#20 Telling Lies: Episode 4.
Arjun, In Denial: A new ice cream flavour. An heiress wife. A ticket to the real VIP lounge of the world, the kind that no superyacht could buy. These were not enough. Arjun wanted more...
This week’s post is a sneak peek into Episode 4 of Wit’s End’s Fiction Section Telling Lies. You will not need to read the episodes in order, they are a collection of interconnected stories, a tapestry. The principal cast of characters includes Aisha, Vishnu, Arjun and Nayna, and their lives unfold mostly in contemporary Bombay and Goa…
All those summers spent sipping lemonade in Capri, St. Tropez and Monte Carlo. The winters skiing in Megeve and St Moritz…
Hard-earned Diwali invitations to watch fireworks and horseback ride with royals in Jaipur. That life, meticulously crafted to reach the top was in peril. And the disappointment was almost too much for Arjun’s parents to bear.
The family ice cream empire, built from nothing over three generations was fading fast. With no apparent heir, Arjun’s ‘idiotic’ infatuation with Marx and Climate was no longer finding traction at home. His father laid the blame entirely on his wife. She looked the other way while Arjun collected Liberal Arts degrees at Columbia and NYU instead of the one in Finance they had agreed on. The purpose of which, as everyone knew, was to consolidate the lifelong network of business associates that kept them all collectivity, afloat.
Back in Bombay, pickled in philosophy and trying to save that dying river, it seemed unlikely that Arjun would ever join the family business. Until his parents met Nayna, that is. A striking debutante, they thought. She could match, and possibly surpass, Arjun in wit, and definitely in charm. They were sure she was the kryptonite they had been searching for. Nayna was the real deal, a tsarina in the flesh, to the manor born.
But would they succeed in winning her over? Would she succeed in luring Arjun away from that loathsome pity for the masses? And then, would Arjun finally fulfil his parent’s dream? Would he scratch his way up to his proper place in the firmament alongside that glorious tribe, the global industrialist elite? They’d worked so hard. And they were so close…
Sandalwood soap, Arjun said. That’s what his earliest childhood memory smelled of. Nayna had asked. Arjun was studying Nayna’s face. He was looking for clues. Why would a woman like her, conventionally - almost nauseatingly - beautiful; intelligent; and with a trust fund - consider an arranged match? Especially with him. His family were upstarts, his lineage pastoral. Hers was Old Money, a fortune amassed selling opium to China for The British East India Company. Her great-grandfather wobbled the Qing dynasty. His great-grandfather milked cows.
A new ice cream flavour. A trophy wife. An heiress wife. A ticket to the real VIP lounge of the world, the kind that no superyacht could buy. These were not enough. Arjun wanted more. He came to the party to buy some time, to keep his mother at bay. He was curious to see how Nayna had turned out. The last time he’d seen her was at a birthday party his parents threw at the Crystal Room at the Taj Mahal Hotel when he turned ten. She had sat with him under the table and held his hand when he cried at finding out the return gifts were budgerigars in cages. How bad could she be? But never mind all that. Because behind her now was that dark-skinned girl again, blowing smoke into his eyes…
© Tara Sahgal