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approval—Melissa was something else altogether. She was definitely as attracted to him as he was to her, but she was treating the whole situation as a bit of a joke.
    ‘I’m rolling the windows down,’ she announced when they came to a stretch where, wonder of wonders, there was an actual repair crew busily laying a new layer of tar on top of the existing apology for a road. ‘I love the smell of fresh tar.’
    She didn’t wait for his permission, and Samir wondered what she’d have said if he told her he was allergic to dust and tarry smells. He wasn’t, but if he had been she’d probably have found that funny as well, he thought resignedly.
    ‘Did you notice how the colour of the soil changes between states?’ she was asking. ‘It was brown while we were in Maharashtra, then it turned black near the Karnataka border—and in Goa it’s brick-red.’
    Samir shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t notice something like that even if there were mile-high signs telling me about it.’
    Melissa didn’t say anything, but it was clear she thought that not noticing anything sounded incredibly boring.
    He gave her a quick smile. ‘Though I do notice that you have a dirt smear on your cheek,’ he said, stroking the offending item lightly with the back of his hand. ‘That comes from having your nose stuck out of the window.’
    ‘Touché,’ Melissa said and grinned as she rubbed the smudge off. ‘I’ve always wanted to say that to someone, only I’ve never met anyone swanky enough to speak French to.’
    ‘I might be swanky, but I can at least speak Hindi,’ Samir remarked. ‘You’re jabbering away in English all the time.’
    ‘In the agency? That’s because poor old Dubeyji almost had a heart attack when I tried speaking to him in Hindi. Apparently my grammar’s all wrong, and I sound terribly rude.’
    ‘You sound terribly rude even when you’re speaking English,’ Samir murmured.
    She punched him lightly in the arm. ‘Ouch, way too musclebound,’ she said, pretending to nurse the knuckles on her right hand. ‘You should go easy on the gym—live life a little. You’d make a much nicer punching bag if you were flabby.’
    ‘What a nice thought,’ he said, laughing. ‘But I think I’ll stick to my gym routine. And you might want to concentrate on that map—there’s a town coming up and I’ve no idea whether to go through it or around it.’
    * * *
    ‘You have reached your destination,’ the smug voice-over on the map informed them a few hours later.
    ‘Except that we’re in the middle of freaking nowhere,’ Samir muttered.
    After telling them to take a right turn towards the Uttorda beach the map had carefully led them to a cul-de-sac, with the beach on one side and a grove of coconut trees on the other.
    A man passed by them, whistling cheerfully, and Melissa rolled down the window. ‘Is there a hotel nearby?’ she asked him in Konkani.
    ‘Lots,’ the man said. ‘This is Goa—not the Thar desert. Any particular one that you might be looking for?’
    Melissa consulted the name on the map and told him.
    ‘You’ll need to go back the way you came for a kilometre or so,’ he said. ‘Turn right at the big purple house and you’ll see the signs for the hotel.’
    ‘Well, at least it got us this far,’ Samir said in resigned tones as he switched off the tablet a few minutes later. ‘Though I wish our friend back there had given clearer directions—every third house here is purple. It didn’t occur to me earlier—you’re Goan, aren’t you? Don’t you have family here?’
    ‘They all live very far away,’ Melissa said. ‘Um, should I call Devdeep or someone who’s already arrived and get proper directions?’
    ‘You’d need to explain where we are first,’ Samir said. ‘Let’s do the old-fashioned thing and ask a real live human being.’
    The next ‘real live human being’ they met fortunately knew the area well, and within ten minutes they were pulling into the hotel