Page 58 of Made in Mumbai

“If I do that now I will have acidity all night,” he snorted.

“Do not talk about such things to a pregnant woman. It brings bad omens.”

“Does it?” He turned to her, expression amused. “You never believed in omens.”

“That was before. This is now. I think with the amount of jerks life gives you, you start respecting signs everywhere.”

“Did you just make a deep comment?”

“I must have lost it.”

He laughed. And Maya felt a little lost in that laugh. She had tried to not look at him this way, but tonight, it was proving difficult to take her eyes off of him. Not because he was a lot dapper than usual in his suit. That was there, of course. The sight of him did make her weak in the knees. But… there was something in the way he had come and stood between her and Amber. She had not expected him to throw away his contract over her. And yet he had.

“How did you make your company?” She asked. “Like really make it. Don’t give me the sanitised answer like last time.”

Gautam smirked. “How do you know that was sanitised?”

“Just answer,” she poked a finger into his bicep. It was firm. She had seen it up close and personal, held onto it in the most magical waters.

“When I spent that day here with you, I wanted a life here. The way you described your day, a typical Mumbai routine, even with the bad parts, I wanted that. The Mumbai life. A city like this, larger than anything I could have ever imagined. A life in its sea, lost among lakhs, crores of others. I am not the first man to dream that, but I was sure gonna make it happen. When I bought that Surat mill, I was raw. Completely clueless. That money wasn’t just my savings but even Kumar bhai’s. And in the beginning, as I worked at that mill to turn it around with just three and half men…”

“Three and half men?”

“I was working two shifts, there was one man who knew how to run the looms and came for the day shift, and his teenage son came to help me after class at night.”

“And Kumar bhai?”

“He was driving trucks. One of us had to earn. Because the mill was just not turning around. I made losses, couldn’t even retain the three clients already with the mill. The first two years were crashing. I had no background in business. I was an eleventh standard dropout. And my big ego wouldn’t let me hire somebody who knew finances. Until I was left with no option but to close the mill. That is when I hired an old, retired accountant. Once he came along, we began to process better. And he was kind enough to teach me. He had run the financial side of mills all his life and his old-school ways were… let’s just say they were perfect. That gave me confidence, and once we were making a decent profit, I came to Mumbai to get clients. But again, I wouldn’t get entertained at any cream companies. I didn’t have much polish. My english was correct, but not fancy. So I started taking night classes in English diction, watching more of English movies, shows, learning how to dress from the bosses I did not get to meet personally. My first set of formal attire was hand-stitched by a tailor in Surat as per the design I showed him, the cloth produced in my mill by myself. Again, it took another two or three years before I broke into the Mumbai scene. And maybe that was the turning point. Because once one thing succeeds, other three follow. I rented out a big sea-facing office at Marine Drive, just to get a taste of the life I craved. We ran GK Textiles from there for three years. But it wasn’t as fun as I had thought it would be. And once I saw this converted villa that they wanted to sell, I just knew I wanted to shift out of town and into the suburbs. Get more greenery around me, get more… that old nostalgia feeling I had when I mistook this promenade for Marine Drive.”

She chuckled. “It’s so much better, no?”

“I agree. That’s why I bought a house here too.”

“Really? Where?”

“There,” he pointed behind his shoulder. Maya turned, and his arm braced her back — “Be careful.”

“That? There are no lights.”

The biggest two-storey bungalow that sat opposite the road had an under-construction sign on it. It was dark, but she could easily make out the hoards of coconut trees fringing it.

“When?”

“Last year. It has been under renovation ever since.”

“Why so long?”

“Something or the other keeps happening. We had to update the entire plumbing line. Once that was done we discovered there was a well underneath the courtyard so my architect suggested we assimilate it with the bungalow’s water storage system. Things like that. Now finally the skeleton work is complete, and they are starting interior work.”

Maya grinned, turning to look at his face just as he turned. Their noses collided. He looked at her eyes, then her nose, with something akin to what she was beginning to feel for him. Maya blinked, ready to pull back, but he said something that made her stop.

“When we parted that day after you said brutal things to me, I promised myself that if I ever saw your face again I would really give it back to you. But somehow, you’ve made me eat my words.”

“I am sorry. I take it back. I wanted to take it back the very next day.”

He just sat there, quiet.

“Hey!” She snapped, reaching for her mobile, frantically going through her iCloud photos.

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