Part VIII
He woke to the sound of chirping birds the next morning. Stretching his arms he got up to find Geet curled up in a ball on the floor next to his bed. Her face was scrubbed clean of makeup, she wore no jewelry, not even a earring and yet she looked so lovely, he thought. 'Get a hold of yourself, Maan' he told himself, 'beauty is just skin deep'. Soon he was seated in the small front room with a steaming tea cup in hand, pouring over the morning newspaper.
Geet walked in and apologised for oversleeping. He merely nodded, not looking up. After she brushed her teeth, she went into the tiny kitchen adjoining the front room. Actually it wasn't even a separate room, just another portion of the same room, parted by a low wall. Looking around she noticed a run-down old fridge in one corner, a single cylinder gas stove on a small platform, a few kitchen utensils and a few plastic containers with the kitchen provisions on a shelf that ran across one wall. Manjula had told her that she had left some dosa atta in a vessel on the platform with which she can make dosas for breakfast, as Maan simply loves them. Geet has never cooked a single day in her life. Rano never let anyone enter her kitchen, guarding it like a fort. So she had no clue how to go about making the dosas or for that matter even a cup of tea. She lit the stove and kept the tava on one of the burners. She kept the flame high and waited for the tava to heat. Taking out the atta from the vessel in a ladle, she gingerly tried to spread it on the tava. As the tava had become super hot by then, the atta kept getting stuck to one place, not letting her spread it around. She took some more atta and tried again quite unsuccessfully. All she managed to get is a lumpy substance on the tava, which kept growing upwards, not sideways, with every ladle she tried to spread. Maan who had finished with his paper, looked up to see Geet wrestle with the tava.
Walking up behind her, with a sardonic grin on his face, he boomed, "Looks like Your Highness has never set foot in a kitchen all her life."
Startled by the suddenness of his voice behind her, she dropped the ladle with a loud clank. Turning around, she bumped right into his solid chest. The kitchen area was really not meant for two people - there just wasn't enough space. Before she could recover from the shock of feeling a man's body so close to hers, he caught her by the arms and pushed her back. "I can't wait all morning for you to practice your dosas on me. I'll have to get to work in less than an hour", he said. He, then, proceeded to the stove and removing the tava from it, and scrapping away the fat piece of atta on the tava, he went about skillfully making paper thin dosas. Not knowing what to do, Geet stood behind wringing her hands and staring at his back.
"Are you going to stand there and stare at me for the rest of the morning?" he asked mockingly, without turning around.
A flustered Geet quickly made a retreat into the bedroom. Wondering what next to do, she opened his cupboard. Just three pairs of pants, the faded denims she had earlier seen and five shirts hung in it. Taking out a bottle green colour pant and an olive green colour shirt, she decided to iron them. She found the iron in the cupboard too. Since there was no ironing board, she spread out the pants on the mattress and switching on the iron, she pressed the pants on the seams, running the hot iron on them. Having pressed the pants, she moved on to the shirt.
Straightening the collar, she ran the iron on it, flattening out the crease in the process. Having finished with his breakfast, Maan walked in as she was finishing up and took in the sight. Snatching his clothes from her, he snarled,
"What are you doing with them?"
"Ironing them", she said meekly.
"Who asked you to do these things?" he hissed.
Holding up his pants, he was appalled at what she had done to them.
"Am I to wear pants or skirts to work?" he shrieked."Pants are ironed on their creases, not their seams. Why do I even bother telling you these things," he said exasperatedly.
He threw aside the pant and shirt and took another set out of the cupboard. Deftly ironing them, he got ready and left for work, without as much as a goodbye. Geet looked on, eyes brimming with tears. She started the day on the wrong foot, she thought. How she wished she knew a few simple domestic chores, but in her father's house there were half a dozen servants who literally waited on her hand and foot, giving her no scope to learn these things.
After she had her bath and changed into a simple salwar kameez, she had her lumpy dosa for breakfast. Having nothing better to do, she had decided to go to her mother's place to return her jewelry. Maan had warned her that keeping the jewelry in their small tenement was not safe.
On reaching there, little did she expect to see what she did.
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