Fade into Red

K Barshikar Reshma

Description

Twenty-something investment banker Ayra had always wanted to be an art historian till it occurred to her that art history couldn't possibly support her penchant for beautiful shoes. One monsoon day, she's sent to Rome on a last-minute assignation with a star client. What should have been a four-day trip turns into a two-week treasure hunt placing her bang in the middle of dodgy vintners and midnight deals, rolling Tuscan hills, and a millionaire playboy who's out to taste more than just the wine.

Informations

• Publié par: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
• Date de parution: 19 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184006285
• Langue: English

Extrait

Reshma K. Barshikar

FADE INTO RED
RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Contents
Dedication
One: Here s Where It All Goes Pear-shaped
Two: Thank You, Cliff Notes!
Three: Oh, to Be a Gazelle and Not a Platypus
Four: Under a Tuscan Bunker
Five: The Enemy of Your Enemy Is Like Exercise, Painful but Necessary
Six: Hi Ho Hi Ho... and Off to Harvest We Go
Seven: La Dolce Vita
Eight: Sorry, Here s Where It All Goes Pear-Shaped
Nine: La Acido Vita
Ten: Shoot Me. So I Fell on a Pair of Lips and Had a Mindblowing Orgasm
Eleven: If Wishes Were Horses, Hers Would Be a Unicorn that Would Take Her Back in Time
Twelve: Friendships Were Made in Heaven First, before Marriages
Thirteen: Afterword
A Note on the Author
Acknowledgements
Follow Random House
Copyright
For Amit,
who makes me fearless
One
Here s Where It All Goes Pear-shaped
Come on! Impatiently, Ayra rolled down the car window. She was yelling at a man on a motorbike who had just cut her off, nicking her side-view mirror in the process. Now he was trying very hard to squeeze between the two cars in front of her. An exercise in futility, she thought, as she pulled her damp head back inside the car. Ayra hated Monday morning traffic and it had only been aggravated by the morning s downpour. The relentless honking, the din of the rain beating on the roof of the car, the sight of her wipers struggling to clean her fogged-up windshield - it was all making her claustrophobic. She clenched her teeth, inhaled deeply, and turned up the radio. It was Kylie s new duet with a Punjabi rap artist, sounding like a cat whose tail was tied to a row of burning tin cans; clearly her locomotion days were over.
Ayra switched to CD mode and found Dinah Washington crooning, What a difference a day makes, twenty-four little hours... She sat back in her seat and sang along: brought the sun and the flowers... there used to be rain. Dinah washed over her like soothing calamine. Ayra resigned herself to being stationary for a while and sighed wistfully at the thought of her mother s coffee. A smile crept over her face as she realized she d be seeing her entire family that weekend. A visit was long overdue and the thought of a big noisy family wedding, complete with hot chicory filter coffee in small steel tumblers, made her feel less stressed. But then a hard jolt almost dislocated her neck; a three-wheeler auto-rickshaw was trying to cut her car in half.
You can t go over my car! she shouted. This is not a Rajinikant film!
Dinah wasn t working. As her stomach tightened, Ayra closed her eyes and tried to ignore the drizzle on the back of her neck and the sight of blue tarpaulin flapping in her rear-view mirror.
The monsoon season was her favourite time of year - well, second favourite after you counted the desperate excuse for a winter that was December through to mid-January. She loved waking up to that heavenly smell of first rain making contact with dust. It didn t matter that the parking lot would be flooded and she would have to wade in her beautiful black and grey pumps through four inches of brown slush; just that smell made it worth living in Mumbai. That morning, as she wrestled with her free Marriott umbrella and skipped over tiny brooks caused by the morning drizzle, she had looked up at swaying coconut trees set against an ashen sky and immediately been transported to a scene in a Satyajit Ray film noir. Her reverie, however, was short-lived and interrupted by the sight of Ramji, her trusted watchman who moonlighted as the building s car-washer, flapping his arms like a large wet chicken while surreptitiously trying to cover the backseat of her car with blue tarpaulin.
Oh no, she had thought, her eyes widening in trepidation as they looked for a rear windscreen that seemed to be missing.
Where is the bloody glass thing that covers the back of my car? she had asked Ramji. He had yelled back, Madam, coconut, pointing with one hand towards the swaying coconut trees while with the other he held down the tarpaulin, now forming a small canal channelling the drizzle right onto her beautiful leather upholstery. Then she d gestured to the other cars and their intact windshields. Ramji shrugged. Madam, coconut car mein gira! He had added defensively, Jab mein aaya, toota tha, to make sure she understood he had nothing to do with it.
After Ramji s futile attempts at hailing a taxi, Ayra had decided to brave the journey to her office in her windshield-less car. She was an optimist, after all, and would take control of the day. So she dabbed some gloss on her lips and stared at herself in the rear-view mirror, noticing that a few more strands of hair had turned white. She reminded herself of Cruella de Vil. Lately, the ever-widening silver patch on the crown of her head had begun to cause her much distress. Her mother, in an attempt to make her feel better, blamed the gene pool. Your Athai also has the problem, she had said, sitting at the dinner table, pointing to Ayra s father s sister, but see no one notices. Not really.
Ayra had woken with a sense of foreboding. Usually she knew when she was going to be in trouble, impending doom creeping up her back like a black widow spider. But that meant very little because Ayra - unlike most famous heroines in novels - did not have great instinct. She always tried to listen to her gut . She even tried cajoling it into voicing an opinion, but it never delivered. Consequently, she lived in a constant state of paranoia. It wasn t her fault.
Like the white hair, it was yet another hereditary disaster. She came from a long line of worriers: No conversation in her family ever began with a cheery ello! . It was family legend that her mother s mother greeted folks at the door saying, Enna acchu? What happened? . Her grandfather, famed for getting flat tyres, had a nickname Thalai ezhuthu Iyer which loosely translated to the Iyer with disaster written on his head.
In view of her lineage, her mother taught her about Sod s law early in life. She used to say, Darling, everything that can go wrong with you will go wrong and what s more, it will happen at the most inappropriate time. So you have to be prepared. Always take photocopies!
Oh well, she thought, pulling into the open-air office parking; at least the rain had turned to a light drizzle, so her luck might be changing after all. As she hopped from one dry spot to another, she saw the Vice President of the infrastructure team pulling into the parking lot across the road. He waved out at her, seeming content and dry. I hope his deal dies, she thought, waving back and crossing the road. As she entered the building, she longed fervently for Friday. This was not a good start to what was meant to be an important week for her and her relationship. But then according to her boyfriend, Kartik, the beginning hardly mattered; he was always worried about the endgame . Last month he d asked, Where are we going, Ayra? , to which she d replied, I m heading to the salon to get my hair coloured. You? She d had to sit through three hours of Dream Theater in penitence.
She entered the glass doors of her office, shook herself off like a dog and mumbled a quick good morning to the security guard. Then she dripped her way towards the bathroom. She wanted to dry off before Mr Rao, the office lech, noticed her pink bra under her wet white shirt and thanked the rain gods.
Good morning, Ayra! Sandeep has been looking for you all day, said Rosie, the receptionist, her high cheekbones even more chiselled by her impeccable contouring; not the person to appreciate tardiness. Great day to wear white, she added, her thin smile trained on her computer.
Meow, Ayra said to herself, smirking at how an hour constituted a day. Whoever said women in the workplace were comrades had evidently never worked at her office. After drying herself under the bathroom hand dryer and achieving some semblance of modesty, she walked into her boss s cabin.
Sandeep was standing there with a toothy grin on his face, rearranging papers on his table. It was amusing how he considered shifting papers from one end to another to be a form of cleaning. A tall wiry man with a receding hairline and bifocal glasses that made his eyes bulge like a frog s, Sandeep was always busy. Now he looked up at her and adjusted his glasses as if to improve the view. There you are! I was just about to call you. He peered at her a little more closely. Did you swim here? he asked, smiling at his own joke.
Ha... yes. Funny thing actually, a coconut fell on my car and... She stopped as Sandeep went back to his papers. Never mind... so what s wrong? Why the Try to come to work on time today, Ayra ? She smiled as she mimicked him.
Now, now, you ll be sorry for that attitude once I ve told you where you re going tomorrow, he said, with an emphasis on the tomorrow . He emptied a drawer onto the floor.
Tomorrow? Where to now? Kandivalli? Ayra couldn t help the sarcasm as she remembered last week s dreadful trip to Deonar, the Mumbai dumpsite, as part of a site visit. Her sense of appropriate dress had descended to an all-time low as she d hitched up her brand new trousers and soiled her favourite Pretty Ballerinas.
Sandeep sat down in his chair and leaned back. Oh, I m so sorry they don t haul shit and process it in South Mumbai. I ll let the municipal authorities know that the next time they need a new dumpsite, they consult me on where to put it. He spoke lightheartedly and started cleaning his glasses. His eyes were actually much smaller than Ayra had thought.
So anyway, where are you sending me? She picked up the phone to order a coffee.
You, Madam, are going to Italy tomorrow.
Huh?
Oh no, she thought. No, no, no. Something was gnawing at the nape of her neck.
Yes. I don t know if you ve heard of Redna. It s a small subsidiary of the Malhotra group - into lifestyles and whatnot. Anyway, they want to buy a vineyard for the you