Celebrity Castaway |ONGOING| MaNan Fiction

2| Cold Shoulder

A/N: Hello readers? How are you all doing? Firstly, I would like to wish all of you a very happy Dussehra and Vijaya Dashami. The holy spirit has been known to have said, there is a little devil hidden deep inside every new born and it is up to ourselves to nurture it or not. Dussehra therefore seems like the perfect opportunity to gain victory, by defeating the evil in the devil, and by hailing the Devi lying within the devil! Alhamdulillah.

Now, coming to the story.

So, Nandini is in the city of dreams, Mumbai, now. Are you all excited? Do you think she will have a chance encounter with Manik or they will continue to coexist in the same city for a week,  without coming face to face? :D

Okay, before starting, one last callout. So, this story will have some flashback narration in it, but I don't want to keep a flash back title before beginning the flash back paragraphs. I personally feel it breaks the flow of the reader. So in this story please note that, whenever a paragraph is in italics, it is a flashback.

Oh and please don't confuse italics writing within parenthesis' [italics] as flashbacks, those denote text messages NOT flashbacks.

So to sum it, italics paragraph without parenthesis means flashback & [short italics sentences between parenthesis] means text messages! (This is not confusing at all! :P)

Okay, chop chop, happy reading!

***

Mumbai

The first two days of her training went smoothly & slowly she was relaxing a bit. Three more days, and she was good to go. To go away from this city, from the past she wants nothing to do with. Every morning she woke up and consciously diverted her focus from thinking about her past too much and prayed to God that the day passed with no major events and so far, she was lucky; but the third day was different.

That morning when Nandini went to the restaurant that hosted the morning breakfast buffet, there was some extra hustle there, it was unusually crowded. Usually it was just them, the folks from Hebbar & Sons who'd come for training, the training instructor & his manager, and a couple of other guests who were staying in this corporate hotel in the outskirts of Chembur, but that day it looked like another fifty odd people had turned up there & they all seemed to know each other. Was there another conference happening in the hotel, she wondered. That wasn't possible, was it? Hebbar & Sons wasn't a multinational company with massively deep pockets, so the hotel they booked wasn't fancy enough to have multiple conference facilities. Then who were those people? As she finally found a spot to sit with her colleagues, she heard something that kind of solved this puzzle for her. Two words that clarified all her confusion & weighed her heart down to stone at the same time.

The word Crew and the word Shoot.

"Is the crew ready for the shoot now? Guys, the actors are ready and waiting at the vanity! Hurry up now!" shouted one man as he walked into the restaurant wearing a baseball cap, with a microphone stuck on his ear, while clutching a lightmeter. He looked irritated, much like all the production guys she'd seen from all her time when she was married to Manik Malhotra. She stopped breathing in shock and soon the crew started moving out of the place, leaving it empty, but taking Nandini's peace with them.

Come on, she was in Mumbai, the city was covered with studios, and sets & every third place was a shooting spot. It could be a shoot for anything, this wasn't the kind of place super-star Manik Malhotra would shoot in, she tried convincing herself.

But, this time around, she was wrong.

***

"Cabir, please check once, how long will it take for them to be ready with the next shot?" Manik mumbled casually, while flicking through his phone, as his friend cum stylist Mukti was working with his hair.