The Sea of Innocence by Kishwar Desai

Author:Kishwar Desai [Desai, Kishwar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General, Crime
ISBN: 9781471101458
Google: ESLV_AqVWHwC
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2013-05-22T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

No matter what I had said to reassure Marian and Amarjit, I had no intention of giving up on my search for Liza. I thought it was both ridiculous and frightening that a young girl could vanish and a year later we still had no idea where she could be, or what had happened to her.

And so, for many reasons, despite the fact that I’d had a really difficult day, I had decided to go to the ‘floating’ casino.

Not that I am a gambler. It’s one of the few addictions that I’ve avoided – I even stay away from lotteries. Perhaps because I hate losing!

In fact, I avoided card games of all kinds if I could help it, because of a well-known family fixation. My grandfather had been so besotted with playing bridge that he often did not come home for days on end, staying on at the club with his cronies, playing rubber after rubber. That convinced me that I should never go near a pack of cards.

Luckily other pursuits – drinking, smoking and flirtatious relationships – have added quality to my life. I would hate to exchange them for nights in cold card rooms or overheated casinos.

So, some of my present excitement had to do with the fact that I was going to the casino with Dennis. It had been a while since I had seriously thought about interesting men, or men that I wanted to take an interest in. Till a few months ago my attention had been taken up by Edward, a wonderful British man I had met in London last year. We had shared ‘memorable moments’ (as mentioned in the last postcard I had sent him), first in London, and later in Delhi. But I knew I would never shift to London and he could not abandon his lucrative career and come here.

And frankly, both of us were just a little bit relieved that these hurdles existed. If there had been none, possibly we would have invented them. We had both been on our own for far too long now to fall into any kind of permanent arrangement.

Thus on our last evening together, over a candlelight dinner in a suburban Delhi restaurant, we had mutually concluded that long-distance relationships simply did not work.

My mother was disappointed because she had (with difficulty) adjusted herself to the idea of a British son-in-law, and Edward was very helpful in so many ways. He loved staying at home, cooking, lending a hand with the household chores and chatting with her about all her ailments.

But once Edward left, she had begun pushing the idea of the newly divorced Amarjit in my direction, though I knew we probably had too much baggage between us. Too much love and too many fights. It was a volatile relationship and strangely it only worked when we had a third person in it to provide a certain piquancy.

I sometimes wondered if I sought out flawed relationships because I hated to commit 100 per cent. So I looked for men who would not demand it.

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