[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 53: Rashmi's Goodbye

The news reached the office on Wednesday.

Not the details. Banerjee was careful, and so was Fatima. But Kolkata is a village with fourteen million people in it, and by lunchtime everyone on our floor knew that Rahul Mehra had been arrested in his own flat on Monday night by the cyber cell. That he had been formally terminated by head office on Tuesday afternoon for "gross misconduct and fraud". That Patel Sir had taken "voluntary early retirement" effective immediately and had not come in since. And that a list was going around, though nobody had seen it, of women whose videos the security officer had found.

People looked at me differently in the corridor. Not with pity, which I had felt for ten months. Something else. A kind of wary respect, as if they had all just noticed that the quiet man in the corner had been there the whole time.

Mohit came to my desk at four o'clock. He stood there holding a file he did not need and cleared his throat twice.

"Ranjeet. I wanted to say. About the Holi party. I should have—"

"Yes," I said. "You should have."

He stood there a moment longer. Then he nodded and went away. It was the longest conversation we had had in ten months, and the last.

Rashmi did not come in on Thursday.

I found out why at six o'clock, when my phone buzzed with a message from a number I did not recognise.

It's me. New number. I've left Mohit. I'm at the Kenilworth on Little Russell Street, room 412, with Tuktuki. My flight to Bangalore is Saturday morning. Will you come and say goodbye? — R

She opened the door in jeans and an old grey T-shirt, with her hair in a messy knot and no makeup. Behind her, the hotel room was chaos. Two open suitcases on the floor, clothes spilling out, a pile of picture books, a pink plastic tricycle. On the far bed, a little girl of three was fast asleep on her stomach with her bottom in the air, clutching a stuffed giraffe.

"She's had a big day," Rashmi whispered. "Come in. Don't trip over the tricycle."

I stepped carefully round it. She closed the door and leaned against it and looked at me.

"You came," she said.

"You asked."

"I know. I thought you might not." She smiled, a little crookedly. "I've been very forward with you, Ranjeet. In restaurants. In your flat. Under tables. I thought maybe you'd decided I was too much."

"You've never been too much. You've been the only person in that office who told me the truth."

Her smile wavered. She looked away, at her sleeping daughter.

"Mohit knew," she said quietly. "About Holi. Before. Rahul told him a week before what he was planning, and Mohit thought it was funny. He actually laughed. He said, Ranjeet's wife won't last five minutes. And then on the night he held you down." She swallowed. "When the list came out yesterday, I asked him if he'd ever been with Rahul's women. If he'd ever watched any of those videos. He didn't answer. He just went into the bathroom and locked the door."

"Rashmi—"

"I packed while he was in there. Tuktuki's things first. Then mine. He didn't come out till we were in the taxi." She shrugged, a small brave movement. "My cousin runs a design firm in Bangalore. She's been asking me for two years. I called her last night. I start on the second."

"Bangalore," I said.

"Bangalore." She looked back at me. "It's very far from Kolkata."

"It is."

"Far enough that I won't be able to sit outside your office in a taxi and drag you to lunch." Her eyes were bright. "Far enough that I won't be tempted to be the second woman in a story that's already got too many women in it."

I did not say anything. She was right, and we both knew it.

"Sutapa told me," she said gently. "About Sunday dinners. About Nupur showing her the cobra's voice." She smiled. "I'm glad, Ranjeet. Truly. She needs someone who doesn't hurt her. And you need someone who'll stay. I was never going to stay. I'm not built for it."

She crossed the room slowly. She stood in front of me, close enough that I could smell the hotel soap on her skin and something else underneath it, her own warm smell.

"So this is goodbye," she said. "And I want a proper one. Not a hug in a corridor. Not a handshake." Her voice dropped. "One night. That's all. Then Saturday I get on a plane and you go home to your yellow curtains, and neither of us ever has to feel guilty about it, because it's finished before it starts."

I looked at the sleeping child on the far bed.

"She sleeps like the dead," Rashmi whispered. "She got that from Mohit. A bomb could go off. And there's a bathroom with a door that locks."

The bathroom of room 412 at the Kenilworth is large and old-fashioned, white tiles and a deep claw-footed tub and a mirror with a gilt frame that has gone spotty at the edges. Rashmi locked the door behind us and turned around and pulled her grey T-shirt off over her head in one movement and dropped it on the floor.

She was not wearing a bra. She stood there under the yellow bathroom light, bare from the waist up, and let me look at her the way she always had, without a trace of embarrassment, with that slight defiant lift of the chin. Small and strong and compact. High round breasts with small dark nipples already tight. The faint silvery lines across her lower belly from her daughter.

"Your turn," she said.

I pulled my shirt off. She stepped forward and put both palms flat on my chest and ran them down slowly, over the muscle the gym had built, and let out a low breath.

"I watched you change," she said. "Over the months. In the office. Your shirts got tight across the shoulders. Your face changed. You stopped hunching." She looked up at me. "I used to sit at my desk outside your cabin and look at you through the glass and think, That man has no idea what he's turning into."

"What was I turning into?"

"Someone who could put Rahul Mehra on the ground in one second and then decide not to break his arm." She unbuckled my belt. "That's the sexiest thing I've ever heard, by the way. Sutapa told me. I had to sit down."

She sank down to her knees on the bathroom tiles and pulled my jeans and underwear down together, and looked at me, already hard in front of her face.

"I've been thinking about this since that day in the restaurant," she said. "When I had you in my hand under the tablecloth and the waiter came in. I've thought about it every day for two months. What I'd do if I had you somewhere with a locked door and no waiters." She wrapped her hand round the base of me and looked up. "Do you want to know what I'd do?"

"Show me," I said. My voice was not steady.

She smiled. Then she leaned forward and ran her tongue slowly up the whole underside of my cock, from the base to the tip, and closed her lips over the head.

She was not slow and deep like Sutapa. She was fast and greedy and loud, the same way she did everything. Her head bobbed, her hand twisted round the base in time with her mouth, wet slurping sounds bouncing off the white tiles. She took me deep, gagged slightly, pulled back laughing with saliva shining on her chin, and took me deep again. Her other hand reached up and cupped my balls and squeezed, just hard enough to make me grab the edge of the sink.

"Rashmi—"

She pulled off with a wet sound and looked up at me, grinning.

"Not yet," she said. "I didn't come all this way for that."

She stood up and pushed her jeans and panties down and kicked them off across the bathroom floor. Then she turned round and braced both hands on the edge of the old white sink, and looked at me over her shoulder in the spotted mirror.

"Like this," she said. "I want to watch your face."

I came up behind her. In the mirror I could see both of us. Her small strong body bent forward, her breasts swaying slightly, her dark eyes watching mine in the glass. Me behind her, my hands on her hips. I ran one hand down over the smooth curve of her bottom and between her thighs and found her slick and hot and ready, so wet that my fingers slid straight into her. She pushed back against them with a gasp.

"Now," she said to the mirror. "Ranjeet, now, please. I've waited two months."

I took my cock in my hand and guided it to her and pushed into her in one long slow stroke, and watched her mouth fall open in the mirror and her eyes go unfocused.

"Oh," she said. "Oh. There."

She was tight. Tighter than Sutapa. She gripped me like a fist. I held still for a moment, buried in her, my chest against her back, and in the mirror I watched her close her eyes and breathe.

Then she opened them again and looked straight at me in the glass.

"Don't be gentle," she said. "I'm not Sutapa. I won't break. I want to feel this on the plane on Saturday."

So I was not gentle.

I took her hips in both hands and pulled her back onto me as I thrust forward, hard, and she cried out and clapped one hand over her own mouth and kept the other gripping the sink. I fucked her fast and deep, the slap of my hips against her bottom loud in the tiled room, the old pipes under the sink rattling with every stroke. In the mirror her breasts bounced. Her face was flushed dark, her eyes squeezed shut, then flying open to find mine again, her muffled cries coming out from behind her own palm.

"Harder," she gasped between her fingers. "Harder, harder, don't stop—"

I reached round her and found her clit, slick and swollen, and rubbed it while I thrust. Her whole body jerked. She took her hand off her mouth and gripped the sink with both hands and pushed back against me to meet every stroke. Her knuckles were white.

"I'm going to come," she said to the mirror, very fast. "I'm going to, I'm going to, Ranjeet, I'm—"

She came with her mouth wide open and no sound coming out at all, just a long silent gasp, her whole body clenching round me so hard I had to stop moving. She shook against the sink. Her legs trembled. In the mirror her face looked almost like pain, and then like something else entirely, and then her head dropped forward and she hung there gasping, still full of me.

"Don't stop," she whispered after a moment, not lifting her head. "Please. Keep going. I want to feel you come."

I started moving again, slower now, long deep strokes. She lifted her head and met my eyes in the mirror again, dazed and soft and smiling.

"Inside," she said. "It's all right. I'm on the pill. I want it. I want to take something of you to Bangalore."

That was what did it. I drove into her two, three more times and came with a groan, my forehead dropping against her shoulder blade, pulsing deep inside her again and again. She reached back with one hand and gripped my hip and held me there, pressed into her, until it was over.

Afterwards we sat in the old claw-footed tub with the hot water running, her back against my chest, my arms round her, both of us silent. Steam fogged the spotty mirror. Through the door we could faintly hear the hum of the hotel air conditioner, and once, a sleepy murmur from the little girl on the bed, and then nothing.

"Can I tell you something?" Rashmi said eventually, not turning round.

"Anything."

"Poroma came to see me. Yesterday. At Fatima's chamber, before I left Mohit."

I went still.

"She wanted to say sorry. For the Bengali New Year party. For everything. For being part of what happened to you." Rashmi was quiet for a moment. "And she wanted to thank me. For giving Fatima my statement about Nupur."

"What did you say?"

"I told her I didn't do it for her." Rashmi turned her head slightly against my shoulder. "And she said, I know. That's why I'm thanking you." She was quiet again. "She's different, Ranjeet. I don't know if you can see it from where you are. She's not trying to be liked any more. She sat across from me in that chamber in a plain white saree and didn't ask me for anything at all. I've known her for three years and I've never once seen her not want something."

I did not say anything. I held Rashmi and watched the steam drift across the ceiling.

"It doesn't change what she did," Rashmi said. "I'm not saying that. I'm just saying. When Nupur is grown up and asks about her mother, maybe there'll be a little more to tell than there was a month ago."

At midnight I got dressed in the bathroom while she sat on the edge of the tub wrapped in a hotel towel, her wet hair dripping down her back. When I came out she followed me to the door. The little girl had rolled over onto her back and flung both arms over her head. The giraffe was on the floor.

Rashmi picked it up and tucked it back under her daughter's arm without waking her.

At the door she stood on tiptoe and kissed me once, lightly, on the corner of my mouth.

"Send me a picture," she said. "When Nupur does the cobra's voice for Sutapa on Sunday. I want to hear it."

"I will."

"And Ranjeet." She held the door half-open. Her eyes were wet but she was smiling. "Thank you for not being too much. And for not being too little. You were exactly right."

I walked down four flights of the Kenilworth's old stairs, because the lift was slow and I needed the time. Outside, Little Russell Street was empty and cold. The Christmas lights along Park Street were still up from December, strings of yellow bulbs looped between the lampposts, swaying in the wind.

I stood under them for a while before I went to find a taxi.