A Scandalous Secret. Jaishree Misra

Forty-Two

      Sonya quickened her footsteps as she and Estella pushed their…

      Chapter Forty-Three

      Sharat sat restlessly in the living room, listening to a…

      Chapter Forty-Four

      Hello, Neha,

      Chapter Forty-Five

      It was a dark English morning that threatened snow, and…

      Reading Group Questions

      About the Author

      Other Books by Jaishree Misra

       About the Publisher

      Chapter One

      Neha stood at the door to her spacious living room in Delhi, surveying the party that was now in full flow. It hadn’t yet reached that freewheeling stage when people, mellowed by the fine wines and Scotches on offer, would start drifting around unreservedly, chatting without embarrassment or restraint to relative strangers. At the moment, most of her guests were gathered in small knots around the room, sticking to the people they knew, but loud bursts of laughter indicated that a good time was already being had. Waiters hired for the night were working the room with trays of drinks and canapés, and some kind of nondescript piano music was tinkling through the eight-speaker Bose system, Sharat’s proud new acquisition. It would need to be turned off for the Divakar Brothers’ live performance that would take place a little later on in the garden, but experience had taught Neha to keep things subtle at the start.

      Virtually everyone invited had already come, even the customary stragglers who made it a point to arrive close to midnight, complaining about receiving three party invites for the same night. Whatever they said, Neha knew with quiet confidence that people did not usually turn down invitations to her famously lavish and elegant soirées but, given the status of many of her guests, she was nevertheless touched when she saw such busy and eminent people turn up at her place so unfailingly.

      Although smaller, more intimate dinner parties were a regular feature of the Chaturvedi household, Sharat and Neha held two large parties every year; one sometime before Diwali and the other a lunch in the garden at the start of spring. The hundred-odd invitations issued were carefully considered affairs, sent – everyone knew – only to the very influential or very well connected. The very point of them, Sharat sometimes said, was to allow people to relax and meet each other without the fear of journalists or paparazzi lurking around the corner. Yellow journalism had been the bane of many of their famous friends’ lives and, horrifyingly, Neha had recently been hearing of parties where – without any warning – the press pack would descend, secretly invited by publicity-hungry hosts who wanted to be mentioned on the party pages of The Times of India.

      At the Chaturvedis’ parties, however, guests came safe in the knowledge that there would be no press presence – if one did not count people like Girish, that is: a golfing buddy of Sharat’s who happened to be the head of India’s biggest television channel. What the couple generally aimed to do with their list of invitees was ensure that guests were either among their own kind or thrown together with people it would be advantageous for them to meet. Both Neha and Sharat liked to be generous in this matter and, partially due to the understated and tranquil atmosphere of the Chaturvedi home, their guests’ guards were often let down in ways that invariably led to the most exciting meeting of minds. Not everyone saw it like this, of course; and once, when a nasty piece appeared in a gossip magazine accusing Sharat of what the journalist referred to as ‘control freakery’, Neha was tempted to ring up the editor to give him a piece of her mind. Sharat eventually dissuaded her from making that call but Neha had felt terribly hurt on behalf of her gentle husband, knowing as she did that the really gratifying part of the whole exercise for Sharat was when people he had helped called up later to thank him for the part he had played in their good fortune. ‘Completely inadvertent and pure chance,’ was the modest manner in which Sharat generally responded, although this too wasn’t entirely true. He gave away far too often, and in often unsubtle ways, his total delight at having been involved in transactions that were important enough to make it to the national papers. Sharat’s pleasure in the parties they threw was really very simple: he genuinely liked putting people together in fortuitous circumstances, hoping that some mutual good would come of their meeting, even if there was no particular or immediate advantage to him. He sometimes joked that he had probably been a marriage broker in his previous life.

      Only this morning, Sharat had appeared on the veranda while Neha was overseeing the decoration of the garden shrubs with fairy lights. He had looked with pride at the pair of massive bottle palms that straddled the entrance to the sweeping driveway.

      ‘Remember their names?’ he enquired with a laugh.

      ‘Of course,’ Neha had replied absently, her attention now on the marigold flower chains that were being looped around the pillars running the length of the veranda. She had earlier tried explaining to the man on the ladder that the two faux Doric columns flanking the front entrance had to be exact mirror images of each other, the flower garland on the left spiralling clockwise while the one on the right went anticlockwise. It was the kind of feature no one would probably notice, but attention paid to such seemingly insignificant detail was what made for a perfect evening, in Neha’s opinion. It was also what led Sharat to call her ‘OCD’ but he would be just as quick to admit how much he relied on her exacting standards.

      ‘Zurich and Americana,’ Sharat grinned, still looking at the palms with his arms crossed over his chest and rocking on his heels, obviously continuing to enjoy the memory from five years ago.

      The palms had acquired their names because they were a present from Arul Sinha, the head of global investments at Zurich Bank, who had sent them after a lunch party where he had struck a lucrative deal with American Steels. Neha remembered the glee with which Arul – a schoolmate of Sharat’s youngest uncle – had greeted the news that Doug Fairbanks III was going to be at their lunch too. (‘You know Doug? Hey, you guys know everyone, yaar,’ he had said, only pretending to be jealous given the vast spread of his own network of contacts.)

      Neha cast a glance at the elegant palms whose fronds were a lush green in the morning sunshine. ‘I’m always astonished that these two giants didn’t just survive, but even thrived in the heat of that summer,’ she said. ‘Do you remember how they arrived in the middle of May, Sharat? Ten feet tall, and with such massive root balls, in the back of a truck? I used to expect every morning to wake up and find them all dead and shrivelled up in the garden. But just look at them now – and they’re probably not even fully grown yet!’

      Sharat laughed at the memory of that chaotic morning. ‘Typical Arul, that kind of attention to detail. Sending not just a pair of palms but a complete team of labourers and gardeners who set to work planting them with some kind of crazy Swiss efficiency. I bet he even ensured that they would grow to identical width and height before shipping them over from China!’

      ‘Well, whatever he did, it worked – our Delhi heat notwithstanding. If anything, they’ve grown a bit too big now, towering over everything else in the garden,’ Neha said, turning her attention back to the flower wallah who was perched on his ladder awaiting his next instructions.

      ‘I’ve always wanted to ask Arul if his business deal enjoyed as swift a growth as the trees, but that would be prying, I guess,’ Sharat continued.

      Neha smiled. She had no doubt that the deal would have been hugely successful, not just because of Arul Sinha’s business skills but also Sharat’s famed Midas touch. But he would be embarrassed if she said that, and now she was distracted by the large roll of black insulation tape that the flower wallah was using to tape the end of the garland to the pillar. ‘Ooffo, yeh kya leke aaye ho?’ she asked, her voice exasperated as she turned to call for her own roll of imported extra-strong and, more importantly, colourless sticking tape.

      It was Sharat’s turn to grin. Neha was a fine one to joke about Arul’s attention to detail. She was at least as finicky as the best Swiss bankers, and on the