Recap: Sparks fly between a relieved Zaara and an obviously miffed Arjun Bajaj, but some dramatics later they eventually settle into a comfortable silence.

Oh, oh man. You have to check this out.

And Rudra, Saahil’s back-end developer, turned his laptop towards them, revealing a video of a young Kim Kardashian groaning in pleasure.

“DUDE,” Saahil yelled from his couch, “turn that off!!”

But he seemed to be the only one who was disgusted by the visual. His front-end developer, graphics guy and SEO dude had all leaned over his Ikea dining table to take a closer look at Kim’s curvy body arching back in pleasure.

“Seriously,” Saahil said, “Rudra, shut it down. We’re at bloody work.”

“It’s lunch break,” Rudra pointed out, miffed. “I thought you’d appreciate it. It’s the best deep-fake making tech on the Net right now. Really, we should hire this guy.”

“So we can morph celebrities’ faces onto porn videos of our own?” Saahil said. “That’s still illegal in India, dude.”

“As a legal business, sure,” Rudra said, with a grin, “but do you know how much money we could make on the side?”

“You’re disgusting.”

“What?” he laughed. “I’m joking. Jeez, I thought you’d be more into it.” He looked at the screen, at Kim K paused, chest out, back arched, mid-groan. “This one’s your type and all.”

Saahil looked at the screen now, utterly confused. “My type?”

“Yeah, you know, curvy, hot. Attitude.”

“What makes you say that’s my type?”

Grey eyes and a long, lean figure flitted through his mind, suddenly, quick as a gazelle. Or a really scared deer. Scampering off into the woods before he could have the chance to show her that he meant no harm.

The boys stared at him, like he was being ridiculous. “Well,” Rahul began, with a slight cough, “You do tend to date the… ahem… more buxom women, with you know a lot of…”

“…Sass,” Mehul cut him off, before they could offend their boss any further. “Very sassy.”

“That’s not my type,” Saahil said, trying to mentally dislodge the image of Seher, long limbs crossed as she read in her loose cotton dress on his aunt’s sofa. “Because I don’t believe in types.”

The key twisted in the lock and all the boys fell quiet. Indeed, a curvy, glamorous girl walked in, holding a brown paper bag. Her bouncy blonde ringlets cascaded down the length of her torso, which was encased in a denim corset that hugged her chest and her shapely hips and apologised for none of it.

“Boys,” she grinned in greeting, before walking to Saahil and kissing his cheek. “Hey babe.”

The guys grinned at her, clearly much happier now that she was in the room. Rudra, the most so. “What have you got there, Ambika? Sushi for us?”

“Are you kidding?” she said. “You make way more than I do. You should be buying me sushi, asshole.”

The boys guffawed.

“I’d take you to Wasabi if you weren’t sleeping with my boss.”

“Watch it,” Saahil warned Rudra. Ambika, however, laughed, taking it in her stride. He didn’t know how she did that. Any other girl would have been offended by Rudra’s presumptuous remarks.

That was the thing about Ambika. She was like nobody he’d ever known.

Or rather, she was the complete opposite of the only girl he’d ever really known.

“I’m actually not sleeping with your boss,” Ambika shot back. “Not yet, at least. We’ve only been talking, sorting shit out. This one,” she squeezed his jaw between her pink acrylic nails, “really likes to talk.”

Saahil looked at her, utterly paralysed by the fact that she was laying all their business down for everyone to hear, no problem.

She pulled out the bottle of wine from the paper bag and grinned. “But there’s hope, isn’t there babe?”

He laughed. It was impossible not to, with her.

“Yeah, alright,” he said, mostly to get her out of there. “Now go on, scram, or Rahul’s going to spend the rest of the day ogling you and we really need him to get this UI delivered to MoneyBazaar.”

“I’ll get out of here as soon as…”

“…Oh right.”

Saahil chivvied her to the bedroom before she could say anything more. He pulled out his Amex. “Here.”

“Fab,” she said, taking the card and kissing his mouth. “I’ll see you at the Four

Seasons.”

Saahil didn’t get much work done after that all day. His employees noticed too. Rudra made one or two jokes about Saahil being entitled to distraction, having the thought of Ambika waiting in a hotel room planted in his head in the middle of the day was enough to kill any normal, 28-year-old man’s productivity.

If only, Saahil thought.

Lust wasn’t the reason he couldn’t type one simple page of code without coming to some sort of system error.

He wished it was lust. That was a straightforward emotion. One he could parse out, like he did a line of code, and execute.

Then it would leave him and he’d be content again.

But Saahil had guilt, longing, hurt — and yes, lust to deal with.

He was confused as hell and he had nobody he could talk to. Nobody except the one girl who understood him. Who had moved to his city, completely out of the blue.

And whom he could absolutely, never call again.

He was done being jerked around by Seher Pandit. He was done being her emotional support animal. There, for whenever she needed someone to lean on. But cut off without a call, or a text, or even a goodbye, when he was going through something.

He still had that cold WhatsApp conversation with Seher from five years ago on his phone. As a reminder for when he started thinking too warmly about her.

May, 2016

SAAHIL
So…..
Ananya’s gay
Sorry I don’t know what the right preamble to this should be

SEHER
Well
I think ‘So…’ was as good as any.
I’m glad she was finally able to tell you.

SAAHIL
You aren’t surprised?!?

SEHER
She sort of...kissed me the last time she visited for the holidays.

SAAHIL
WHAT?

SEHER
In her defence, I had hung a lot of mistletoe around mum’s Mayfair house.
If you remember, everyone was making out.

SAAHIL
Please.
Please. Tell me my baby sister did not make out with you.

SEHER
Relax. I told her I don’t swing that way.
She took it very well. And went and made out with my spin instructor, Thea, instead.

SAAHIL
I’VE MADE OUT WITH THEA

SEHER
That is not inaccurate.

SAAHIL
Brb about to change my surname.

SEHER
Silver linings, Pratap Singh.
It’s a good thing she’s telling people the truth, no?
It’s better than feeling like you’re lying all the time

SAAHIL
Nah she’s ok with the lying.
She only told me because she wants me to come back to India for a bit
My parents are trying to get her married to some dude in the same zip code as them

SEHER
She hasn’t told them yet?

SAAHIL
She hasn’t even told them that she’s a DJ at Sunburn
Mom still thinks her daughter goes to Goa etc. on ‘Yoga retreats’ with her ‘girlfriends’

SEHER
Well, they probably are her girlfriends.

SAAHIL
Shut up Seher.
Sorry that was a gimme.
Anyway the point is she can’t tell Jai and Sangeeta she’s gay without me there.

SEHER
Because in comparison to a lesbian DJ, a self-made web developer seems like the white sheep suddenly?

SAAHIL
Because my mom will try to send her to electroconvulsive therapy in Dubai.

SEHER
Shut up.
She would not

SAAHIL
She has said so, in no uncertain terms, to both of us before

SEHER
She was probably joking.

SAAHIL
Back in high school, our second cousin got the homo shocked right out of him on a ‘Diwali holiday’ in Jumeirah.

SEHER
No.

SAAHIL
Mom got the number from bua.

SEHER
No.

SAAHIL
Just in case.

SEHER
No.

SAAHIL
‘It’s good to know all the top doctors’

SEHER
You have to go back.

SAAHIL
I have to go back.

SEHER
When are you leaving?

SAAHIL
It’s a little urgent.
Ananya’s a loose cannon.
I want to get there before mom pushes her buttons about meeting boys and she yells something like ‘I’M GAY’ at the poolside of Breach Candy Club.

SEHER
Leave tonight.

SAAHIL
I’m on my way to Heathrow actually.
Couldn’t get a direct flight from Kent
Was going to swing by your place.

SEHER
Ah

SAAHIL
Ah?

SEHER
I’m at the library at the moment actually.
But see you when you’re back?
Brunch next weekend?

SAAHIL
Probably won’t make brunch next weekend.
Dunno how long this is going to take.
No return date at the moment.

SEHER
Ah

SAAHIL
Big fan of the word ha?

SEHER
Haha
So no ETA huh?

SAAHIL
Hah. Sort of.
I’ve spoken to all the people I’m working with at the moment, and they’re cool to let me continue building stuff for them overseas for the next six months at least.

SEHER
So you may be gone for the next six months?

SAAHIL
Yep

SEHER
Oof

SAAHIL
So should I stop by the library?

SEHER
I don’t know if that’s a good idea.

SAAHIL
Ah?

SEHER
I don’t do very well with goodbyes.
Safe flight Saahil ??

SAAHIL
Okay?
Alright, I guess.

SEHER
See you in the new year, I guess.

SAAHIL
Yep, bye Seher.

They didn’t see each other in the new year. She didn’t text after that. Not once. And he sure as hell didn’t either.

He was shocked by it.

Did it really not mean anything to her at all that he may never return to Kent? Did she take it for granted that he would just always be there for her?

Why the fuck couldn’t she call?

And so, after a showdown with his parents, in which both Saahil and Ananya moved out of their parents’ house and into the spare flats each of them owned in Bandra, Saahil wound up staying in Bombay. Almost in defiance to Seher’s indifference.

It was, in a sense, his response to her yellow heart emoji.

And then there was his next act of defiance, to his parents’ need to control him, by trying to set him up with ‘suitable’ girls.

Ambika wasn’t suitable at all. Not by his mother’s standards.

For one thing, he found her on Tinder. For another, she was a PR girl, the kind whose skill set lay in using her looks and her whipsmart mouth to network. But while Saahil was attracted to her unapologetic sexiness and her can-do attitude, he knew his mother would just look down upon the fact that Ambika took an auto from Thane to Bandra to do what she needed to do. So what? Saahil thought. So what if she had only been abroad once, on a school trip to Nepal, devoured Gossip Girl with the same relish she consumed Big Boss and spent her month’s salary on the most monogrammed LV bag she could find on fakeittillyoumakeit.com. So what?

She was affectionate and funny and a firecracker of a girl. And most importantly, she made it clear that she wanted Saahil and nobody else. He felt 10-feet tall around her.

But over the last three years their basic differences in thinking had become obvious and led to many fights between the two of them. Ambika was ambitious. Saahil was not. Not like Ambika anyway. They had broken up at least seven times in the last year-and-a-half over the fact that Saahil never took her on holidays or to Willingdon Club. She wanted Saahil to do the thing he’d been avoiding the hardest his whole life — to become his dad’s employee.

The last time, Saahil had thought, was the last time. He had left her in his apartment and driven to Aparna Maasi’s hoping for some peace. Where he had met….

SEHER
Please spend time with your family.
We will hang out whenever it’s convenient.

She went from intimate to unfamiliar so incredibly quick.

Unlike Ambika, who even if they were broken up, was always always familiar. Willing to be intimate. Eager to be his.

When work ended that day, Saahil closed his laptop and drove to the Four Seasons.

(To be continued)

Riva Razdan

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