shook her head. She didn’t want to spend the two-hour flight making polite conversation, and this lady looked the chatty kind. Before Shefali could shut her eyes again, she had started.
‘Are you from Delhi or Jabalpur?’
‘Neither,’ Shefali replied.
But the lady wasn’t about to give up. ‘Going for a wedding?’ she asked, pointing at the henna tattoos that covered Shefali’s hands.
Shefali pulled the long sleeves of her shirt down a little further to hide the elaborate designs that extended all the way up her forearms. The traditional mehandi ceremony had been held three days before her wedding-that-never-happened, and she’d had to wait for hours afterwards for the henna paste to dry. The rich black had now faded to orange, but to Shefali’s paranoid eyes her hands and arms still screamed out jilted bride.
‘Excuse me a second,’ she muttered, and pressed the button to call the flight attendant. ‘Can I shift to a seat in the emergency exit row?’ she asked when the attendant came up to her. ‘I have a...a knee problem. I need more leg-room.’
She picked up her handbag and moved gratefully to the seat pointed out to her. It was an aisle seat two rows ahead, and the window seat next to it was occupied by a man around her age who was peering intently into his laptop screen.
Shefali was fastening her seatbelt when the man spoke without looking up from the screen.
‘So where are you from, then? If you’re not from Delhi or from Jabalpur.’
She gave him a startled look. ‘I’m sorry?’
The man turned, and Shefali saw his face for the first time. He was quite strikingly good-looking, with blue-grey eyes and perfectly chiselled features. For a few moments Shefali found herself staring stupidly without a word to say. Fortunately he gave her a quick smile and turned back to his computer.
‘I couldn’t help overhearing,’ he said, and lowering his voice. ‘Good thinking with the knee problem.’
‘Thanks,’ Shefali said. ‘I think.’
The man nodded and started typing something into the computer. He didn’t seem disposed to talk any more, and Shefali felt a pang of something approaching disappointment. A random conversation with an attractive stranger might have helped take her mind off things. But who was she kidding? Nothing could take her mind off the single, mind-numbingly humiliating fact that her fiancé hadn’t bothered to turn up for their wedding. The wedding that she had spent the last year planning and preparing for.
Sometimes it felt as if her whole life had been geared towards that one day when she’d marry the perfect man and settle down into happy domesticity. And Pranav had seemed perfect when her parents had introduced him to her. He was rich, successful, and very attractive—and though it was to have been an arranged marriage she’d very quickly started weaving him into her daydreams. Finding out on their wedding day that he’d decided to go back to his ex-girlfriend had been the biggest shock she’d ever had in her sheltered and slightly pampered life.
The attendant brought across their pre-ordered lunch trays. Her neighbour closed his laptop and took his. Shefali shook her head abruptly.
‘No, thanks,’ she said. Her head was still aching, and even the sight of food was off-putting.
‘Can I have it?’ the man next to her asked. He gave her a quick grin. ‘I missed breakfast—and, well...’ He gestured towards his tray. ‘This doesn’t look like enough to keep a mouse alive.’
‘OK,’ Shefali said, taking her tray from the attendant and passing it on. His hands were good, she noticed. Strong, with square-tipped fingers, sinewy wrists and no rings. She’d never liked Pranav’s hands—thin and hairy: an awful combination. Pity they hadn’t been grounds enough for her to decide against marrying him.
‘You’re sure you don’t want any of this?’ the man was asking, gesturing towards the two trays.
Shefali barely repressed a shudder. ‘I’m sure, thanks. Just the bottle of water, please.’
He handed it to her, and she took it, carefully avoiding touching his hand. His proximity was affecting her weirdly, and she didn’t want him to notice. Her head still ached, and she picked up her bag, rummaging around in it for the package of painkillers. They seemed to have vanished, so she pulled out her table and starting putting the contents of her designer bag on it one by one. The painkillers finally turned up, wedged between the pages of the novel she’d been too stressed to take out and read. Heaving a sigh of relief, she popped open the blister pack and put one into her mouth.
She hadn’t opened the bottle of water yet. She tried to twist it open, but the seal stubbornly refused to break. And the pill she’d put in the centre of her tongue—because, according to her primary school science teacher, there were no tastebuds there—was slowly dissolving in her saliva and spreading to parts of her mouth where there were tastebuds. It tasted vile.
‘Ugh,’ she said, as politely as she could to the man next to her.
He had stopped eating and was staring with horrified fascination at the heap of things that had emerged from her bag.
‘Ugh,’ she said again, and finally nudged him with her elbow and pointed at the bottle.
‘Oh—sorry,’ he said, taking the bottle from her and opening it with an effortless twist of his wrist. ‘Here you go.’
She grabbed it from him with more haste than grace and took a few rapid gulps. The pill finally went down, though it cleaved lovingly to the roof her mouth for as long as it could. She made a face—the bitter taste in her mouth was refusing to go away.
‘Have some sugar,’ the man suggested, giving her a little sachet from one of his two lunch trays.
His voice was perfectly grave, but he was laughing, his eyes crinkling up at the corners in the most attractive way possible. His teeth were perfect, Shefali noticed. Having gone through years of painful and extremely expensive orthodontic treatment to achieve her own current flawless smile, she resented people who’d been born to have perfectly aligned teeth. He looked as if he’d never had to go to a dentist in his life.
Her neighbour polished off his second dessert and handed the empty trays to one of the stewards. ‘We’ve almost arrived,’ he remarked, looking at his watch, and the seatbelt sign came on as if on cue.
Shefali didn’t answer, but clenched her hands unconsciously. This was it, then. The start of her brand-new life. In a few minutes they’d be landing in a city where no one knew about her engagement and the disastrous end to it, and she could make a completely new start. She’d never taken her job very seriously—teaching at a playschool had been just something she did to fill the time between graduation and marriage—but when she’d wanted to get out of Delhi it had been her boss who’d come to her rescue, offering her the job of centre manager at their Jabalpur branch, and she was determined not to let him down.
* * *
Neil Mitra was looking at his neighbour curiously. There was something odd about her—some kind of pent-up anxiety that came through in her strained expression and rather jerky movements. Also, from what he’d been able to see of the packaging, the pills she’d been popping were either anti-depressants or pretty strong painkillers. If not for the haunted look in
