Recap: Raahi walks into Aparna’s room hoping to find out where the best salon around is, but ends up making the programme for a girls’ day out with her.

Nobody but her mother or younger sister ever took the liberty of touching Seher’s face.

Knowing how easily she flinched at physical contact, even Maahir had always maintained a preferred distance of an arm’s length from his eldest daughter. But Saahil, not believing in any boundaries between him and the girl he knew since he was eleven years old, now went ahead and pinched the furrow between her well-shaped eyebrows, in apparent admonishment.

Seher looked up from her novel, astonished.

“You’re doing it again,” he warned.

Her frown vanished, instantly, to be replaced by amusement. She was in a constant state of amusement around her light-hearted friend. Most funnily, she didn’t feel like rising from her cane chair on the balcony and putting some distance between her and Saahil, who was now leaning so close to get a better look at her book, that all Seher saw was his face against the amber sky of sunset.

“If Tolstoy’s bothering you, ditch him,” Saahil advised. “The Russians never really worked for us. Economically, politically or in literature. Too goddamn depressing.”

Seher laughed, in disbelief now. “Anna Karenina is a work of art, you know.”

“Doesn’t she throw herself under a train?”

“It’s an act of redemption,” Seher retorted, in defence of one of her favourite novels. “And she finally frees herself from the expectations of a superficial, bitchy society.”

Saahil paused for a measure, staring at Seher in consideration. Then coming to a decision, he plucked Tolstoy out of her hand.

“Dude you have got to get over being illegitimate.”

Seher looked at him, stunned. Then she burst out laughing.

The wonderful, ringing sound was so rare and so enthusiastic that it carried down to the garden, where Raahi and Aparna were directing the new gardener Baburam’s efforts to plant jasmine and frangipani in the previously weed-overrun grasses. All three of them looked up at the balcony, and through the grills of the ledge, saw the back of Saahil’s lanky frame, with Anna Karenina outstretched above his head, and the soles of Seher’s fair feet jumping up and down, ostensibly in a bid to retrieve her book.

Both mothers shared a delighted glance, just as they had the day before when Saahil requested his Aparna Maasi if he could move in with them for the week, since his own apartment was apparently being ‘pest-controlled’.

Azaan hadn’t been delighted by the development, irritated as he was by the growing fondness between his cousin and his unwanted half-sister, but he no longer had the time to expend on resentment of the Pandits. The pre-production of the three films Maahir had green-lit for the year was now in full swing and Azaan was struggling to lead the creative meetings he had been left out of up till now. An intern had snickered at him just the day before for not knowing what a B-Story was.

So occupied was he in trying to understand the finer nuances of storytelling that he didn’t even have time to speak to Bhatia, who had called him in alarm a few days before to tell him that his mother was ‘spotted’ going to the salon with the Pandits.

Azaan couldn’t waste time on whom Aparna was getting her manicures with. Not when he didn’t know whether or not to sign off on the rewritten script his director had brought him, along with an invoice of Rs 15 lakhs for the new draft. And he would die before he asked Raahi for her opinion on the story, as Maahir always had.

Raahi, for one, was glad that Azaan had been missing from the dining table since their first evening in Bombay. Now, other than the disturbance of his screaming for his car keys and coffee at six-thirty in the morning, they had the good fortune to avoid him completely. And in his chair, was such a welcome replacement.

Saahil Singh was respectful, intelligent, and clearly in love with her sensitive daughter. From the way he plonked the plumpest dates in her plate at breakfast, knowing that she would never reach for them herself, to the cheeky way he prodded her every time she fell into a frown over the day’s depressing headlines, Raahi was starting to see how well serious-minded Seher was complemented by this quietly teasing web developer.

She had decided that morning to do some teasing of her own.

“Saahil beta, how’s the pest control at home getting along?”

The boy met her gaze without the slightest wavering and only a hint of a smile.

“It’s likely to take a week at least, Raahi aunty.”

Raahi nodded. But she wasn’t done. “Your parents live in Bombay too, don’t they?”

“They do, aunty. In fact, they live just down the road from Aparna Maasi.”

The question hung in the air of the dining room as obviously as the scent of the parathas. Still, Raahi went in for the kill, “So what made you decide to stay here instead?”

Seher blushed and busied herself with slathering jam on her toast, acutely aware of everyone’s eyes on her. Even Ali saab, the cook, was lingering a little longer over the Nespresso machine than usual.

Saahil, for his part, grinned fully at her mother, like a card-shark with an ace up his sleeve.

“My parents and I don’t speak at the moment, aunty. You see, I’m a disappointment to the Pratap Singhs.”

“You’re not a disappointment,” Seher looked up, instantly. “Don’t be silly.”

Raahi smiled. When was the last time she had heard her daughter rush to defend a young man? Almost never.

“Saahil has his own web design and media company Ma,” she continued, indignant. “They have 13 accounts at the moment. And they just got hired by Zara to redesign their app for the Indian market.”

“What’s your parents’ issue then?” Zaara asked, curious.

“Zaara,” Raahi admonished her outspoken daughter, but her eyes had lit up in amusement. She was wondering the same thing.

“Sangeeta is ah… a little more ambitious for Saahil,” Aparna explained, in tepid defence of her sister.

“What he’s doing doesn’t sound unambitious to me,” Seher said with a polite shrug.

“That’s because you’re nothing like my mother.” Saahil grinned. “And thank God for that.”

Seher fell silent in surprise. Then with a shy smile, she picked up her date and bit into it.

Raahi decided then that it did not matter whether or not Saahil was ambitious enough. He was the only boy she had met who could rouse her guarded daughter to feel this much. Satisfied, she began to think of him as her own son.

Zaara, however, wasn’t so sure about the match. In her opinion, Seher needed more than this lanky 28-year-old with his lazy smile. Saahil wasn’t a man, he was a boy. A cute one, perhaps, but wholly unimpressive. Okay for a laugh but certainly not for love.

Zaara had emerged in the garden now, with her AirPods hooked in and a glass of cold coffee in her hand.

“What are you looking at?”

She heard an unmistakable thwack of a book hitting an arm, and then Saahil’s answering chortle. Aparna and Raahi also laughed in response. Even Baburam smiled. But Zaara, as she looked up, didn’t seem amused.

(To be continued)

This is the ninth episode of Riva Razdan’s serialised novel Nonsense and Respectability, published every Sunday

Riva Razdan is a New York University graduate and currently working as a screenwriter and author based in Mumbai. Her debut novel Arzu was published by Hachette India in 2021