All Aboard!, page 18
But Rhea had made herself very clear. She was going home and going to marry Samir. To emphasize her decision to herself, she pulled out her phone and typed out a message to Samir. ‘Back in Delhi in two days. Let’s meet.’ She received an immediate flood of replies, which should have made her soul soar with their unabashed declarations of devotion and undying love, but all they did was to make her terrified, yet again, about what she was getting herself into.
She was ready to get back to life as she knew it. Now all she needed to do was to exorcise the memories of the time she spent with Kamal which would be easier with the distance between Delhi and Mumbai, she told herself.
The Colonel arrived at their cabin and offered to wheel Rina Maasi to the queue if she felt weak. She shushed him and insisted on walking all the way. ‘I’m not going to cop it so soon, Singhie. You’re not going to be rid of me so easily,’ she glowered. He laughed at her and kissed her cheek affectionately, nonetheless insisting she sit in the wheelchair rather than overexert herself.
Rhea began gathering up their things and wondered yet again who had placed that box with the ring on her bedside table. The cabin steward entered to say his goodbyes, and to receive, hopefully, an envelope conveying their appreciation of the service rendered.
‘I wanted to ask you,’ Rhea said, holding up the red velvet box which had contained the ring she was now wearing, ‘if you knew how this box came to be by my bedside.’
He looked at it in surprise. ‘No madam,’ he said, ‘I don’t remember seeing this before.’
‘Let it be,’ said Rina Maasi. ‘It’s a pretty ring and you wanted it. Now you have it. How does it matter how it came to be by your bedside?’
‘Of course, I’m bothered. Rings don’t just appear, do they?’
Rina Maasi gave her a raised eyebrow look. ‘So it is probably from an admirer who knew you wanted it. If the admirer chooses to stay anonymous, let him.’
‘But it is very expensive! I can’t take something so expensive from someone I don’t know.’
‘Oho, child. Just enjoy wearing it.’
This only confirmed Rhea’s suspicions that her aunt had bought it for her and was not owning up for whatever vague reason she might have. Perhaps this was Rina Maasi’s way of trying to make Rhea feel better about not being able to shop at all for herself.
They went onto the deck for breakfast and Rhea kept peering around hoping against hope that she would spot Kamal and Naina with the kids. She had, she admitted to herself in the most grudging manner, grown rather fond of Jay and Kiara, and would have liked to say goodbye to Naina. Perhaps she could call their cabin but on second thoughts decided against it.
Having finished their breakfast and completing the billing formalities with much agonizing over the charges for the medical treatment, they moved towards disembarking. On an impulse she called home, knowing it would mean a small ransom on her mobile bill for the next month but unable to contain an overwhelming urge to hear her mother’s voice. Moreover she had to tell them that Rina Maasi had been taken ill on board.
‘Rhea!’ her mother’s voice beamed. ‘You haven’t called for days, I hope you and Rina are fine.’
Rhea quickly filled her in with what had happened the previous evening, downplaying most of it, and insisting Rina Maasi was now perfectly fine.
‘Samir came home,’ her mother said. She had been expecting it. ‘He’s sorry, genuinely sorry for having run off like that. You must forgive him and take him back.’
‘Ma,’ she began, searching for words to tell her mother that she wasn’t sure she loved Samir anymore and that a lot had changed in the past few weeks she had been away. But she didn’t know where to start. ‘He messaged me, called me. I’m confused. I know it is the sensible thing to do but I feel I don’t love him anymore.’
There was a pregnant pause. A pin could have caused an explosion had it cared to drop now. Her father came on the line in a swift manner that could only mean her parents had her call on speaker phone.
‘What nonsense are you talking about, Rhea? You went around with this man for years! You would have been married to him if it hadn’t been for some foolishness on his part. Let me tell you, all men get terrified about getting married. If it hadn’t been for the fear of my own father, I might have run away from my own wedding.’
‘But Papa . . .’ she tried to cut in without much success. Her father was in full flow and could not be interrupted. His voice had reached octaves of trembling anger. It was a good thing, she thought, that she could hold the receiver away from her ear and prevent ear drum damage.
‘Now listen to me, Rhea,’ he said, his voice clipped and angry. ‘You will come back to India, you will tell Samir you will marry him and you will get married to him. Your mother and I are old now, and we want to see you settled before we die. There will be no further discussion about this.’
She disconnected the call quickly, her body shaking with rage. Speaking with her father without her mother to buffer the conversation always did this to her.
How dare he dictate what she should do with her life? Whose side was he on anyway—hers or Samir’s? And she wasn’t even a financial burden on them, if that is what his worry was. She was quite capable of earning her own living. She would be damned, she decided, if she got married to Samir just because her father wanted her to.
Rhea couldn’t bear the thought of going home, not after the conversation with her parents. Samir would ring the doorbell, expecting her to open the door and welcome him with a warm embrace of forgiveness and a Come Back All Is Forgiven flag waving from the balcony. To make things worse, her parents expected her to wave that flag with enthusiasm. Mulling over the depressing thoughts, Rhea and Rina Maasi, along with the rest, moved towards the disembarkation point. Rhea felt as if she was letting something precious slip away, something she would never find again for the rest of her life even if she tried. Her heart sank.
The queue was inching forward, the morning was beginning to get hot, and she could feel damp patches begin to form in her armpits. She looked behind, on a hope and a prayer, trying to spot Kamal for one last time.
‘I swear I won’t speak a word to him, God, please, please, please . . .’ she prayed hard.
Nada. Zilch. The area was buzzing with passengers from all over the world, all set to get off the Aqua Princess and get on with their journeys back home. But there was no sight of Kamal. Her heart sank further.
They were asked to wait in a lounge until their turn came and Rina Maasi sat happily on a sofa, chatting with the Colonel. Rhea stood against a wall, blinking back tears, pretending to examine a work of art that hung from the wall which was just a mash of motley colours swirling into the tears that she was mopping up before they brimmed over.
Just then, as they were called to move ahead, Rhea heard a familiar voice pipe up, a child’s voice. She turned around. Naina, Kamal and the kids were just about taking their place in the fledgling queue being formed for their deck. Sonia was nowhere to be seen.
Naina spotted her, waved frantically and began walking across to meet her. Kamal, Rhea noted, looked at her, smiled politely and then looked pointedly away, his jaw square and gritted, looking heartbreakingly handsome in a baby blue shirt and faded denims. Rhea sighed and looked away from him.
‘I wanted to speak with you before we left. I heard about the conversation between Sonia and you and realized I must have created some misunderstanding inadvertently.’
Rhea felt her stomach go queasy on her and gripped Naina’s forearm to steady herself.
‘How did you get to know about that?’
‘From my brother, of course. Sonia is the daughter of old family friends of our parents, we have a common circle of friends and we’ve known each other for a while, but it was only recently that Kamal and Sonia began seeing each other . . . perhaps a few months ago.’
‘But I was under the impression they were a long term couple?’
‘I’m sorry, I just had to clarify this, they were seeing each other off and on, and dating for a few months. Of course, we all hoped they would get married, but they had a fallout and while I didn’t know the details earlier, Kamal told me all about it last night and I understood why he could never marry her. But let me not get into that. That is something, if it needs telling, needs to be told by him.’
Rhea looked again in the distance, where Kamal was standing with the children, Kiara by his side and Jay on his shoulders. This time he looked straight at her and she felt her insides melt into mush instantly.
‘Why are you telling me this, Naina?’ she asked. ‘What does this have to do with me?’
Naina took a deep breath and continued, ‘I think my brother has grown terribly fond of you over the past couple of weeks. And I’ve never seen him so concerned, so keen about any girl in the past. I hope you did realize he was trying his best to woo you, in his own rather awkward way. When he told me about what Sonia said to you, I thought I needed to clear things up.’
She sighed.
‘Sonia had no business calling you a social climber and she had no business at all telling you to stay away from Kamal because she’s making a last ditch attempt to woo him back when he’s least interested in any relationship with her.’
Rhea ran a hand over her forehead, trying to figure out what it was that Naina was actually trying to tell her.
‘Kamal told Sonia off in my presence last evening about the way she spoke to you. Especially after what he had learnt about her. Sonia was amongst the first to disembark this morning. He told her that he didn’t want to see her ever again and to stop deluding herself that he was serious about a relationship with her.’
‘What you’re saying, Naina, is that they were seeing each for a few months and they split because of something so nasty you can’t bear to tell it to me?’
Naina nodded grimly. ‘That’s my brother, he’s very old school about not bandying a woman’s name in disrespectful terms, though if I were in his place I would be hard pressed to even be civil with Sonia. She’s a total . . .’ her voice trailed off and she looked guiltily at Kamal in the off chance that her voice had carried over the distance.
‘Now though, it is completely up to you. God knows, my brother is besotted with you. You’re all he can talk about. And you must like him a bit too, if you’re wearing the ring he bought you.’
She lifted Rhea’s hand up and the coral cameo glistened in the bright Mediterranean sunlight, the lady within catching fire from the rays of the morning sun. ‘Kamal bought this?’ Rhea’s jaw fell. ‘I didn’t know it was him. How did he know I liked it?’
‘I think he was right behind us in the shop when you tried it on. He bought it for you and then didn’t have the courage to give it to you directly so he tipped your cabin steward to keep it by your bedside, without telling who it was from.’
Rhea looked at Kamal again. He was looking right back at her with a strange expectancy she couldn’t quite comprehend, and then, in that moment, all the decisions were made. All the doubts clouding her mind were gone, just like a brisk shower clears the sky and makes the sunlight clearer.
She dropped the little overnighter in her hand down and hugged Naina. ‘Thank you Naina, thank you so much. You don’t know just how much I owe you.’
With that Rhea took off towards Kamal, her feet barely touching the ground in her haste to get to him. His eyes widened in surprise. The world around them slowed down as he set Jay down and reached out to put his arms around her as she dashed into him, the speed making her unable to contain the impact. And then Rhea, without a moment’s hesitation and without a care of being in public, pulled his face down to hers and kissed him passionately. When they finally broke for air, she was vaguely conscious of around a hundred pairs of eyes on them, some approving, others disapproving. She drew back a step, only to find Kamal pulling her back firmly against him, his mouth seeking hers out again for a kiss so deep, so passionate, her entire body trembled in response.
They stopped and looked into each other’s eyes, unmindful of the entire queue staring at them. His voice, when he finally broke the silence between the two of them, was husky, whether with emotion or a bad throat, she did not know. ‘This is not a terrible mistake, is it Rhea?’
She shook her head. ‘No, not a mistake.’
Despite herself and the innumerable censorious eyes on them, she drew his head down to hers again and kissed him again, surely, tenderly and confidently.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I’ve been really silly and prickly, and assuming the worst of you when you gave me absolutely no reason to. I apologize.’
‘Apology accepted. And now I have something to say to you,’ he put her hand up to his lips, kissed it, and gently pulled off the cameo ring she had worn on her right hand. ‘You have worn this on the wrong finger on the wrong hand, you doofus. It needs to go here.’
He lifted her left hand and placed the ring gently on the tip of her ring finger, and looked at her as she looked at him, startled with what the gesture implied. Her breath caught in her throat as she realized what he was trying to say. ‘It might seem a bit too soon, Rhea Khanna, given I’ve barely met you a couple of weeks ago, but I feel I’ve known you for years, and have been waiting for you all my life. I’ve never been surer of anything in my life. Will you marry me?’ He wasn’t kneeling down, looking up into her eyes, it wasn’t a candlelight dinner at a fancy restaurant, and she hadn’t spent the day defoliating, tweezing, buffing herself for the moment. But it was a story she could tell their grandchildren, the story of how their grandfather proposed to her moments before they were to get off a cruise ship and lose each other forever.
There was a slight tug on the hem of her shorts and a piping voice commanded sharply, ‘Say yes.’ A sharper, older female voice from behind her, which she recognized as Rina Maasi’s, seconded the command issued from the child. ‘Go on, say yes.’
‘Is this a conspiracy?’ she laughed, looking back to see Rina Maasi, the Colonel and Naina all standing a few paces away, watching them, their faces expectant and excited.
She looked down at Jay scowling up at her, his grip still threateningly firm on her shorts, laughed and nodded a ‘yes’ to Kamal. ‘Yes, yes, yes, I will marry you, Kamal, I will,’ she laughed through her tears. And with that he slid the ring on her finger, kissed her again and again until she was breathless and had to rest her head on his shoulder to steady her heart, and the spontaneous applause that broke out around them was sweeter than any music she had ever heard.
Acknowledgements
With All Aboard! I take the deep plunge into the rose-tinted world of romance writing which has been quite an adventure for me to say the very least—me being old, cynical, embittered and, as Plum Wodehouse would say, a twenty-minute hard-boiled egg.
I’d like to, therefore, thank the very fabulous Vaishali Mathur, senior commissioning editor at Penguin Random House, who believed I had a true blue romance tucked away somewhere below my cynical carapace and didn’t give up on me, hand holding me through this entire book with infinite patience, much more than I deserved. Many thanks due to editors Paloma Dutta and Azera Rahman, as well. Because I am such a sucker for lovely covers, a huge thank you to Tara Upadhyay for the fabulous work.
From the bottom of my cholesterol-laden heart, infinite gratitude to my darling Tisca Chopra, who is a living embodiment of how it is completely possible to be beautiful on the inside and outside, and to the fabulous, effervescent and ever-smiling Tara Sharma Saluja, who has been so generous with her support, always.
Thank you to my wonderful family—my mother, Shama Sheikh, for putting up with me while growing up when I always had my nose in a book, any book, to escape from learning any useful taxable and non-taxable life skills. Thank you to my sisters-in-law Pramila, Chanda and Tara for indulging me, pampering me and making me their youngest sister. Thank you to my mother-in-law Leela Manral for allowing me the luxury of not having to worry about domestic chaos and get on with my writing. And to my darling son, Krish, for being the dynamite under my short fuse every single day.
And finally—thank you to my husband, Kirit, who will always remain to me the unsure and terribly gorgeous boy I had met in the January of 1991 who took my breath away. Thank you for always being my knight in shining armour, albeit a bit creaky at the joints now.
THE BEGINNING
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