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All our phones pinged at the same time, and we looked at each other warily as they kept pinging with messages. I pulled mine out and frowned at the messages from my assistant. Each successive text seemed increasingly distressed. They all spoke of impending doom and I wondered if he was high.
Finally, he sent me two images and I stared in horror at the screen because if there were any images I’d never want to be made public, it was these two.
“What the hell is this?” demanded Diya, staring at her screen in confusion.
“It’s a picture of Veer on a yacht,” said Dheer, who had got the same image from somewhere. “He’s trending on social media right now, and not in a good way. Kirori Ji just sent me some links for articles about him.”
I was reading one such article that my assistant had forwarded to me and it was bad. Really bad. Dread curled around my innards and I took a deep breath as I tried to make sense of what was happening.
“I can’t spot Veer in this image. Oh, there you are! Eww…. what the fuck is that on your head?” yelped Diya.
That was a bra. That a woman took off and draped around my head like a crown.
Fuck it! I should have known this party in Monaco would come back to bite me in the butt, I thought grimly. There I was - wearing only a pair of swimming shorts and that bloody bra on my head.
I looked like a moron.
“You look like the poster child for billionaire debauchery,” exclaimed Diya.
“It’s not what you think,” I said wearily. “It was just a joke.”
“I don’t see anything funny about it,” she shot back. “What kind of parties do you host on that yacht?”
“First of all, this is a very old pic. At least five years old,” I argued. “And I didn’t even know that woman. She was drunk and waving her bra around like a flag, draping it over random people because she found it funny. She was escorted off the boat soon after this scene.”
“There’s another picture of you emerging from a bathroom at some nightclub in Amsterdam wiping your red nose,” said Dheer, shoving his phone in my face. “You fucking idiot!”
“I thought that was your name,” I drawled to hide the rage that coursed through my body at the accusation in his tone. No matter how much he provoked me, I had to remember that he was married to my sister. And that I was in his house. Ma would disown me if I beat up her precious Jamai Sa in his own house.
Besides, I didn’t blame him for jumping to the most obvious conclusion. I looked like Rudolph the fucking reindeer, and my bloodshot eyes made it look like I’d just done some lines of coke in the bathroom. But I hadn’t!
“This is not a joke, Veer,” he snapped.
“For fuck’s sake, I had a bad cold that day,” I roared. “This was your party, Diya. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, yeah! We flew down to Amsterdam for the weekend after Paris Fashion Week,” remembered Diya. “You were sick as a dog, and we stayed in the hotel all weekend because you had a high fever.”
“It looks very bad, Veer. The trolls are calling you a charsi,” said Dheer.
“But why? What set this off?” asked Diya.
“The better question would be who set it off?” I said softly. “Someone did this deliberately.”
Before I could say anything else, a car roared up the driveway and I cursed under my breath. My parents must have seen the pictures and had turned around to demand some answers.
Baba hopped out of the car and I could see him practically vibrating with fury.
“Explain yourself, Ranveer,” he snapped, his voice sharp as a whip.
“It’s a set-up, Baba,” I replied, trying not to rise to the anger in his voice.
I had to stay calm because if I panicked, it was all over. After all, I had anticipated some pushback when I agreed to join politics. And from all sides, not just the land mafia.
“Are the photos fake?”
“No, they aren’t,” I admitted with a sigh. “But it’s not what it looks like.”
In one masterstroke, whoever had engineered this attack had used my own past against me.
