All Aboard!, page 7
The rest of the afternoon, which was rather hot, was spent walking around the streets of the city, eating more gelato than was mandated, picking up souvenirs for friends and family back home, clicking pictures, and doing other usual touristy stuff, followed by a motor boat ride through the canals. Rina Maasi wanted to shop some more but they had just enough time to scramble back to the ship with the final horn.
‘I’m exhausted!’ Maasi said as soon as she hit the bed. The cabin had been restored to its pristine self in their absence, complete with chocolates on the pillows for the sugar rush that was needed after a long day of traipsing around on foot. ‘I’m just going to lie down and will order in dinner if I feel hungry. But I don’t think I will. Isn’t he so handsome?’
Rhea swivelled around, perplexed at where the conversation was headed. ‘Yes, he so is,’ she replied, her face colouring up at the memory of his arm around her waist and the touch searing her skin into flames.
‘Such a gentleman,’ Rina Maasi continued.
‘Yes, he is,’ Rhea agreed, realizing that she hadn’t met many of his kind in recent times. Perhaps their population was diminishing.
‘And he still has all his hair . . .’ Rina Maasi sighed. ‘By the time most men reach Bikram’s age, they either have a toupee or a comb over like a horrible giant spider squatting on an egg.’ Rhea laughed despite herself. They were talking about two different men. As if on cue, there was a sharp rap at the door just then, and the man whose head was still full of hair entered.
‘Rina, my dear,’ the Colonel’s voice boomed. ‘Care for a quiet meal in the cabin, rather than the noisy restaurant tonight? My legs have quite given up on me with all that walking.’ The ex-army man had had his left leg blown off in combat. The prosthesis was rather unforgiving and after long use it chaffed against the stump and caused soreness. He was limping discernibly and sank into a chair with a sigh. ‘The kids want to go watch a movie, and my son and his wife are going to the bar and then dancing.’
‘Of course, Bikramjit,’ Rina Maasi cooed, ‘I was thinking of dining in anyway. I have no stamina to walk another step.’
Rhea decided it was appropriate to make herself scarce, and announced bravely that she was going to meet friends for dinner at the Indian restaurant on board.
She showered quickly, changed into a comfortable cotton sheath dress in baby pink and ate a solitary meal at the restaurant she claimed she had to meet friends at. She finished her meal and wondered whether she should get back to the cabin or wander around a bit and find herself a party to join. It was then she spotted him, standing at the end of the deck below, looking out at the blackness of the ocean. She rushed down, scattering unwary people in her wake. By the time she reached where he was, Rhea was panting heavily.
Kamal was freshly showered—his hair was still damp—and was clad in a jacket over a pair of trousers. His hands clasped the railing and his shoulders were hunched forward, leaning over it. She went and stood next to him without speaking a word, looking out at the sea fluttering under them. The waves rippled delicately as the great liner cut through the sea, reflecting the lights of the ship, and it was as if a ghost ship and ghost figurines living right below, in the ocean, were keeping them company through their journey.
The sun had long set over the horizon and the coast was twinkling at a distance. The first stars of the evening sky made their sparkling entrance, the solemn moon rose from behind a cloud and lit up their faces.
‘Hello,’ she said quietly, wondering if she was intruding upon him.
He turned to look at her, his eyes smiled.
‘So, Rhea Khanna, is that why you have been so prickly with me? Did you put me down as a lecherous, philandering husband? And that I was hitting on you despite being a married man, on cruise with his family?’
She nodded, embarrassed and speechless. ‘How could you? She’s my kid sister. I’ve brought her on this cruise to cheer her up. She’s just been through hell—an ugly divorce and a custody battle.’
‘How was I to know?’ Rhea defended herself hotly. ‘Brothers and sisters are supposed to look similar.’
He threw his head back and laughed aloud, a deep rolling laugh that was full throated and unhindered.
‘You are such a naïve one. Perhaps we could be step-brother and sister. Perhaps we could just resemble parents who don’t look similar . . .’ his voice trailed off as he leaned back to stare at her. Her knees turned into jelly and threatened to buckle under her. ‘I cannot believe you thought I was a sleaze ball hitting on you when the wife’s back was turned, and with my children right there. And here I was, wondering what had I done to upset you so.’ He laughed again.
She drew away from him. ‘Do you blame me? You didn’t introduce Naina as your sister!’
‘My apologies,’ he replied. ‘Can you forgive me, can I make you forgive me?’ he added in mock seriousness, before bending down to explore her lips. She put her arms around him, drinking in the freshly bathed muskiness of him, her fingers tugging at his damp hair, feeling his hands grip her waist urgently, pulling her harder against his body. She let her hands travel all over the muscled planes of his body, slipping them through the thin linen shirt he had on, under his jacket. As they broke away to look at each in wonder, she gently pushed him away, albeit reluctantly.
‘No, no, I just wanted to apologize for being rude to you,’ she said. His hands refused to relinquish the grip on her waist. He gently tucked an errant lock of hair back behind her ear and began nibbling her ear in a manner that made her forget all the moral lessons she had learnt on her mother’s knee.
‘Stop,’ she said, fighting herself more than him, and pushed him away. ‘We must stop. I’m not looking for a holiday fling.’ He pulled himself away and looked at her. Just then, thick drops of rain began slapping down on them from a sudden cloud that found itself over the ship. All over the deck, people began to scuttle for cover.
‘Why do you think that I want a holiday fling?’
Rhea did not wait to listen to him. She pulled herself away and ran swiftly into the covered parts of the deck, and from there to the elevators that would take her back to her cabin. She opened the door to find Rina Maasi asleep and snoring gently, which was a blessing because she spent the rest of the night tossing his last sentence over and over again in her mind. What did he want from her if not a holiday fling?
SIX
By the time sleep embraced her, the first rays of the morning sun had spread across the sky. The weather had cleared after a brief shower and Rhea could hear the routine morning sounds—Rina Maasi waking up, brushing her teeth, gargling her throat long and laboriously, switching on the kettle, possibly sipping her cup of tea whilst sitting by the window, surveying all that was spread before her.
A gentle breeze from the open window stirred the room and played on Rhea’s skin, making it impossible for her to bask in further laziness. She stretched on the bed languorously when memory of the previous night’s kiss came right back to her. She sat up with a start.
He had kissed her last night, a deep, long drawn out kiss and she had kissed him right back. Had she not broken away where would it have ended? Though her imagination ran wild, the sane, rational part of her brain told her calmly that there probably wasn’t much they could have done on the open deck for fear of being arrested for public indecency.
Why had she never felt like this when Samir had kissed her? Why had it always been an exercise in hurrying through the kissing in order to get to the act in question with him? Just one kiss with Kamal made Rhea realize that perhaps, after all these years, she had never really been kissed the way she was meant to be kissed.
She rushed to the bathroom and splashed water on her face, hoping to douse the sudden, flaming red that had stained her cheeks. When she came out, with thoughts suitably collected and composed, Rina Maasi was pouring herself what seemed like a second cup of tea.
‘Join me?’ she asked. Rhea poured herself a cup and sat down on the chair opposite.
Her aunt’s wise eyes settled on her with a twinkling, discerning look. ‘Now, young lady,’ she said, ‘Is there something you should be telling me, or do I come to all sorts of conclusions by myself?’
‘About what, Rina Maasi?’ Rhea asked. She had always been scrupulously honest about her relationships and love life with her aunt.
‘About why you were giving sheepish glances at my ex-student all of yesterday.’
Rhea blushed prettily and looked away.
Rina Maasi narrowed her eyes and looked intently at her. ‘Don’t tell me you are falling for the boy?’ There was a gentleness in her voice that belied the sternness of her glance.
Rhea laughed. ‘Come on, Rina Maasi, I am a responsible adult. You don’t have to babysit me.’
‘I know, I know, but here, on this cruise, you are under my supervision and I can’t have you getting your heart broken again. Not when you’re finally managing to smile and look human again instead of Frankenstein’s monster’s bride with an intestinal tract that needs more roughage.’
‘Seriously, Maasi, no danger of heartbreak here, trust me.’
‘You asked me to trust you when you announced your engagement with that sphincter-clenched specimen, and I did. I don’t trust you anymore. Did you sleep with him last night?’ Trust Rina Maasi to do away with gentle delicacy on such matters.
‘No!’ Rhea squawked, appalled at her aunt’s unabashed lowering of her moral compass. ‘I barely know him. Anyway, what’s with the Spanish Inquisition level questions, Maasi?’
Rina Maasi raised a single eyebrow, in a manner perfected in extricating confessions from young striplings about pranks such as Fevikwick applied to chairs, necessitating holes being cut in the seat of a hapless Maths teacher’s trousers.
‘I hope you know that this cruise is barely for a few weeks. Then you get back to India, to different cities, and get on with your respective lives. And what do you know about him anyway?’
Rhea looked out of the porthole, noting the never changing sameness of the sea. As the sun rose higher in the firmament, the waters reflected its rays off its surface and the sky changed its hues quietly, from a soft pink to a beautiful golden. This was not a discussion she preferred to have on an empty stomach.
For a moment there was an awkward silence between aunt and niece while each weighed their words, reluctant to say something that might rub the other the wrong way.
‘Don’t get me wrong, child. I don’t want you to get hurt again. I brought you on this cruise with me to get your mind off Samir. I want you to heal, Rhea. I don’t want you to let your vulnerability make you rush into something on the rebound, a casual fling that both of us know won’t last once you land back in India. You have always been an emotional, sensitive child and you get easily hurt.’
Rina Maasi was making sense, Rhea acknowledged sadly. ‘Yes, Maasi, you are right. I do find myself terribly attracted to him although for the longest time ever I was terribly rude to him because I thought he was hitting on me despite being married. It was only yesterday that I realized Naina was his sister.’
A hearty chuckle emerged from Rina Maasi. ‘That’s funny, I thought the same until he introduced Jay to me as his nephew on the second day of our trip, when he came to check up on me.’
Rhea gasped. She had been the only person labouring under the misconception that Kamal was married with offspring!
‘No damage done yet, Rhea,’ Rina Maasi said with the warmth of someone who knew what it was to be confused about love. ‘But don’t go head over heels at the deep end. You were always an intense child, you made best friends too soon, you fought with them too quickly . . .’
‘No worries of getting emotionally involved with him, Rina Maasi,’ she said, feeling her heart break into the proverbial thousand pieces as she spoke, and realizing that she needed to tell herself that. Technically Kamal and she hadn’t even been on a date, unless traipsing around an Italian city in a herd of strangers could be called a date.
The cabin phone rang. ‘Who could it be so early in the morning?’ Rina Maasi wondered aloud. Rhea set her cup down and padded over to the phone at the side of the bed in her bare feet. ‘Hello?’ she asked hesitantly.
‘You left without completing our conversation,’ said the voice at the other end of the line, still husky with sleep. ‘Was I so terrible a kisser?’
‘It wasn’t the kiss,’ she whispered as softly as she could, aware that Rina Maasi was listening intently, and she had no need of hearing aids yet. ‘It was me. I’m not in a place right now where I can handle a relationship, or even a holiday fling.’
‘That is exactly what we need to discuss, Rhea,’ he said, ‘I need to meet you.’
‘No,’ she replied, her tone definite and regretful. ‘There is nothing to discuss, no need to meet. Let’s forget that kiss happened. Good bye, Kamal.’ With that, she put the phone down.
Rina Maasi looked at her curiously as she moved back towards the chairs by the window.
‘That was Kamal,’ she told her. ‘I told him that we couldn’t let this go further.’
‘It’s for the best, my child,’ Rina Maasi said, reaching out a perfectly manicured, wrinkled hand, and patting her head with it. ‘When you get back home, you will realize how right I was. You don’t want to try and heal one wound by digging another next to it.’
Rina Maasi knew a thing or two about broken relationships. Her own marriage was a fly by night thing and she was divorced before the mehndi faded from her palms. She never married again and lived her life alone despite being the looker among the three sisters.
‘Yes, Rina Maasi,’ she replied mechanically, feeling her voice go flat and the light dim in her eyes.
‘Anyway, enough of discussing men, what do you plan to do today?’ Maasi asked. ‘I’m a little exhausted. I think all this gallivanting around on shore excursions is not a great option, especially when your heart almost stops on you some nights ago. I’m going to stay put in the cabin . . . perhaps catch up on some reading. But you go out and wander the ship.’
Rhea raised one eyebrow at her aunt, knowing there had to be more to it than a genuine desire to have her wander the ship on her own. ‘Are you sure Rina Maasi?’ she asked. ‘Won’t you get bored on your own?’
‘Oh no, didn’t I mention? Bikramjit will be joining me soon and we are going to play cards till lunch time. After that we will go for a ballroom dancing lesson.’
Rhea laughed. Her aunt may have just delivered a long sermon on not getting involved in a holiday romance, yet she was headed the same path with the Colonel. ‘Sure, Rina Maasi. I will take myself out and you can have all the calmness and quietude that you need to restore your spirits.’
Rina Maasi rolled her eyes. ‘I think I will skip breakfast. My digestive power isn’t what it used to be and I think I over indulged at dinner last night.’
‘Now, please, don’t discuss your digestive system with the Colonel.’ Rhea winced at the thought of it.
‘Why not, my dear? At our age, it is the most interesting topic we have to discuss.’
Rhea bathed quickly, put on a pair of floral shorts with a cropped white vest that left just a bit of her waist visible for public viewing over one of the more daring purchases she had made for her intended honeymoon, a white and gold bikini. She dunked a floppy straw hat on her head to keep the sun off her face, pulled a pair of floral printed, woven, straw-soled espadrilles, and completed her look with a pair of huge Jackie O sunglasses that almost covered her entire face, before emerging blinking into the bright morning sunlight on the deck.
As she set off to check the activities offered on board, she zeroed in on the rock climbing wall to begin with, followed by a dip in the pool and a day spent lazing along the poolside. But when she reached the wall she realized that despite the encouraging instructors, she didn’t have the courage to try it on her own.
‘You have just one life; be reckless,’ she told herself in a vain bid to boost up her non-existent courage. For a girl whose zenith of risk-taking was limited to crossing the road when the traffic had not yet halted, even in a traffic jam, a rock climbing wall was Everest. Perhaps she could take a dance lesson on doing the tango—the ship’s newsletter had announced it would be held at around this time in one of the dance halls. It was high time she exchanged one of her two left feet for a right one. Samir was a wonderful dancer and she had always been embarrassed to be with him on the dance floor where they were obviously mismatched. Had they been mismatched in other areas as well? He was unpredictable, unlike her, and that’s what made their journey such a fun ride. Damn him. He still kept sneaking into her thoughts even though she tried hard to keep him out. She closed her eyes tight.
Damn it all, she was going to spend the day doing absolutely nothing except get tanned by the poolside, watch the movies they showed on the big screen, and allow herself to pig out on the snacks and sandwiches from the 24 hour café. After all, a broken heart hurriedly scotch-taped together into functionality, not to mention the bruised ego, needed meaningless calories to heal well.
There were two pools—one mid-ship where the maximum action was, plus the screen for movie watching, and the other on the top deck which was meant only for adults and was more secluded, but had a fabulous view of the open sea from every point. She opted for the mid-ship pool, thinking she could catch a movie if she felt like it. And it would be nice to be in the thick of things—the children’s paddle pools by the side, the hot tubs, the choice between deck chairs and chaise lounges.
The poolside, as it was on most days at sea, was packed to the gills. Every sun bed was covered with bodies in varying stages of undress, painstakingly rubbing tanning lotion on each other in a vain bid to get the golden glow they craved. Some of those sprawled on the deckchairs had skin which had already crossed the Rubicon dividing it from a golden glow to fiery, burnt leather. Rhea spotted a couple of empty chaise lounges in the covered area and pounced on one swiftly before it was snapped up by another poolside prowler.
