Шома Нараянан – Monsoon Wedding Fever (страница 4)

The words were brave, but Riya felt about as confident as she had as a quaking four-year-old on her first day of school. Dhruv Malhotra meant trouble, and the less she saw of him the better.

CHAPTER TWO

GAURAV knocked gently on Riya’s door. ‘Come in!’ she yelled out. He came in quietly and sat down, gingerly perching his bulky frame next to her.

‘I’m sorry about foisting Dhruv on you,’ he said, tugging gently at a lock of her hair. ‘I wish I’d known—I wouldn’t have asked him to stay here.’

‘Relax. You’re not a clairvoyant, so there’s no way you could have known. It doesn’t matter, anyway.’

‘Should I ask him to move to a hotel? He’s offered to, in case you’re uncomfortable with him being around. Chutki’s staying over at a friend’s place from tonight anyway.’

Riya shook her head and laughed. ‘It’s not that big a deal, Gaurav. Really. Dhruv and I used to hang around in college—I took it a little too seriously and scared him off.’

Gaurav hesitated. ‘He seemed to think it’d be better if he moved out.’

‘So let him move, then, for God’s sake,’ Riya snapped. ‘It doesn’t matter to me.’ But it did. It mattered a lot. Chutki’s saying that he’d held on to her picture had made her think that maybe, after all, Dhruv had cared for her—just a little. But if he still wanted to run away from her, even after twelve years, she couldn’t help feeling some of the old hurt creep back.

Gaurav said gently, ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

Riya shook her head decisively. ‘No, thanks. I made enough of a fool of myself over your cousin the first time around, and I don’t want to think about it any more.’

‘Poor girl.’ Gaurav pulled her against himself for a quick hug. ‘You know what? I think you guys should talk it over now, put it behind you.’

‘Yeah, thanks for the advice, Oprah, but I think I’ll pass.’ The last thing she wanted was more time talking to Dhruv—it wouldn’t be possible to conceal how much he affected her for more than ten minutes.

‘Is it OK if he comes for my surprise party tonight?’

Riya groaned. ‘Gaurav, you aren’t supposed to know that there is a surprise party. Who blabbed?’

He gave her a smug grin. ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out... Come on, Riya, did you really think anything in the office would stay a secret?’

It didn’t. Her office was the original leaky sieve—one of a dozen people could have told Gaurav, and she had been crazy to think that she’d be able to keep the surprise party actually a surprise.

‘You can help clean the house before the party, then,’ she told Gaurav, ‘now that you know. Remember to put all your smelly socks in the wash.’

Gaurav groaned. ‘I should have just pretended to be surprised. Like my grandmother says, there’s no room for honesty in this black era. So, can Dhruv come?’

‘I guess so,’ Riya replied grudgingly, and he beamed back at her, evidently convinced that all was forgiven and forgotten between his cousin and his best friend.

* * *

The house was chock-full of people by eight p.m., and more kept arriving. Gaurav was popular in the firm, and because he was in HR he knew everyone. It was a bring your own booze party, and the food was Chinese takeaway and pizzas—it hadn’t been much trouble to organise—but Riya was finding it difficult to concentrate even on simple things, like making sure someone responsible was in charge of the drinks, and that people didn’t spill ketchup on the company-owned sofas. Her eyes automatically went to the door every time the doorbell rang—Dhruv had said he’d be late, but she couldn’t help searching for him among every group of entrants.

It was nine-thirty when Dhruv finally made an appearance. Riya was perched on the balcony, swinging her legs against the parapet as she talked to a group of colleagues. The atmosphere in the room seemed to change as he walked in, looking around the room and hesitating a little before coming up to her. Riya gave him a polite, noncommittal smile, noticing bitterly that even with a day’s stubble and rumpled clothes he was by far the best-looking man in the room.

As he walked towards her more than a few heads swung in his direction. The reaction in the little group on the balcony was palpable. The two women smoothed their hair, clearly in a bit of a flutter. Rishabh, the only man in the group, straightened up and squared his shoulders—the typical male reaction to a man several inches taller. Riya tried to stay unaffected, but she knew that she more than anyone else was conscious of every movement he made, every change of expression.

‘So, what do you do, Dhruv?’ one of the women asked after Riya had introduced Dhruv. ‘Let me guess... Not a banker, obviously—not boring enough. Lawyer? Businessman?’

‘I’m an architect,’ Dhruv replied quietly.

‘Really? What’s your firm called?’ Her expression was one of animated interest.

Dhruv, used to female attention, hardly noticed the effort she was making to capture his attention. It had been a long day, and he’d come back hoping for a relaxed evening, but with the house full of guests it didn’t look likely. The woman was still looking at him expectantly, so he answered.

‘Icarus Designs,’ he said, wishing they would all go away and leave him with Riya. She was wearing a sleeveless turquoise top in some silky material over jeans, and her hair was loose over her shoulders—she looked younger, and far more as he remembered her from college, and if they had been alone he’d have been tempted to take her into his arms and kiss her senseless.

Rishabh looked up. ‘There’s a Singapore-based firm of that name—any connection?’

‘I’ve been working out of Singapore the last few years, but I started in Delhi and I still have an office there,’ Dhruv said. He had an eye on Riya, sensing that she was withdrawing from the conversation. He figured that while she was on friendly terms with Rishabh, she didn’t really like him.

‘Dude, I love the buildings you guys have done in Singapore,’ Rishabh was saying. ‘I worked in one of them, and the design was out of this world. I actually researched the firm as part of a project. Are you setting up something in Mumbai?’

‘I’m considering it,’ Dhruv said. ‘I’ll be coming back to Mumbai after Gaurav’s wedding to scout for office space, and if things work out I’ll set up here by the end of the year.’

Rishabh hopped down from the parapet onto the balcony and took a card out of his pocket. ‘Maybe we can meet up once you’re back? My contact details are on this—or I can call you if that’s OK?’

‘Sure,’ Dhruv said, taking the card but not offering one of his own in return.

Riya frowned. It hadn’t even occurred to her to ask Dhruv about his work, but Rishabh had sensed a business opportunity and honed in. That was how he managed to hold his own at work, she thought. They had joined CYB around the same time, and got along well at least on the surface, but professionally they had been at loggerheads since the day they’d started working together. Riya knew that she was technically far more competent than he was—where she fell behind was on the ability to spot new business.

She looked over the parapet, down at the city. She needed to get at least a couple of new clients on board this quarter to secure a decent bonus. God knew she needed the money. She earned a good salary, but a lot of it went home to her parents. Her mother didn’t work, and her dad had retired on a very small pension—and he’d had a lot of health problems recently.

She pursed her lips worriedly. If Icarus Designs was big—and Rishabh evidently thought they were—she should speak to Dhruv about a possible project. He’d be far more inclined to talk to her than to Rishabh, but she felt very reluctant to broach the topic with him.

She cast a quick look in his direction, and all thoughts of work immediately flew out of her head. He was impossibly good-looking, she thought, confused, and his rumpled hair and unshaven chin only added to his dangerous bad-boy looks.

Dhruv looked up at her suddenly. ‘Riya, don’t lean so far back—you’ll topple. We’re on the twenty-second floor.’

Gaurav walked up to them, drink in hand, slinging a careless arm around Dhruv’s shoulders. ‘Yeah, you’ll make a lovely splat on the concrete. You guys heard the joke about the idiot who fell from the roof of a ten-storey building?’

Rishabh grinned—he and Gaurav were the clowns of the bunch. ‘He heard the doorbell ring and ran to open the door.’

‘Right. And the one who drove his truck off a cliff?’

‘He wanted to check his air brakes!’

Dhruv moved closer to Riya and said in an undertone, ‘Riya, please get down.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Dhruv, I’m not about to fall. Back off.’

Rishabh said, ‘And the one who fell out of the window?’

‘He tripped over the cordless phone,’ Gaurav said, grinning, as the girls groaned in mock exasperation.

Riya was still stubbornly perched on the balcony railing, giving Dhruv a defiant little look as she laughed at Gaurav’s completely pathetic jokes. Dhruv had had these sudden bouts of over-protectiveness in college as well—worrying about her getting home when it was getting dark, insisting on dropping her home on his motorbike from college after she’d had an accident on her two-wheeler. She’d never objected then, thinking it was a sign of how much he cared for her, but there was no way she was going to take orders from him now.