Meera's day

BUT — because the Fardeen grab rattled her, Meera now walks into a Bandra bar at 8pm to meet a junior litigator Heena knows through a wedding planner who knows a junior litigator, and the man — Siddhant Rao, late twenties, sleeves rolled, a wedding-planner contact card already half out — orders her a gin and tonic without asking, sits one chair closer than the table warrants, and asks what she is 'really doing in Mumbai, hosting can't be the whole answer' in a voice pitched for intimacy that Meera recognises as the same voice the Jaipur-jaw man used in August. The sexual_heat micro lands when Siddhant's hand drifts to the back of her chair and rests there for the duration of one drink, not touching her, not quite, and Meera lets it rest because letting it rest is the way she has learned to read a man's reach before he has to be told to withdraw it. The betrayal beat comes when Siddhant asks, casually, 'so the farmhouse at Karjat, are you going back?' — a question no junior litigator with no hostess contact would know to ask — and Meera answers with a question of her own, 'whose farmhouse, Siddhant?' and watches his jaw soften the way jaws soften when a man has just realised the woman across from him has been timing his sentences. The cute beat is the second gin and tonic he does not order for her because he has stopped trying to read her, and the empty glass between them at the end of the meeting that she does not finish. By the time she leaves she has decided two things: Siddhant's paragraph is not going on the counter-complaint, and his name is going on a list Heena keeps in a drawer labelled 'men who knew before they should have.'