Gehna’s baby shower was actually two baby showers. Her mom had staked the first claim by planning a tea party for the family only. The Yam, on hearing about it, immediately began planning a dinner party on the same day for friends only.

‘You’re mental,’ Gehna had told her. ‘I’ll have to haul the foetus a 100 kilometres from Pali Hill to yours in rush-hour traffic. Why can’t you have your thing at my place?’

‘Because tradition, babe. Tradition demands that the mom-to-be’s best friend throw the baby shower at her own home.’

‘It demands no such thing. Besides, when did you start giving a damn about tradition?’

The Yam, having no answer, had changed the subject to the guest list. It was hard to stay annoyed with someone who was that excited about your baby shower. And Eram, though he hadn’t really mentioned it as a positive, had been right about Gehna’s ‘whole zen thing’. There was, she noticed, a natural flow to life. When she fought it, or tried to force things to go her way, she just ended up feeling angry and disappointed. So, she was practising acceptance. Letting events take their own course. If, as in this case, events were taking Gehna on a cross-city party hop, so be it.

Nina Rai’s tea party was organized, as expected, with precision and beauty. The living room was canopied in panels of pink silk that descended in gentle waves from a central point in the ceiling. Arrangements of white lilies, carnations and roses in vases of varying heights dotted every available surface. The tea itself was served on delicately patterned platters from the Good Earth store in Juhu—smoked salmon and cucumber brioches, burrata and tomato crostini, devilled eggs, raspberry cream tartlets, vanilla pound cake, macaroons and an unreasonable number of shortbreads. There was an assortment of liqueur chocolates in fuchsia pouches for the guests to take home afterwards. Gehna took one look and pulled Druhi aside to hiss at her.

‘What’s going on here? Is someone getting married and no one told me?’

The housekeeper didn’t roll her eyes or click her tongue or in any way let on just how harassed she had been over the last few days of party prep. She signed: Your mother is trying to show her support. By having a nice baby shower for you. That is all.

‘This,’ Gehna waved both hands at the pink-and-white confection that was the living room, ‘this isn’t a nice baby shower, Dee, it’s a Miss Virginia pageant.’

Druhi might have on occasion disagreed with her employer when they were alone, but to the rest of the world she was Nina Rai’s staunchest ally. Privately, she understood Nina Rai’s motivation for hosting an unarguably over-the-top celebration like this one. When your teenage daughter gets knocked up, you either keep it on the down-low as much as possible and tiptoe around the shame of the fact, or you own it. Nina Rai was owning it.