Secrets & Saris

‘You’re her father?’ Shefali asked finally, looking him up and down.

‘So I’ve been told,’ Neil drawled. ‘I’ve been thinking of getting a DNA test done, but you know how things keep getting put off.’

Shefali was about to snap at him when she realised that Nina was right next to them, listening intently.

‘He is my dad,’ Nina said, her voice firm, but Shefali saw her chin wobble slightly. ‘What’s a DNA test, Daddy?’

‘A piece of paper that says you’re all mine,’ Neil replied, his voice rough as he swung Nina up into his arms. For a few seconds he’d been so intent on getting under Shefali’s skin that he’d forgotten his daughter was within earshot. ‘But we already know that, so we don’t need one. Bad joke. Sorry.’

‘Well, now that I see you together I can tell you’re father and daughter,’ Shefali said, trying to lighten things up a little. She’d have a lot to say to him if she saw him alone, but now was most definitely not the time. ‘Your ears are identical.’

Nina chuckled happily. ‘Everybody says my eyes are like Papa’s,’ she said.

‘Don’t believe, them. Yours are much prettier. Your ears, on the other hand...’

‘I can’t believe it—a schoolmarm with an ear fetish,’ Neil murmured as Nina slipped down from his arms.

‘I read it in a Sherlock Holmes story,’ Shefali said, blushing hotly. ‘Ears are supposed to show a family resemblance the most.’

‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,’ he said, and he smiled suddenly, his eyes lighting up in the way that made Shefali’s heartbeat quicken. ‘It’s years since I read Conan Doyle.’

‘Same here,’ Shefali, said, and there was a little pause broken by Nina’s cheerful little voice.

‘Teacher, I love the patterns on your hands,’ she said. ‘They’re like a dulhan’s hands. Did you just get married?’

The henna again. Shefali wished there was a way of getting it off—nail polish remover? Acid, maybe? Anything to get rid of the orange designs snaking over her hands, a constant reminder of her stupidity.

For the moment, though, she was done with lies and evasions. Neil could think what he liked.

‘I almost did,’ she said. ‘But it didn’t work out.’

Neil’s brow furrowed. ‘Get into the car, sweetheart,’ he said to Nina. ‘Look—Bela Mashi’s waiting for you by the gate.’

Nina gave Shefali a cheery wave and ran off. Neil’s amazing eyes were troubled as he turned back to Shefali.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I didn’t realise...’

Shefali cut him off. ‘It’s OK,’ she said quickly. ‘I didn’t realise you were married for that matter. Maybe you’d forgotten it for a while as well? Look, I need to go—I’ve got some people to meet.’

She turned and almost ran up the steps. It was perfectly true—she did have a meeting with the man who did the accounts for the school. Only she didn’t go straight to the office. Instead she headed quickly for the back stairs and went up to her flat. Once inside, she held her hands up to her flaming cheeks. God, how stupid she was. It hadn’t even occurred to her that Neil could be married. He definitely hadn’t acted married. But then Pranav hadn’t acted madly-in-love-with-another-woman either. Maybe it was something wrong with her that made her the automatic choice for every man with a secret? And she’d spent the entire weekend thinking about Neil—she’d even daydreamed about him in class today, for heaven’s sake. It all went to show that she didn’t have the first clue about men, and the less she tangled with them the better.

Downstairs, Neil stood in the playground for a bit, hoping Shefali would reappear so that he could explain himself. When it became apparent that she wouldn’t, he turned and walked back to his car. Inside, Nina was bouncing up and down excitedly, telling her nanny about her day. Neil’s grim expression softened as he looked at the two of them. Bela Mashi had been his nanny when he was young, and she’d come out of retirement when Nina was born. He didn’t know what he’d have done without her—especially after Reema had left.

‘Daddy, isn’t the new teacher pretty?’ Nina asked.

Neil smiled at her reflection in the rearview mirror. ‘Very,’ he agreed. ‘Is she teaching your class?’

Bela Mashi shook her head before Nina could say anything. ‘Centre manager is what she is. Going to run the school after that Dubey lady retires. Young girl like that—what does she know about running a school? Anyway, we’re leaving in a couple of months. Doesn’t matter to us. It’s the others who’ll be stuck with her. And she’s from Delhi too. God knows why she’s come to work in this little village.’

‘Little village’ was how Bela Mashi described all the cities Neil had chosen for his latest show, but she followed him loyally wherever he went. Starting the car, Neil wondered what he’d have done without her. Probably buckled under family pressure and let his sister bring up Nina. Not that he hadn’t been tempted by the offer—bringing up a baby alone wasn’t the way he’d imagined spending the best years of his life. But that was the point, he mused, glancing at Nina as she tugged open her bag to show Bela Mashi something she’d made in class. The last four years with Nina had turned out to be best years of his life, though not quite in the way he’d dreamed of in his teens.

THREE

It was all the fault of the stepladder she’d found tucked away in the storeroom, Shefali decided. The second she’d seen it she’d been reminded of all those paint ads in which glamorous models and actors transformed a room with a few strokes of a brush. Reality wasn’t quite so much fun. For one, the ads never showed the hours you needed to put in, first scraping the old paint off and then smoothing the walls with messy Plaster of Paris. Or that ceilings were unreachable even after she’d tied the brush onto the end of a broomstick.

She’d been at it for almost the entire day now, trying to transform her pistachio-green walls to a more cheerful pale yellow. So far she’d done exactly one third of one wall of the living room, having given up on the ceiling. In any case the ceiling was white—it didn’t matter if it looked slightly dingy. The colour on the walls would brighten everything up.

She was just dipping the brush into the paint when the door bell rang. Who could it be? She put the brush on its side and covered the paint tin exactly as they’d shown in the video on house painting she was using as her reference material. Then she pulled off the old dupatta she’d tied around her head and went to open the door.

Neil Mitra.

She felt the breath catch in her throat at the sight of him leaning against the door. The sun was setting somewhere in the distance and his brown hair glittered golden. While his face was in shadow, his eyes sparkled as he broke into a disarming smile.

Realising that she was still staring at him like a dork, Shefali cleared her throat. ‘Yes?’ she said, putting on her best dealing-with-irritating-parents expression—neutral, but completely in charge of the situation. It probably didn’t go very well with her paint-splattered T-shirt and jeans, but she could hardly run in to change.

‘Is this a bad time?’ Neil asked, his grin broadening as he peeked around her into the living room.

The furniture was swathed in the lace curtains that she was planning to get rid of anyway, and the stepladder stood perfectly aligned with the wall. OK, the room wasn’t exactly ready to be featured in a home décor magazine, but she couldn’t see what there was to grin about either.

‘It’s fine,’ Shefali said, not budging from the doorway. ‘If you’re not going to take too long?’

‘I won’t,’ Neil promised. He’d thought about this for a whole week before he’d decided to come and speak to her. ‘I just wanted to let you know—I’m not married.’

Right. Thrown off-balance more than a little, Shefali stared at him uncertainly. ‘You mean...Nina isn’t your daughter?’

‘She is.’ Neil gestured behind her. ‘Do you think I could come in? It’s a little weird, having to blurt out the story of my life on your doorstep. I’m a very shy guy, really.’

‘Really?’ Shefali said, but she stood aside to let him in. Her head in a bit of a whirl, she gestured towards the dining room. ‘We can sit here.’

Neil strode across the room, and Shefali took a minute to admire his athletic body from the rear.

‘I’m divorced,’ Neil said, as soon as he sat down, his blue-grey eyes looking up into hers.

Oh. For some reason that hadn’t occurred to her. She sat down opposite him, unconsciously smoothing her long T-shirt over her knees. ‘How long ago?’

‘Very soon after Nina was born.’

‘And Nina’s been with you ever since?’ Fathers very rarely got custody of the kids in a divorce battle, Shefali knew, and getting custody of a baby girl only a few months old had to be even more uncommon.

Neil shrugged. ‘Reema didn’t want her. We got married young, had a child early. She wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment.’

Shefali stayed silent, not sure how to react. She was hugely relieved, of course, to learn that she hadn’t kissed a married man. For the entire week she’d been seeing herself as a home-wrecker who encouraged philandering husbands. But the fact that he wasn’t married also meant that he was available, and she didn’t want to think of him that way. This part of her plan to get over Pranav didn’t involve men. And especially not madly attractive men like Neil.

The madly attractive man in her dining room was now surveying his surroundings. ‘A bit grim, isn’t it?’ he asked, gesturing around at the bilious walls and the mildewed framed posters of kittens in baskets.

‘That’s why I’m repainting it,’ Shefali said drily. ‘To make it a little less grim.’

‘Have you ever done anything like this before?’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve lived in my parents’ house till now. They’re not really the do-it-yourself type.’

‘I wouldn’t have put you down as the do-it-yourself type either,’ Neil remarked.

Shefali bristled immediately. ‘I’m not incapable!’ she said.

‘Not at all,’ he said smoothly, but Shefali got the impression that he was still laughing at her. ‘It’s just that every time I’ve seen you so far you’ve struck me as someone who doesn’t push her boundaries too much.’

Kissing a man she barely knew had definitely pushed her boundaries, and Shefali found herself resenting his remark.

‘Was that all, then?’ she asked. ‘You came to tell me you’re not married? I don’t mean to be rude, but I really do need to get on with my painting.’

‘I’ll help you,’ he said easily. ‘You’ve done most of the hard work anyway—it won’t take long to get the room done. And there are a couple of other things I want to talk to you about.’

Shefali gave him a cold nod.

‘Well, the first thing is that Nina’s taken quite a fancy to you.’ Neil said. ‘And she’s a little upset because she says you’ve been ignoring her. Apparently on the first day you spent quite a bit of time talking to her, but since then you’ve not spoken to her at all.’

Shefali felt her face heat up. She’d deliberately avoided Nina, feeling awkward about the whole thing with Neil. It had been unfair of her, but she hadn’t realised that Nina had noticed.

‘Look, I can understand why,’ Neil said. ‘The whole episode that night—I lost my head a little, and I’m sorry. Really, really sorry. I can now understand why you probably don’t want to see me again, with your wedding having just been called off... But I don’t want Nina to be affected by something that’s totally my fault.’

He was making her sound like a neurotic on the rebound. Plastering an over-bright smile on her face, she said, ‘Of course not. Nina’s a lovely kid. I’m sorry if she thought I was ignoring her—it’s been a crazy week. I’m still settling in, and of course I was feeling a little awkward about...you know...’

Her voice trailed off, and he nodded understandingly. ‘I had no idea you were going to be working in the school, otherwise...’

This time, it was his turn to leave a sentence hanging, but Shefali knew what he meant. If he’d known she was going to turn up in his daughter’s school he wouldn’t have come within a mile of her.

‘So that’s settled, then,’ he was saying. ‘I promise to behave myself from now on, and you’ll treat Nina like any other student. I’m not asking for special attention—she can be a real brat sometimes.’

Remembering how she’d told him that she disliked some children, Shefali said quickly, ‘Oh, she’s a wonderful kid—very bright and enthusiastic, no trouble at all.’

‘Not obnoxious?’ he asked, his eyes laughing at her. ‘Like some adults?’

‘Not at all like some adults,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘Listen, if you’re really planning to help with my room we need to get going.’ She wasn’t sure if she wanted him around, given the effect he had on her hormones, but help with her painting was help with her painting. Difficult to get and impossible to refuse.

‘I’ll help,’ he said. ‘But one last thing—will you be OK with doing a small appearance on my show?’

Whatever she’d expected him to ask, it wasn’t that.

‘Appear on your show doing what?’ she asked.

‘Well, you’re a bit of an oddity, you know,’ he said, walking into the living room and picking up the can of paint and a brush. ‘A girl from Delhi, coming to live in a small town—you could say what you think of the place, tell people what made you decide to come here and so on.’

‘I chose this town because nobody knows me here,’ Shefali said abruptly. ‘And because I wanted to get away from everyone I know in Delhi. That’s not going to sound good on national television, is it?’

‘Hmm,’ Neil said as he got on the stepladder and started to paint the top part of the wall with wide brushstrokes.

He was good, Shefali thought, admiring the way the muscles in his back rippled as he moved the brush back and forth.

‘What about a short piece on you doing a make-over on your flat? We can get some of the crew to help you, and it’d look good.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Shefali said. ‘I really don’t want people back home to know what’s happening in my life.’

‘Right,’ Neil said. ‘I guess that’s understandable. Can you pass me the roller, please?’

Shefali handed it to him, and then asked, ‘How come you’ve put Nina in school here if you’re only going to be around for a couple of months?’

‘That’s the good thing about your playschool—you have branches everywhere,’ he returned. ‘I’ve been transferring her from one branch to another for the last year. But I’m done with this kind of life now. In two months we’ll be back in Mumbai, and she’ll join regular school. I’ll shift to an assignment that doesn’t need me to travel.’

That made sense, Shefali thought as she picked up a brush and started work on the lower part of the wall. It was just that the responsible dad side of him was so incongruous with his rather Bohemian appearance.

‘How old are you, Neil?’ she asked, and he stopped painting to look down at her.

‘Twenty-eight,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘It’s just that you seem too young to be the father of a four-year-old,’ she said. ‘I thought maybe you were older than you looked. But you’re not—you’re just a year older than I am. Most men your age are still out having fun, and you’re looking after a child...’

Neil shrugged. ‘Life doesn’t turn out according to one’s plans, does it?’ he said.

Unsure whether he might be making a dig at her own circumstances, Shefali continued painting in silence.

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.’