The Woman My Grandmother Loved.

Chapter Ten

"In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I love and admire you."

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.

There were three days until Bhuwan and Jha were to arrive.

Bhuwan was the family oddball, the black sheep; the one that splurged more than he earned. He was always traveling to different parts of the world and he came back with the most delightful stories that greatly amused Anita. Growing up, Anita had always looked up to him and tried to copy him best as she could. She admired his boldness and he had always indulged. He was the one who had taught her how to sneak out, the one who had driven her to the family doctor after a drunken accident; the one who took her out for long walks when the parties got a little too tedious. He had been the first to show her where their father stacked the Scotch and cigarettes. When she was younger, she had always tried to hang around him and his best friend, Jha. While Anita's mother greatly disliked her hanging out with her problematic stepson, Anita loved and admired him more than she cared for her own sibling.

Back in India, in their ancestral home, Bhuwan sat in the verandah, his long legs propped against the railing as he lay on the cane sofa. He was a devilishly handsome man with charming manners which he didn't hesitate to use on the ladies, often the man that ladies turned to for their last-minute shot freedom before they resigned to a lifetime of sharing a bed with their husbands. Bhuwan wasn't a man of many principles and he didn't pretend to be. With a cigarette perched delicately in his mouth, he was focused on the morning's issue of Veritas. The snobbery of holding his family's newspaper was not lost upon him and he mostly read it in an attempt to make a sarcastic comment.

His younger step-brother, Roop was now the editor in charge after his father had resigned and Bhuwan did feel a twinge of bitterness about it. Not that he had studied journalism or had any skills that a reporter would require, but he still looked at it as a mark of his father's favoritism. He hadn't allowed Bhuwan's eldest brother Pradeep to take over and had sent him abroad to work as a foreign correspondent after hurriedly marrying him off to the daughter of a business tycoon; simply in an attempt to build bigger ties for the family. It was a Sunday today and in precisely fifteen minutes, Roop would be out in the verandah and he would be able to make his comment. Roop had also gotten married a few months after their eldest brother and that was another thorn on Bhuwan's side. The fact that his father had given in to the wishes of his step-sibling so easily, when he, Bhuwan remained unmarried. Not that he intended to get married; but he wanted to nurse this grievance as well.

And now, he had just returned from a trip to the eastern region of the country, where he had been living for the past eight months. He hated staying at home, with his father and his sullen stepmother who had never liked her stepchildren. He didn't plan on staying home for long. He didn't intend to deal with his family's hostility anymore than he had to.

The thought of visiting Anita in England makes him smile. When his father had first married his cold and sharp-tongued step-mother, Bhuwan had promised himself that he would never love his step-siblings. And he hadn't; when Roop had been born, he had hated the poor boy with a passion that would leave him with a lifetime of resentment towards Bhuwan.

And when Anita was born a year later, he had tried to hate her as well. But somehow, she had managed to sneak into his heart and find a place for herself where he had promised to be alone. Maybe it was because she was cut of the same cloth as he; both of them had their father's wild side and a penchant for getting into trouble. While Anita was believed to be slightly less impulsive than Bhuwan, he knew that wasn't the case. He had seen her chug an entire bottle of beer in two minutes when she was fourteen on a dare that he and Jha had given her. It had been done in a desperate attempt to get rid of her and tell her that she would never be one of the boys. But when she had thrown up all the contents of her stomach a minute later; and looked at him and asked him, Did I pass the test? with the bravest smile, he had seen, he hadn't had the heart to say no. When a pissed-off Jha had asked him why he had relented, Bhuwan told him with grudging admiration, She doesn't have to be one of the boys, don't you get it? She's better than us, already.