Now That You're Rich: Let's fall in Love! Read online

  Durjoy Datta

  Maanvi Ahuja

  NOW THAT YOU’RE RICH

  Let’s Fall in Love!

  Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Dedication

  You Need to Hear This

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  chapter 16

  chapter 17

  chapter 18

  chapter 19

  chapter 20

  chapter 21

  chapter 22

  chapter 23

  chapter 24

  chapter 25

  chapter 26

  chapter 27

  chapter 28

  chapter 29

  chapter 30

  chapter 31

  chapter 32

  chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Also in Penguin Metro Reads

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN METRO READS

  NOW THAT YOU’RE RICH

  Durjoy Datta was born and brought up in New Delhi. He completed a degree in engineering and business management before embarking on a writing career. His first book, Of Course I Love You …, was published when he was twenty-one years old and was an instant bestseller. His successive novels—Now That You’re Rich …, She Broke Up, I Didn’t!, Oh Yes, I’m Single!, If It’s Not Forever …, Someone Like You—have also found prominence on various bestseller lists, making him one of the highest-selling authors in India. Durjoy lives in New Delhi, loves dogs and is an active CrossFitter.

  For more updates, you can follow him on Facebook (www.facebook.com/durjoydatta1) or Twitter (@durjoydatta).

  Maanvi Ahuja was born in New Delhi, and did her post graduation in finance from IIM, Kozhikode. She is the author of two books, Of Course I Love You … and Now That You’re Rich …, both of which have been on various bestseller lists. Currently residing in Mumbai, she works as an investment banker at a leading banking firm.

  To know more about her, you can mail her at: [email protected].

  Also by Durjoy Datta

  Hold My Hand

  She Broke Up, I Didn’t!

  I Just Kissed Someone Else!

  Of Course I Love You

  Till I Find Someone Better

  (With Maanvi Ahuja)

  Oh Yes, I’m Single!

  And So Is My Girlfriend!

  (With Neeti Rustagi)

  Till the Last Breath …

  Someone Like You

  (With Nikita Singh)

  You Were My Crush

  Till You Said You Love Me!

  (With Orvana Ghai)

  If It’s Not Forever

  It’s Not Love

  (With Nikita Singh)

  To Shelly (1998–2009)

  The bravest, cutest and smartest dog ever. We will miss you.

  You Need to Hear This

  I have always been terrible with secrets and stories that are never meant to be told or passed on. A very feminine trait, I know. But then, stories are meant to be told, aren’t they?

  Lazing in my cosy couch today, with a laptop on my lap, I can’t help but recall a story that I have told a million times, no matter how many times I have been asked to shut up.

  But I find no reasons as to why I shouldn’t pen this one down and entertain a few souls while irritating a few others. What the heck! I will write it.

  This one, I think, has all the elements: a guy with a Porsche, a girl lost in love, selfish parents, loving siblings, a love scene on a thirteenth-floor terrace, lecherous seniors, blackmail, life-altering videos, hideous bosses, infinitely sexy co-workers, drunk guys professing undying love and last but not the least … definitely not the least … money.

  Fifty years after you get married, you find women with no grey hair desirable, you find women who are not obese attractive; whoever that woman might be, she won’t be your wife. The girl you’re in love with today, the girl who you think is smart and interesting and pretty, will be the one who will make you feel your skull is being clawed open with Wolverine paws. Love is often blind, and it blinds you short-term and makes you overlook what time changes.

  Love makes the world go round. But money buys the tickets.

  Maybe, love lasts a lifetime. Money lasts longer. It pays for the funeral, too.

  Falling in love is easy. Choose the sweet guy who sits next to you in class and flutter your eyelashes at him, or pick the girl who does as much as talk to you, exchange numbers, be her wake-up call in the morning, send sweet text messages telling him or her how much they meant to you, and BAM! You are in Love.

  So, what’s wrong?

  The analysis … You forget to analyse how this situation will play out after a decade when the girl or the guy is no longer pretty and they are predictable and boring. You forget to ask yourself the simplest and the most obvious of questions.

  Is the guy rich? Is the girl rich? Does the girl have a brother? Am I ready to be with him after thirty years, come what may? Will I be happy with a husband who has not been to the gym since his teens when he used to be buff and fit, and is now fat and lazy? Will he be able to sustain my needs and the kids who are going to wreak havoc later?

  Will I be happy after ten years with the girl who now dresses up like someone’s dead? Will I be happy to see her wrinkled smile twenty years down the line, with bills piling up at my doorstep?

  Will I tolerate it with a smile when she tells me that the neighbour just bought a new car and she wishes to have one, too?

  One answer settles it all.

  Marry rich, very rich.

  We are nice people, and for us, relationships are meant to last a lifetime. If they don’t, the guy is a bastard and a jerk, and the girl is a cheating slut. So, till the time that changes, choose your date for tonight carefully. You might just end up spending a lifetime together.

  Fall in love carefully. Piles and wads of money usually break the fall and make for a smoother landing. So, now that the pearls of wisdom have trickled down my brain to the recesses of yours, let us go on with the story.

  It’s the story of the four of them.

  Overachievers. Geeks. Nerds. The ones who ask for sheets after sheets in examination halls while you look blankly at the question paper, cursing yourself for not studying the night before. The ones will be out with the answer while you are still looking for your calculator, trying to figure out which numbers to tap. Whom would you not consider as serious contenders while predicting class ranks? Olympiad winners? College gold medallists?

  All four of them, brilliant minds.

  The first amongst them, Abhijeet, exemplified everything I just said. He had yet to score in the eighties, or the seventies; anything less than the mid-nineties depressed him and for good reaon. He was the most hardworking student you would ever come across.

  He had led an uneventful life. The craziest thing he had ever done was to take an exam with a chapter not revised. So, let me start from the day he spent his last day as a college topper, when something remotely happening happened.

  1

  It was the fourth of January and the air in the college campus was redolent with expectations and the sweat of his fellow classmates who were still looking for jobs.

  There were more than a few pairs of eyes on him; most of them had disgust dripping fr
om them. A few greeted him and the others looked away. He had already been placed in a company which offered him seventeen lakhs per annum, but he wanted more. The company on campus that day was offering thirty lakh Indian rupees per annum. It was an opportunity of a lifetime.

  He left the presentation that the Human Resources of the company had prepared especially for the students of Shri Ram College of Commerce and headed for the library where he came across a few of his professors. They wished him luck and said they had full faith in his capabilities. Abhijeet was too brilliant for his own good. He was good enough to be hated.

  I need this. This is what I want to do, he told himself and trudged to the library. He passed the college bookshop and spotted a few of his classmates in an intense discussion with Raju bhaiya. Raju had seen hundreds of students spend the best three years of their lives in front of him. Years later, they would discuss him in their reunions, but Abhijeet would never be a part of those discussions because he had been too busy with books and seniors and sucking up to his professors. Being the brilliant college topper for two years in a row was a full-time job that hardly left any time for friends or frolic.

  Macroeconomics, by Ravi Shastri. He flipped through the pages. There was nothing new. He flipped through some other books. Accounts. Business Studies. Law.

  Same thing.

  The last two years of spending hours neck-deep in those books, while others were looking down cleavages, held him in good stead.

  Abhijeet had been brought up in a single income family. His father worked in the Delhi Development Authority while his mother was a housewife. The glaring difference between his father and his uncles’ wealth always pinched him: their cars, their big houses and the big rings on their fingers. He always felt he was missing out on something. Though his parents did whatever they could for him, he did not like it when his uncle discussed business and laughed out loud at losses that were more than his father’s yearly income. He wanted to make it big. This was his day and his chance to get back at them. While his cousins were waiting in the wings to join their fathers in their dingy manufacturing units that made plastic buckets and trinkets, it was his chance to become a front-end investment banker, the most grossly overpaid and overworked of all white collar jobs.

  Abhijeet was always conspicuous by his presence. He was a Delhi Board 2004 topper, an NTSE scholar and CA foundation rank one. Everybody knew who he was. Some girls even found him cute, but then, girls also say that about stray puppies. Big deal.

  But I wouldn’t really call him average-looking with his just-right complexion, lean frame and chocolate-boy looks on a six-foot frame. He was better-looking than many guys around, but he hid behind huge rimmed glasses, dull shirts and oversized trousers. The worn-out white sport shoes under the loose dirt-brown trousers just made things worse.

  That morning, it had been hardly a few minutes since he had started reading an article on subprime losses and their fallout when he heard a meek, squeaky voice of a girl.

  Riya had just joined college and looked so. She stood no taller than Abhijeet’s shoulder and had a baby face that had not left her since eighth standard. She was as fair and as cute as they get. Beyond measure. Nice baby-like eyes. Small pouty pink lips. The brightest shade of pink could be named after her. A big smile was her biggest asset; it never left her face.

  Abhijeet was used to juniors coming to him with questions about professors, subjects and career options. For the juniors looking to emulate Abhijeet in academics, he was a helpful senior and an eager guide.

  She pulled up a chair, and after congratulating him for his placement with HLL, the conversation shifted to other things.

  ‘But all my friends are taking tuitions,’ she said and her lips curved downwards when Abhijeet dismissed tuition centres for being money-sucking business ventures with no commitment towards results or academic excellence.

  ‘If you concentrate hard enough in the classes and don’t miss any, I don’t think you need to spend so much on tuitions.’

  ‘Yes, I guess. But you are a topper. It’s easy for you to say this.’

  ‘It’s not that. Attend classes and you too will do well. It’s easy.’

  ‘But who will attend all the classes?’ she asked and leaned back on her chair. A little shorter and her feet would not have touched the floor. ‘There is so much to do. There is the choreography team, the Western dance team … there are so many movies to watch … the new one … Johnny Depp is looking so hot in it, even though I don’t like his beard … but that is okay … and there is this nice new party place near Vasant Kunj, you’ve got to go there … you just can’t miss it. It is done in pink and blue … it is wonderful … and add to that, shopping and old friends from school and new friends from college … there is no time left … Oh! And there is a new Bercos in Kamla Nagar and it is so eww … but there is this small shop near it which has these real nice earrings …’

  She went on and on and on. Abhijeet did not mind, he was busy noticing her. Her white T-shirt hung down from a shoulder and showed a strap—pink.

  Her T-shirt spelled out Sugar—in pink. There was perfect colour harmony. Earrings and shoes. Shoes and bangles. Bangles and hair colour. There were about twenty shades of pink on her that day. She even smelled pink.

  ‘Riya?’ somebody shouted from behind them.

  ‘Oh … I must get going. We are going for a movie today. Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Missing classes again?’

  ‘Yes,’ she crinkled her nose and smiled. ‘Bye,’ she said, clutched her bright pink handbag and left.

  He followed the skin-fit jeans with little fake diamonds on them and the screaming pink handbag, as she hopped across the library and joined her friends. For a girl of her height, she had considerable curves, almost like a miniature Beyoncé. She would grow up to be a voluptuous and attractive woman, that is, if she ever grew up.

  Abhijeet smiled at himself and got back to his newspaper, running the conversation over and over again in his mind, reliving it again. Blood had rushed from every vein to his face and his cheeks had turned into a shade of red.

  This day defined his life.

  Not only did he have the single longest conversation with a girl, he was through Silverman Finance and was officially on his way to be an investment banker in a few months’ time.

  Geeks fall in love way too quickly. It’s for the simple reason that it is not every day that a girl so cute comes up to them and starts a conversation.

  Abhijeet was in love. Deep true, eternal, undying love!

  It was his third plate of Maggi and his stomach was about to revolt, but he could not think of a better reason to sit outside her class, which faced the canteen.

  The hour changed. The class changed … but there was no sign of her.

  The last three days of waiting finally yielded a positive result as she walked past him, surrounded by friends, hopping between them and screeching at the top of her voice as she begged them to miss another class and go bowling. Abhijeet sat up and prayed that she would notice him.

  She and another classmate of hers stayed back while the others entered the class.

  Abhijeet alternated between staring at his plate and looking at her, keeping a page half turned to look busy. She was in the same colours as she had been the other day. She wore a baby pink T-shirt that hung loosely over her and seemed to have been picked out from the kids’ section of a garment store. The sun reflected off her face and it glowed bright yellow. Her long straight-pressed hair that came down to her waist was shining.

  She did not see him.

  He sat there, waiting for her to notice him, often changing positions, getting up and then sitting down again, rustling the pages in order to catch her attention, but nothing worked.

  Disappointed, he got up to leave.

  Just as he crossed her, she noticed him and came running over, her waving her handbag in the air, a different one but pink nevertheless.

  ‘Hi! Where are you going?’ she asked. �
��Oh … by the way, congratulations for getting through! I told all my friends about you and they went nuts that I know the guy who got placed with Silverman Finance! Isn’t that just the dream? But then I told them that we have just talked once and then they were like okay … but you’ve got to admit … I am your lucky charm. We talked and you got through, so I deserve a treat and I know this place and it’s really nice … but you look so tired, what happened?’

  Abhijeet had started blushing again.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Okay, listen, I’ve got to go now because I have this practice … it’s the Western dance thing and the competition is in two months and you have got to see it. Okay, got to go, catch you later, bye!’

  ‘Okay, bye!’

  She left him smiling ear-to-ear.

  Gradually, Riya started noticing Abhijeet around all the time. Ignoring someone who’s always where you are is usually quite tough and Abhijeet made sure he was always in sight of Riya.

  Small conversations started to brew and they soon exchanged numbers. Abhijeet used to stare at the number for hours on an end.

  Free time between classes was spent at the Café Coffee Day nearby. Messages were exchanged, day in and day out. Generally, if you are exchanging more than twenty messages with a girl in a day, I would say you are in love … or if you’re not, you will be and will regret it when you get caught in the friend zone.

  They were getting closer each passing day. Her innocent charm had him in knots every time she smiled at him and he helped her cope with the daily rigour of college.

  ‘I really don’t need this,’ Abhijeet said to her as she held out a pair of jeans, faded near the crotch and the knees and the back pockets. She had taken him to accompany her on one of her shopping sprees, but seeing him in the mirror, so awfully dressed, she couldn’t help herself.

  ‘Are you crazy? This is what everyone is wearing these days! Seen OC? 90210? EVERYONE! You’ve just got to have one of these. Trust me, they’ll look awesome. You have the face and the physique for it. Just go, try them. Next, we will try those ones there, they are a little expensive but you can’t miss out on those,’ she said, as she pushed him into the fitting room.