Twelve Hours of Temptation by Shoma Narayanan Page B

thought. Half the women were living with someone or the other. Though I must say most of them had grotty little flats in God-forsaken places like Chandivali and Vasai. Samir’s place must be heaven in comparison.’
    ‘Where did you live before you hooked up with Samir?’ the first woman asked.
    ‘Colaba,’ Melissa said shortly. She didn’t explain about the working women’s hostel.
    Colaba was as nice as you could get in South Mumbai, and the woman looked a little disappointed. She’d probably hoped to hear that Melissa had lived in cockroach-ridden paying guest accommodation miles out of town.
    Priyanka came up in time to hear the last bit of the conversation. ‘I was so excited when I heard about you,’ she said. ‘One of my closest friends stays in the same apartment block as Samir, and she told me first. Then, of course, when Samir called next he told me he had a new girlfriend.’
    ‘And a very pretty girlfriend too,’ Priyanka’s husband said, coming to stand next to her.
    ‘Thanks, Anil,’ Melissa muttered, feeling stunned. She’d always thought of Mumbai as being large and anonymous—it had never occurred to her that people she didn’t even know might be talking about her and Samir. No wonder Samir was more conscious of appearances than she was.
    ‘Samir’s mother will be on the phone with Priyanka as soon as the party’s over,’ Anil said. ‘We’re actually more her generation than yours, and she keeps checking in with us about how he’s doing. Samir’s not the most communicative of sons.’
    His mother? Melissa hadn’t realised that Samir’s mum even knew she existed, let alone that she was keeping track of the parties she attended and calling up people to ask about her afterwards. Priyanka was frowning at Anil now—evidently he wasn’t supposed to have shared that last titbit.
    ‘I wonder what’s keeping Samir?’ she asked, glancing at her watch. ‘He said he’d be here by eight-thirty.’
    ‘It’s Janmashtami,’ Melissa said. ‘There are dahi-handis set up all across town and the traffic’s bad. He must have got stuck at Worli after he got off the sea link.’
    ‘There’s always something or the other happening in this city,’ one of Anil’s friends said. ‘It’s terrible the way they hold up everything just because of some archaic festival. It’s barbaric, the way they make human pyramids to knock down that ridiculous pot of curds. And all for some piddly cash prize.’
    ‘Ah, but the prize isn’t piddly by common man standards,’ a third man said.
    He was thin and wiry, and his wire-framed spectacles gave him a permanently cynical expression. Vikas Kulkarni—that was his name, Melissa remembered. He was the only person in the group other than Priyanka and Anil that Samir had ever mentioned to her. Evidently a bit of a non-conformist, he gave the rest of the group a slow smile that Anil at least appeared to find intensely annoying. ‘And, as for being barbaric, wasn’t it one of you who was raving about breaking piñatas in Mexico?’
    The man who’d originally called the festival barbaric flushed and was about to say something when Priyanka broke in, ‘Oh, but it’s not the same thing at all—is it, Vikas? I can’t imagine why people would want to spend months practising for something like the dahi-handi .’
    ‘It’s rather fun, actually,’ Melissa said. ‘Last year a group of us joined an all-girls team and we used to practise three days a week.’
    She didn’t add that practising had been far more fun that the actual Janmashtami celebrations—the pandals had been packed with people and one of the girls had been groped in the crowd. Oh, and they hadn’t won anything because the team had been able to form only five tiers of the pyramid. Other girl govinda teams were able to do six, and male teams went up to seven and eight.
    There was a second’s silence—they all looked as shocked as if she’d confessed to soliciting customers at Kamathipura