“Speaking of venomous snakes, has anyone met Nilanjana lately?” she asked, and we all shuddered at the very thought of it.
“She’s still hanging around the palace, trying her wiles on poor Samrat,” said Shivina.
“So that hasn’t changed,” I murmured.
“She is his brother’s wife,” said Shivina in disbelief.
“His dead brother’s wife,” corrected Isha. “And if that didn’t stop her when her husband was alive, I don’t think it’s going to stop her now.”
“Ugh! Enough about her. Meher, I, for one, love your idea of doing luxury safaris, and I’d love to help you,” said Shivina, setting her glass down. “Tell me what you need.”
I sighed heavily, for what I really needed was a time machine to go back and erase the past because I could never outrun it. And as long as people remembered the incident, they would never let me back into their circles.
And if the royals of our country did not welcome me back into their circle, they were hardly going to give me their business. Because that was what I wanted. I needed the very same supercilious, but extremely rich royals who turned their backs on me to come in droves to the wonderful safari experience I was hosting at Matta Palace. After all, if the royals came to Matta, would the rich and famous of our country be far behind?
When my world came crashing down around me eight years ago, I had driven straight to our ancestral palace in Matta because I knew that was one place the media would never find me. The roads leading to our palace were practically inaccessible unless you were driving a sturdy off-roader, and the local tribespeople, the clans that had been serving our family for centuries, were fiercely protective of us. Any outsider who asked too many questions about the royal family was promptly sent on their way.
I hid in my bedroom for days, refusing to speak to my father and brother, who were the only people who cared if I lived anddied, while I mourned the death of a relationship that had ended not with a bang, but in complete silence. All I could see was the shock in Samrat’s eyes that morning, which turned to fury for a few moments, before it was wiped out by a blankness that chilled me to the core. Before I could open my mouth to defend myself, he turned on his heel and walked out of my life. Just like that.
As if I didn’t matter.
At first, I was too shocked to cope with the fact that my life had turned upside down in a matter of seconds, but a few weeks later, the fog began to clear, and it left behind a wave of fury. Fuck them all, I thought! I was Meher Rathore. I was scandal-proof, thanks to my family’s name and money.
I returned to Jaipur defiantly, ignoring all of Ma’s arguments against the idea, and reached out to my friends. That’s when I learnt a very hard lesson. Nobody in our world was scandal-proof. The Teflon coating of wealth and lineage vanished when faced with the collective disapproval and disdain of some of India’s oldest and most powerful families.
I returned to Matta broken, but not beaten. Never beaten. I didn’t need these rich bitches, I told myself. I didn’t need any of them. I was going to build a new life for myself. One that couldn’t be snatched away by a scandal of nuclear proportions.
Shaurya Bhai Sa called it hiding, of course. But I called it personal growth. When Baba Sa got tired of seeing my grumpy, discontented face across the breakfast table one day, he took me for a drive in the wilderness. When we had waited for what felt like ages in his jeep with the hot sun beating down on our faces, he pointed to a spot in the bushes right ahead of us, and I saw a pair of bright brown eyes peeking out at me from behind a rock. It was a leopard cub.
I grabbed his arm tightly, too scared to even make a sound. Baba Sa shook my hand off and stepped out of the jeep, and I almost died of shock.
“What are you doing? Get back in the jeep,” I hissed.
“That baby needs my help, beta,” he murmured as he pulled out some minced raw meat from a steel box in the back of the vehicle.
“That baby’s mother is going to mince you like the meat in that dabba, Baba Sa. Get back in the jeep and stop trying to be a hero,” I whispered in desperation.
Leopard mothers were fiercely protective of their cubs, and I was worried my father was going to die just because he pss-pssed the wrong cat.
But he shook his head, and I cursed the streak of stubbornness that tainted my family’s gene pool. All the men in the Matta royal family were obstinate. They called it being strong-willed, but I called it being dumb.
It was this same streak that made my ancestors sign up to wage wars against armies a hundred times bigger than theirs. It was the same streak that made Bhai Sa try and tame a wild horse when he was twelve. He broke both his arms when the horse threw him off, but he climbed back onto the beast as soon as the casts came off. Surprisingly, I was the only one who thought it was a stupid idea. Everyone else was impressed with his heroism.
Well, that heroism was about to turn my Baba Sa into leopard chow, and I wished I had spent my teen years finding a cure for my family’s stupidity instead of wasting it trying to sneak into Taylor Swift’s shows.
“The mother’s dead, beta,” said Baba Sa softly, and I froze.
“What?”
“One of my men told me they found the mother dead three days ago, but they couldn’t find the cub. They finally spotted it this morning, which is why we’re here. He won’t survive on his own in the wild for too long. We’re going to take him back to the sanctuary.”
Baba Sa had recently opened a small sanctuary for severely injured animals, and I knew the local forest rangers brought their animals there to be treated and cared for until they were fit to go back into the wild. He lured the little cub out of its hiding place with handfuls of meat, and when it came out, he picked it up gently and set it on my lap.
It looked into my eyes and let out a loud screech of protest. And just like that, I was hooked.
I threw myself wholeheartedly into his conservation program, and over the past eight years, we had rescued many orphaned cubs. They were my little furbabies, and I raised them by hand until they were strong enough to be released back into the wild.
“Baisa, dinner is served,” announced Seema softly, and I dragged myself back to the present.
