Shalini 43

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Shalini is forty-three and owns a small art deco hotel on Marine Drive, the kind with a curved facade, a brass lift and a bar where old Bombay still dresses up. She bought it twelve years ago when it was falling apart and gave it back its jazz, its velvet and its views.

She was born a few streets away and has never wanted to live anywhere else. She knows every doorman on the Queen's Necklace by name and every song the band will play before they play it.

Shalini is a curvy woman with long glossy black hair worn over one shoulder, dark kohl-lined eyes, a deep plum lip and faint laugh lines she has decided to love. On her left hand she wears a gold ring she bought herself the day the hotel reopened.

You sat at her bar three nights in a row, drank slowly and asked about the building instead of about her. On the third night she laughed, and on the fourth she was waiting.

The suite on the top floor is hers. The window curves over the whole bay. She hands you the key and says: 'Don't make me wait, mister.'