side of what she’d been about to say, started laughing. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s just hair—if they mess it up it’ll grow back again.’

‘Right,’ Neil said. He reached out a hand and solemnly prodded her cheek.

‘What are you doing?’ Shefali asked, jerking back and swatting his hand away.

‘Checking if you’re real,’ he said, his eyes glittering. ‘You’re so perfect I was expecting plastic.’

She glared at him. It was a week since he’d helped her out with painting her living room, and he’d come over twice after that, with Priti and a couple of other guys from his TV crew who’d drunk large quantities of nimbu paani and helped her get the rest of the flat painted. Today she was going with him to attend a class reunion at a nearby school—one of the ex-students in town for the reunion was a Bollywood actor who had made quite a name for himself playing character parts, and Neil was interviewing him for his show.

‘You’re the one who told me to dress up a little,’ she said indignantly.

‘But you’re perfect all the time,’ Neil protested. ‘Perfect swingy hair, perfect make-up, perfectly ironed, perfectly fashionable clothes, perfect shoes— Ow, perfect aim with a hairbrush...’

‘You deserved that,’ Shefali told him sternly as she took her hairbrush back, but she was smiling.

The more she got to know Neil, the more she liked him. He continued to be brutally frank about everything, but he was helpful, funny and incredibly loyal to his friends. He also seemed to be incredibly unaffected by Shefali—it was as though that first kiss had never happened. The trouble was Shefali continued to find him as attractive as she had when they’d first met, and it was a little annoying and more than a little frustrating that he treated her like one of the guys. She still didn’t think that she was ready for a relationship, but it would have felt good to think that he was holding himself back too, battling his feelings because the time wasn’t right for either of them...

She bit the thought back with a sigh as Neil got off the sofa and said briskly, ‘Come on—hurry up or we’ll be late.’

The party was more fun than she’d expected. Most of the guests were in their early thirties, and they were a happy mix of people. And of course there was the actor—a dark-skinned man with an intelligent mobile face. He specialised in honest uneducated villager roles, and it came as a bit of shock to hear him speak perfect English. Neil and his crew were circulating among the guests, with Neil doing short interviews with each of them. Later he would cut and edit the segment to around three minutes, but he’d shot for well over an hour before he wrapped up and came to sit next to Shefali.

‘Very bored?’ he asked, sotto voce.

Shefali shook her head. ‘Not at all. I spent a lot of time talking to a woman who’s a major in the Army—very interesting the stuff she had to say. Her husband’s in the Army too. And I met a chap who runs a consumer durables dealership. He said he’d give me a good bargain on a washing machine.’

Neil raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re buying a washing machine now? What happened to the austerity drive?’

‘The washerwoman’s ruining my clothes,’ she said. ‘Last week she put a red kitchen towel into the wash with my under-things, and I now have seven pink bras.’