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CHAPTER1
TASHA
Ileaned against the wall and drew in a deep breath. As the salty sea breeze filled my lungs, I raised my face to the sky and allowed the bright Goan sunshine to bathe me in its warmth. For the first time in my life, I felt free. I felt safe.
“It’s good to see you happy for once,” said Freddy, and I tried not to make a scrunchy face.
Happy was a bit of a stretch. I hadn’t felt happy for a long time. And I didn’t think I would ever feel happy again. But, while I couldn’t do happy, I could definitely do grateful. Which meant that I couldn’t unload any more of my issues on Freddy, who had been kind enough to offer me shelter when I turned up at his doorstep unannounced.
“Only an idiot wouldn’t be happy in paradise,” I replied, with a smile.
And that proved what my mother had always said. I was an idiot.
My father had been the last Raja of Hindal and I had inherited his considerable fortune, which was a good thing since I refused to touch my mother’s money. After the witch died - hopefully, in prison - I was going to donate all her money to charity in her sister, Princess Smriti’s name, knowing that it would make my mother’s evil soul weep in fury for the rest of eternity.
For now, I had plenty of money. Enough to live wherever I wanted.
When I left Nagaur House and my old life behind, I had chosen to live in paradise - or what passed for paradise on earth - and yet, I couldn’t dredge up even one ounce of happiness from the bottom of my miserable soul. All because of a man. His Highness Digvijay Singh, Maharaja of the erstwhile princely state of Bindhar, also known as DV.
Who was the moron who said that doing the right thing brought its own form of joy? Whoever he was -because of course, it was a man. A woman would never say anything so stupid- he deserved to be shot in the head. At point-blank. Because it wasn’t true. For once in my life, I had done the right thing, and all it did was bring me misery.
I had broken off my engagement to DV because I couldn’t bear to be tied to a man who didn’t want me. I had seen it in his eyes every time he looked at me. He was trapped. And he wasn’t even fighting to get away. He was just resigned to his fate.
You’d think that after a lifetime of not being wanted by anyone, one more rejection wouldn’t pinch anymore. But it did. Oh, it did. The resignation I saw in his eyes when he talked about our future together on the night of Sona’s wedding hurt like a bitch. He was too decent to dump a girl whose mother had been arrested for murdering her sister and brother-in-law - a girl who was now all alone in the world except for a grandmother and a new-found cousin.
He might have been too decent to break it off, but I wasn’t. I was tired of feeling unwanted.
All my life, my mother had treated me like a burden. As if I was a cross that she had to bear. A taint on the pure bloodline of the Nagaurs and the Hindals. I had grown up believing that I would never be good enough for my family, no matter how much I tried. My grandmother had been too wrapped up in her grief over my aunt’s death to notice how my mother was treating me, and I had believed all the nonsense that my mother had stuffed into my head.
When I realised the extent of my mother’s crimes, I saw that there was nothing to tie me to my blue-blooded family anymore. I was only living in Nagaur House because I was too much of a chicken to stand up to my bully of a mother. Now that she was in jail, I was free to live my life on my terms. Free to break away from anything and anyone who made me feel less of a person. Unwanted. Rejected.
My grandmother had a shiny new granddaughter, Sona. She didn’t need me hanging around the house as a constant reminder of my mother’s crimes. Which was why I broke off my engagement and walked out on my family that night.
I booked a one-way ticket to Goa and landed on Freddy’s doorstep at three in the morning.
Freddy Suratwala was one of my father’s oldest friends. They were best friends until my father died in a plane crash when I was five. The private plane that my father was flying in had crashed into the side of a mountain in Scotland, and everyone on board had been killed, including DV’s father, who was also one of my father’s best friends. They were so close that when I was born, they cemented that friendship by promising to make me marry DV.
If our fathers had survived that crash, I’m sure DV and I would have broken off our betrothal long ago because we were truly a match made in hell, but out of respect for their dead souls, we had allowed it to drag on to this point. Big mistake.
Freddy was a very successful businessman, with a string of restaurants and nightclubs in Goa. And a few years ago, he had set up Paradiso, a gated commune for people who wanted to experience the organic way of life. It was full of hippie foreigners who were happy to live off the grid in solar-powered mud cottages, growing organic fruits and vegetables, making jewellery, and teaching yoga.
It was just what I wanted. I wanted… no, Ineededto disappear. Natasha Raje, princess of Hindal and Nagaur, needed to disappear. Forever. From now, I would be Tasha. First name only. Like Madonna. Or Adele. Or Badshah.
And in the three months that I had spent in Paradiso, I had come into my own. Kind of.
I couldn’t grow vegetables or fruits, because anything I touched shrivelled up and died, thanks to my black thumb. I was thrown out of the jewellery-making class because I stabbed my deskmate in the face with silver wire. Hey, that wasn’t my fault! Well, not entirely. That silver wire isn’t as easy to twist as the instructor claims.
I was a disaster at yoga because of my complete lack of spatial awareness and balance. And I crashed their computer trying to help with the accounts because Excel sheets made me see double. Again, not my fault! My talents lie elsewhere!
I am a born salesman. It runs in my blood. The first Raja of Hindal won his jagir by selling fake diamond mines to a Viceroy who luckily died of snakebite before he discovered that his wonderful new mines were duds. Us Hindals are born hustlers. My grandfather amassed a huge fortune by cheating rich young royals out of their estates at poker.
Just to clarify, I do not approve of cheating people out of their fortunes.
But those hustling genes came in handy at Paradiso. Within three months, I had taken over the PR for the commune. I updated their website and reworked their social media accounts until we got blue ticks on all the platforms.
We had rented out five more cottages and had hosted seven yoga retreats in the time that I had been there, all thanks to my efforts. I was doing something meaningful for the first time in my life. I was giving back to the community.
And yet, in the evenings, when I sat on the porch of my tiny cottage with a glass of wine, staring at the sunset, I couldn’t stop thinking about DV.
