‘I’ve stayed at six Raj hotels in the last nine days,’ I told her, ‘and I’ve rarely come across their equal.’
‘Oh, do tell him that,’ she whispered. ‘He’ll be so touched, especially as the two of you have spent most of the evening trying to prove how macho you are.’ Both of us put nicely in our place, I felt.
When the evening finally came to an end, everyone stood except the man seated opposite me. Nisha moved swiftly round to the other side of the table to join her husband, and it was not until that moment that I realized Jamwal was in a wheelchair.
I watched sympathetically as she wheeled him slowly out of the room. No one who saw the way she touched his shoulder and gave him a smile the rest of us had not been graced with, could have had any doubt of their affection for each other.
He teased her unmercifully. ‘You never stopped flirting with the damn author all evening, you hussy,’ he said, loud enough to be sure that I could hear.
‘So he did get a rise out of you after all, my darling,’ she responded.
I laughed, and whispered to my host, ‘Such an interesting couple. How did they ever get together?’
He smiled. ‘She claims that he tied her to a lamp post and then left her.’
‘And what’s his version?’ I asked.
‘That they first met at a traffic light in Delhi... and she left him.’
And thereby hangs a tale.