Secrets and Sins

‘Well, Ben,’ Riva muttered, sitting on the edge of her bed to yank on a pair of fleecy boots, ‘I could have roused myself to rustle up a pulao or a soup, just to keep you feeling like a man who’s just come in from a hard day’s work. But, you know what? My best friend, Susan, has just found that the man she’s lavished every ounce of love she’s had to give since she was eighteen may be having an affair. As though he were just another dick and not the fine, intelligent, upstanding man we always thought he was. Maybe, just maybe, she needs me a tiny bit more than you do tonight, Ben.’

That was the other thing about a writer’s life: these ridiculous monologues that had recently become a habit, everyone assuming that a writer’s life was easy simply because you could hang around in your pyjamas while doing your day’s work. Would anyone stop to consider, Riva wondered, that she hadn’t spoken to another soul all day? Except for Susan this morning, which was a most unusual event. Even the routine trip to the newsagents had been dumped in favour of finishing Chapter Ten because there was every danger of being sucked into reading something in the papers that would gobble up a precious couple of hours. Deadlines, deadlines, did publishers know how sapping of creativity these bloody deadlines could be? Ben certainly didn’t.

Riva looked at herself in the mirror to dab a bit of powder over her face and run a kohl pencil over her eyes. That would do. She really ought to wipe this unseemly frown off her face before she got to Wimbledon. For Susan’s sake. God knows she needed some cheering up, although Riva didn’t feel terribly well qualified to be that person tonight.

She picked out a small leather satchel and slipped her travel card into it, making her way downstairs. It was only as Riva was pulling on her coat in the hallway that she saw the letter sticking out of the postbox. The envelope was creamy and expensive looking, and had a French postage stamp bearing a Cannes postmark. Riva ripped it open and nearly dropped it in her excitement. She reread it to be sure it wasn’t a mistake. This was incredible! She, Riva Walia, was invited to be a jury member at the sixty-third Cannes Film Festival this summer!

In disbelief, she ran her eye once again over the details, savouring every word…At the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès…Nine jury members…Chaired by Isabelle Huppert…

Then she sucked in her breath sharply as she read the names of the other eight judges and came to the fourth on the list…Mr Aman Khan from India.

Riva leant heavily on the sideboard, suddenly dizzy. Perhaps she had wished for this somewhere in her deepest subconscious, in some kind of stupid yearning fan-like dream. Without an author carefully plotting events on a timeline and playing God with a bunch of helpless characters, choreographing their every move, how else could such an astonishing thing possibly happen?

Riva slid the letter under a pile of newspapers and left the house, resolving to contain her excitement until after she had met poor Susan.

Chapter Eleven

Aman was met at Dubai airport by a small posse of dangerous-looking men who whisked him into a fleet of cars. Although he enjoyed relative anonymity in this city, like London, it was too full of Indians for him to hope to pass completely unnoticed.

He looked out of his darkened windows at the other opulent cars passing by, imagining how excited he would have been as a boy to see a Bugatti, a McLaren and a Maybach all in the space of ten minutes. Now everything seemed so lacklustre.

It was not long before Aman saw the tall mast-shape of the Burj Al Arab rise from the waters of the Arabian Gulf as the chauffeur steered his Rolls-Royce expertly through Dubai’s lunchtime traffic. The car swept along a freeway that was flanked by palm-fringed emerald lawns on one side, the ocean glittering blue-gold on the other. Soon his car was rolling up the hotel’s vast drive, the ocean on either side giving Aman the illusion that they were wafting all the way up the gangplank to a massive ship.

The Indian doorman gave Aman a delighted smile as he disembarked. After a polite exchange of words with the man, who seemed quite overcome by a film star paying him so much attention, Aman sprinted up a set of sweeping marble stairs to the entrance. No matter how many times he walked through the doors of the Burj, Aman couldn’t help being dazzled all over again by the quantities of gold leaf that seemed to cover everything; the walls, the floor, the ceiling were brighter than ever as the afternoon sun poured in. This was his fourth or fifth visit but Aman reckoned he would never entirely cope with the garish opulence of the Burj. It was Salma who insisted on staying at this hotel when she was in Dubai, mostly for the privacy they guaranteed all their guests, but also, Aman knew, because she simply would not settle for anything less. If there was a seven-star hotel in a city, it would be unthinkable that Salma Khan should stay anywhere else!

‘Has my wife arrived yet?’ Aman asked the butler, who was walking a few respectful paces behind him down a gilded maroon corridor towards the lift.

‘Mrs Khan arrives in an hour’s time,’ the man replied in soothing tones. As if he understood already that soothing was what Aman really needed with the imminent arrival of Mrs Khan. Aman smiled wryly. Salma would appear, as she always did, in a whirl of secretaries and beauticians and hair stylists, barking orders into a phone that was permanently glued to her left ear. The habit had grown worse with her recent acquisition of a cricket team that was playing in the Indian Premier League, the long-distance negotiating and strategising seeming to give her a special buzz. It was as if she thrived on the power of being in charge of things, no matter how far away she was. She certainly had a strange way of robbing not just Aman, but the very air around her, of peace and tranquillity.

Aman sighed as he was escorted up to the Royal Suite on the twenty-fifth floor. He’d suggested going for one of the smaller suites this time, given that this was not a personal visit but one organised and paid for by the Khalili brothers. But Salma would never agree to anything but the very best, of course, and the ever-courteous Khalili family had been quick to respond.

‘Least they can do, Aman,’ Salma had urged. ‘After all, you are charging only half what you normally get to attend their function.’ She was right but, typically, she was overlooking the fact that the discounted rate was because the Khalilis were known for their philanthropic work and the function was a fundraiser for Autism Awareness, a cause the oil tycoons were committed to because of the autistic twin sons born to the elder of the two brothers.

Aman entered the mustard and gold expanse of the Royal Suite, wondering how the hell he would cope with leopard-print carpets for three whole days. The two bedrooms upstairs were a necessary requirement, as he’d asked Salma to bring Ashfaq along on this trip and she would no doubt turn up with his regular entourage of nanny, governess and playmate. But a living room this size, a dining room and a private cinema was definitely overkill for such a short stay, much of which would be spent in the Khalilis’ ocean-view mansion anyway.

Aman flung his shades down on a console table and kicked off his shoes, enjoying the cool of the Carrara marble underfoot. Running up the stairs, he entered one of the two bathrooms and washed his face vigorously under water as cold as he could stand. After towelling his face dry, he picked up a bottle and splashed something that smelt faintly like citrus fruit on his face – Eau de Hermès, the lettering on the bottle discreetly pronounced. Salma would be pleased.

Aman wandered out into a bedroom whose centrepiece was a huge circular and canopied four-poster bed. He remembered this bed from an earlier visit four or five years ago – a time when he and Salma had been getting on better, for he could recall how they’d laughed while experimenting with its various spinning and vibrating functions. It was hard to imagine such a time now, given the frostiness that had crept into their marriage in the past few years. Looking back, the surprising bit hadn’t been that he’d married Salma in the first place. She had been a beauty, after all, daughter of the legendary Noor, India’s top actress in the sixties. Aman had spotted Salma at one of his first film parties – a lavish affair celebrating twenty-five years of Rajshri Studios – and had found himself unable to take his eyes off the fair-skinned, svelte beauty that Salma had been then. She was, in fact, the spitting image of her mother, as Noor had been in her prime, and Aman was overwhelmed by a feeling of déjà vu, imagining he was watching an old Noor film (and he had seen them all in his misspent schooldays) as he watched Salma, clad in a sparkling white gharara, sitting demurely by her father, the powerful and influential Abdullah Miandad, then Bollywood’s top director.

Aman had managed to inveigle an introduction to Salma at the party and they had spent some time chatting about inconsequential things. But Aman had picked up a sense of an ambitious girl trapped in a traditional setup and had felt a rush of sympathy that only added to the sensation of being quite smitten. Old Miandad had been pleased as punch when, a month later, Aman made a tentative enquiry regarding the possibility of seeking his daughter’s hand in marriage. The positive response had surprised Aman at first, but he realised later that Salma’s canny father had probably already had some inkling of Aman’s star potential with Krodh having by then catapulted him to hero status. Aman’s parents had been nonplussed by the Bollywood princess they had suddenly been landed with as a daughter-in-law, but Aman’s new-found money and status was by then bringing them a life of substance too, so it hadn’t been a totally unequal union. In the early heady flush of that youthful marriage, Aman had for a short while genuinely believed he was happy and in love.

That was then, Aman mused, staring out at the waters of the Persian Gulf sparkling into the distance. He had certainly never bargained for Salma turning into a lazy, complaining wife who considered it his duty to keep her in comfort. Even his tentative suggestion that she try taking up the acting career she had seemed to so desire was met by a disbelieving look.

The blazing blue of sky and sea was broken only by the occasional boat or aircraft and, as Aman watched a helicopter approach the hotel, he guessed that it was making for the helipad on its roof. He grinned, remembering a tennis match he had witnessed on the helipad a few years ago – a Roger Federer–Andre Agassi tournament that the smooth British MC had described as ‘strawberries and cream meeting the mile-high club’. Aman watched the helicopter progress slowly in the direction of the Burj and it slowly dawned on him that Salma had taken the option of using a helicopter transfer from the airport, despite his firm instructions not to do so. He felt bile and fury rise in his stomach as he thought of how heedlessly she had taken to ignoring his every request. She would, doubtless, accuse him of being tight-fisted but it wasn’t that at all. It was not just Aman’s fear of small aircraft but also his ever-present terror that something bad would happen to Ashfaq when he wasn’t near enough to help; an anxiety born from being forced to spend so much time away from his son. Salma would have been fully aware that a helicopter journey with Ashfaq would make him deeply unhappy – and yet she had chosen to do exactly that. Aman watched the small distant dot of the helicopter and felt his jaw clench in helplessness and fear.

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