The Benefit Season by Nidhi Singh

diet of the
nomads that ran over the grain eating Indians, she says.
    I have everything here that I wanted- all
the trappings of a ritualistic wooing- the silks, the candelabras,
music and the magic. I dig the box out and slip on her slim finger
the golden band with a tiny solitaire. It looks small on her long
finger; but will have to do for the moment.
    ‘ It’s my mother’s. She so
wanted you to have it. She said I could buy you all the rings I
ever wanted later, but this one had to be the first- welcoming you
into our family.’
    ‘ It’s so beautiful’. She
rises and hugs me briefly, leaving some of her sheen on
me.
    ‘ I mean to buy you the
most…’ she leans across and places a finger on my lips.
    ‘ It’s all I ever wanted’,
she whispers.
    I relax and lean back and ask after her
father. ‘ I wonder how the old dog will react when he finds his pet
peeve asking for his pet daughter’s hand in marriage’.
    ‘ Tell me when you plan on
doing that- I’ll hide all his guns…and his spectacles’.
    I could imagine the frantic old man running
a hazy figure out of his house with an ornate umbrella, of which he
had a proud collection, nipping his shins on the furniture and
mouthing his choicest profanities.
    ‘ He’s going to do none of
that’, she says, rubbing my shin with a toe, as if she can pinpoint
the crazy idea in my head. Next time a naughty thought crosses my
mind, I’ll have to remember that I am transparent as glass and I
have a mind reader in front of me.
    ‘ I know what you are
thinking,’ she says, ‘naughty boy’, as the toe wiggles on the
inside of my thighs. I close my legs tight, catching her foot.
‘Ooh’, she smiles, tilts the chin and raises the eyebrows at my
impunity. She tries to pull her foot away but I have it locked in
my grasp. As we playfully tug at each other under the table, a tall
lady appears behind Aarti.
    ‘ Look what we have here’,
Monal exclaims. She is dressed in an elegant navy gown with bold,
white hemming and buttons. I half rise to my feet; but Aarti pushes
her foot against my leg and I come clumsily crashing back on my
hump.
    ‘ Don’t you get up’, Monal
says, resting a hand on my shoulder, and casting a glance upon
Aarti, who, with her foot still wedged between my thighs, is still
very amused with my discomfort.
    ‘ And this must be Aarti’,
she says, smiling broadly, offering a limp hand.
    ‘ Hi’, Aarti says, briefly
brushing a hand against her fingers. ‘And this must be…?’ she asks
me, cocking a thumb up at my boss.
    I try to rise again but
Aarti is not going to let go this night. ‘She is my boss, Mrs.
Monal Nagrath’. I stretch the Mrs. part a wee bit too much, I realize. ‘ I…I work
under her…’ Luckily the last word of my unfinished sentence-
“influence”- doesn’t pop out.
    ‘ Under her what,’ Aarti,
who with the sixth sense of the betrothed always knows, asks,
removing the foot.
    I shrug and smile.
    ‘ Under my spell, silly’,
Monal says, joining Aarti in the fun.
    ‘ You are as pretty as I
thought you would be, for a man like Arjun here’, she tells Aarti,
softly weaving her hands through my hair like I am some puppy. I
wonder whatever happened to the Mr. Pasrichas or the Mr. Arjuns,
and where all this sudden niceness is coming from.
    Aarti smiles, crosses her arms across the
chest the way a proud ancestor several centuries ago might have
done while looking a charging bull sternly in the eye, with a
wooden mallet dangling carelessly from the hunting hand. ‘A man
like Arjun, ahem’, she says, pinning me like a fly between the
narrowed brows, and swinging that mallet slowly now.
    ‘ Come, how was the band’,
Monal asks her.
    Aarti looks up, surprised, the mallet
slipping from her grasp. Then she looks at me and says, ‘ was it
her idea’?
    ‘ No no, it was mine. But
where do you expect I will find a school band ready to turn out in
full trim to beat a tune for little known me on an airport in full
public