Recap: The Pandits are at the Gurus’ elegant home for dinner, where they meet Jaspal’s over-the-top wife Neelam and his suave friend Mehra.

Mehra did the polite thing. He stayed silent and focused on the lamb biryani — which was excellent — as his friend’s ill-mannered wife and her glamour girl guests attempted to electrocute each other with the undercurrents of polite conversation in the Gurus’ elegant marble dining room.

“Your Vogue UK photographers didn’t do you justice at all, you know,” Neelam said as she passed Zaara the large brass bowl of raita.

“Excuse me?” the youngest one said with a bare arch of her perfectly plucked eyebrow.

“You two are much prettier in person. Fresher looking too. If my photographers handled you, you wouldn’t look a day over 17.”

“Those photographs were taken by me,” Raahi said in a tone as cool as the yogurt.

“It was an at-home shoot to publicise a fundraiser for the school I used to run,” the older one explained. Seher. Mehra liked the tone of her voice. It was placating. Cool to the touch like a washcloth on a fevered forehead.

“Ah,” Neelam shrugged and took a mouthful of her rice.

Mehra was relieved that the discomfort had passed. Except it hadn’t. How could it have? He was at dinner with more than one woman.

“It’s not your fault,” Neelam said, smiling sweetly at Raahi, “Even most cameramen don’t know how to present women well. They don’t understand how lighting works for us. That’s why I’m around on every shoot, okaying takes.”

“Are you saying I presented my daughters in bad lighting?”

Neelam smiled and shook her head, as though indulging Raahi. “I’m saying I could present your daughters beautifully,” she said simply. “Because I work only with the best.”

“Like your architect?” Raahi smiled.

Mehra looked up, surprised. He hadn’t yet met a woman who could dive for Neelu Singh’s jugular, but here was Raahi Pandit, daring it. It was too bad his friend and his fantasy of himself as an artist had to be speared in the process too.

“We had to have Rooshad Shah design our house,” Neelu recovered, by name dropping and keeping her gaze firmly averted from her husband, who had coloured a little. “He’s a close, personal friend.”

“Surprising. Considering you have an architect as a husband. And such a talented one too.”

“I told Jaspal to save his talents for the penthouse. So that someone like you might enjoy his craft. And it worked didn’t it? Who would have thought that we’d have Raahi Pandit and her daughters as neighbors?”

“Who indeed,” the young one stabbed her leg of lamb with such ferocity, the fork clanged against the bone.

Why women did this, why they prolonged unpleasantness by digging and digging until they hit bone, Mehra would never understand. But it was the reason he usually avoided them.

That is, save for the casual encounter on a sunday evening at Aer. But even those encounters had lost their electricity. He had started to find his dates dull, and a tad too transparent. They may have been attractive, in that plastic, full-lipped, made-up way, but there was nothing original about them. Their faces and conversation seemed to blur into the same boring giggle, laughing in agreement with him because he was paying for their picanté. By the time the sun set over the city, Mehra needed to be completely drunk to escort them to his room on the seventh floor.

But a year ago, one of the models he had met had taken a selfie in his bathroom, for her Instagram. And for some reason, watching her stick her rear out in the mirror, hearing the fake sound of the iPhone camera-shutter clicking had alerted Mehra to the overwhelming falseness of the arrangement. It was sick, how little they cared about each other, and how willing each was to trade themselves for the night; him, on his inherited status and her on her inherited looks, in a transaction that brought joy to neither.

He had been unable to let her unbutton his shirt.

Physically, his desire hadn’t diminished but mentally he couldn’t stomach the situation any longer. The chase, if it had ever held any charm for him, had worn off.

He declined the model’s advances that evening but requested her to, please, keep the room for herself and her friends if she liked. It was already paid for, anyway.

After which he cancelled his long-standing reservation at the Four Seasons.

He sought out, instead, the platonic company of married men at his parents’ club. After tennis on Sundays, Jaspal and his friends mostly talked about the money they had and the money they were going to make in a bid to feel more secure on the threshold of another week. It bored Mehra, who wasn’t yet 40. But it didn’t turn his stomach. Unlike the beautiful women with empty minds and eager-to-please eyes, it didn’t remind him of what he had lost.

That’s why he had accepted Jaspal’s invitation to dinner that evening. He hadn’t expected there to be beautiful women there. And ones who wanted to be Kardashians no less. The very worst of the kind that he avoided these days.

“Let’s get an impartial opinion in. Mehra, look at her.”

Mehra broke out of his reverie. Neelam Singh Guru was demanding something from him now. “Isn’t this the most gorgeous girl you’ve laid eyes on in the last 10 years?”

Neelam’s silver spoon, with rice grains still stuck on it, was pointed at the young one. With the alive eyes.

“Uh...”

“I’m afraid you’ve put him on the spot,” Seher laughed, trying to get past this odd, very odd subject. “I’m sure Mr Mehra isn’t used to objectifying women at the dinner table.”

“On the contrary,” Jaspal laughed. “I’m sure Mehra’s been asked to give his opinion on this subject millions of times. He knows all the beauties of Bombay and Delhi.”

“And Chandigarh,” Neelam added.

Mehra smiled at the surprised expression on the Pandits’ faces.

“I wouldn’t say millions of times. And I wouldn’t like to comment right now.”

The young one glanced at Mehra, stunned and stung. A flush of colour came onto her high cheekbones, making them draw even higher, somehow.

“Mr Mehra’s opinion of the way I look is besides the point.” She raised her chin, in bare acknowledgment. “I’m not interested.”

Mehra’s eyes widened in surprise at her well-placed double entendre. He nearly chuckled.

Nobody else seemed to cotton on. Or if they did, they took no notice. Neelam continued, still thinking they were talking about acting.

“Bombay is already buzzing with news of you three,” she said, oblivious, “Instead of hiding out, afraid of the notoriety, you should use it to your advantage. Make some money off it. I know three brands that would love to have you as their influencer-ambassador...”

“...Influencing is whoring out your personality.”

“Zaara!”

Seher closed her grey eyes, wincing. Her sister had called their hostess a pimp. Mehra laughed out loud. He couldn’t help it. In all the years he’d known Neelu, he’d never heard her impertinence silenced by anyone.

But Neelu wasn’t one to be shut up for long.

“How is it any different from what your mother did?” she smiled at the young girl.

“At least when you’re acting, you’re slipping on a persona and then slipping out of it to tell a story. With influencer marketing, you’re performing your own personality on one Instagram post after another till it becomes a performance. And for what?” Zaara paused for a breath, but only barely. Mehra watched, shocked as her plump mouth poured forth fire.

“To goad people into buying the props you used in your performance in the hope that they will someday be as false as you.”

There was a stunned silence of many moments following this speech. Zaara had now not only called their hostess a bawd, but also a fraud.

The quiet was broken only by the houseboy bringing out a platter of Memsaab’s bread pudding.

“I should never have sent her to NYU,” Raahi whispered to her eldest as a large, sticky slice of pudding slid onto her plate. They had planned to leave before dessert but they would have to stay now in redress if nothing else.

Seher asked for seconds and praised her hostess profusely, even though she hated dessert. Jaspal said nothing. Zaara ate nothing. Neelam sipped her gin in a confounded silence.

Mehra alone had a spark in his eyes. A keen ember of curiosity that hadn’t been there at the beginning of that evening, or any other evening in the last 10 years.

He had thought the girl pretty when he entered, but like all the other pretty girls he knew, he hadn’t suspected Zaara to have an original thought in her head.

Now he found her irresistible.

(To be continued)

This is the 20th 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