Aarti Raman - Kingdom Come

And Dada Akhtar.

Grandpa.

Ziya sighed as she looked out her bedroom window and saw Dada Akhtar puttering around with his beloved rose bushes, his tiny gardening scissors going snip-snip on the bad leaves. His beady eyes large behind the gigantic glasses he wore with obvious pride. He was nearing eighty, a retired military man, who was now content with looking after his roses and holding court over his family when they deigned to visit him.

He was the grandfather she’d never had.

Ziya pressed a hand against the chilled glass of her window and called out, “Good morning, Dadaji .”

Dada Akhtar, still spry and having all of his senses whipped his head up and smiled a wrinkled smile at the woman he already considered his newest granddaughter. Mostly because she loved Goonj almost as much as he did. It was home. When he died, it would his resting place. Laid to rest next to his beloved wife Saira, underneath an apple tree in the very first orchard that his grandfather had planted with his own hands.

“Good morning, Ziya. It’s a beautiful morning, isn’t it?”

Ziya smiled, pushed a swathe of tousled hair away from her face and answered, “Absolutely, Da. Still in love with your roses?”

He held the pair of scissors in a kind of salute and touched one vivid, blood-red bloom with something close to reverence. “As much as I love you, baby girl.”

She laughed, shook her head and was about to close the window when he called out her name.

“Yes?”

Dada Akhtar smiled, a crafty glint in his still-sharp eyes. “Krivi’s coming over for breakfast. I think he has the figures for the new venture you were talking about.”

Ziya caught herself before her smile slipped and irritation took its place. There was no reason to be irritated, therefore she wasn’t. The logic always worked for her. She nodded and said, “I’ll set an extra place for him then.”

She shut the window on Dada Akhtar’s boom of knowing laughter, as if watching Ziya squirm was a source of particular amusement for him. She tied her blond highlighted hair back in a tiny stub, because it barely brushed her shoulders as it is. Less maintenance, less hassle she’d always claimed. But secretly, she was vain enough to know that short hair went particularly well with her face and accentuated her best features while minimizing her flaws.

Now, padding into the bathroom just off her bedroom, she examined that same face while brushing her teeth diligently. It was an average kind of face, with great cheekbones, pale gray eyes, a too-wide mouth and a stub of a nose that looked a little out of place with the rest of the features. She had a nose ring, a tiny clip-on that she wore sometimes and Noor claimed it gave her a fey quality that attracted men in droves. She didn’t know about the fey thing or the droves, because she rarely had time for either of them.

The rest of her wasn’t that bad either, she conceded as she showered rapidly. Nice legs, thank God, and a figure that was curved but with a tendency to go to fat if she didn’t watch out. So she watched out and ate sparingly when she could and binged when she couldn’t resist the temptation anymore.

Besides, work at Goonj meant a lot of walking, even sprinting in some cases. Spring was the best time to get a lot of traveling and work done, because it ended so quickly. And she had several inspections scheduled over the next few weeks over the fields and the cricket bat manufacturing plant and the lumber lot too. The lumber union was demanding a renegotiation of their contract and that was one particular headache she was eager to solve.

Her plate was full, and breakfast had to be made for five people. So, why was she wondering about her decidedly unsexy body in the middle of her shower?

Him, the answer came to her mind immediately.

Krivi Iyer, the new manager who Bashir Akhtar Salman had hired to help her with the management of the estate. She hadn’t been present at his interview. All she knew was that he’d shown up one day in a battered Jeep with a duffel bag full of clothes and unreadable black eyes. He’d arrived six months ago, and they’d barely spoken ever since.

She got on well with people as a rule, it had been drummed into her in B-School, and before that in her various foster homes, the early ones … when she’d tried so hard to be the kid, the one kid they would keep and not send back after six months or a year or two weeks. Agreeability was a learned nature for her.

Yet, she couldn’t make herself look Krivi Iyer in the eyes long enough to make herself agreeable to him. And he, strangely enough, kept to himself too. They never spoke unless there was a business matter to attend to. Sometimes she’d even wondered if he was all there in the head, then she would look into those pitch-dark eyes and know. He was all there in the head all right. He just looked through her. So she made an effort to ignore him as thoroughly and effortlessly as he ignored her, and the plan was working splendidly.

Ziya dressed in jeans and a pullover, ran a brush through her now-free hair and without a trace of makeup, walked downstairs to the kitchen to prepare breakfast. Her Google Nexus smartphone, which had been Dada Akhtar’s welcome to Goonj present for her, was already in her hand and she was running through her schedule for the day.

She again blessed Da , as she did every time she punched in keys on her cute-yet-edgy cell phone and smiled fondly as she ticked off making breakfast on her to-do list.

Goonj was laid out in a typical Indian manor house fashion. There was the huge living room which also served as the dining room when the occasion warranted it and the kitchen next to it, with the mudroom just off the back of it. A simple wooden staircase led to the two upper floors, where all the bedrooms and Dada Akhtar’s study and office were.

Ziya’s own rooms were on the second floor because Dada Akhtar had insisted a single girl like her was not staying by herself in the gamekeeper’s cottage, just at the edge of the gardens that surrounded Goonj.

The cottage had been unoccupied till six months ago, when Krivi Iyer had arrived and parked his second-hand Jeep and duffel bag there. Till date, Ziya had found reasons to never visit him at his own place.

Any off-hours business that had to be conducted was done either over the phone or in Dada Akhtar’s home office.

Ziya shook her head and muttered, “Stop acting like a sixteen-year-old ninny.” And entered the kitchen.

“Well, honey, talking to yourself is considered an evolved form of ninny-ness,” a sexy female voice drawled from the inside.

Ziya chuckled and reached for the coffee pot before addressing the comment and its maker.

Noor, dressed only in shorts and a tank top, sexy, sleepy attire with an opened hot pink hoodie thrown on for fashion as much as modesty, raised her coffee mug in a toast. She had the kind of face that stopped traffic. Heart-shaped, with sharp, green eyes that could turn sultry or throw daggers, and a mouth that was made for sex. That with a killer body that she dressed to maximum effect. She could have been a supermodel but she had chosen academia as her calling.

“Just because you are an Oxford scholar doesn’t mean you can make words up, my dear.”

She fired up the gas and placed the iron skillet on it, dropping in a healthy pat of butter while she scrounged the refrigerator for eggs. Scrambled eggs were a morning staple around here. She glanced over her shoulder at Noor who cradled her mug for warmth. “You want?”

Noor shuddered, and the sweatshirt slipped a little to show one tanned shoulder. “No way. That much carbs in the morning will make me a beached whale and then I won’t look hot at my wedding. And, hey, ninny-ness is too a word. I can prove it to you.” Noor took the English language more seriously as the season’s latest fashion.