Page 83 - James Caan - The Real Deal

8 · Aisha

more. At twenty-two she was nearly two years older than me.
Although I wouldn’t be twenty-one until the end of December,
people had assumed I was older than I was for so long that by this
point I couldn’t actually tell you the last time I had dated anyone
younger than me. It took me a while to realise that the usual fifteen
minutes I spent with candidates had become an hour, and I’d
moved on to ask her about her family. ‘How many sisters have you
got?’‘Where do you hang out?’ I had a licence to ask her anything
I wanted. Her background was very different from mine: her
parents were from Bombay and had professional careers – her dad
was a civil servant and her mum worked for the Law Society – and
she had been encouraged to study. It struck me how different our
influences had been, and I found that difference really intriguing.
Towards the end of the interview, I’ddefinitely gone beyond ‘Is
she right for the job?’ to ‘I think she’s right for me!’ but I didn’t
quite know what to do about it: asking her straight out seemed
inappropriate, even though I had done that with candidates before.
All I knew was that I wanted to see her again.
‘I think you’d really fit in here, so I’d like to see you again for a
second interview.’
I gave her a training script we used with new recruits.
‘Take a look at this, and when you come back we can go
through it together and see how you get on. Let’s talk on Monday
and put a date in the diary.’
It just so happened that I was having lunch with my parents that
weekend and found myself telling them that I’d met a girl. I never
told them about my private life, so they knew instantly that
something was going on.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Aisha Patel.’
There was a moment’s silence as they took in that it was an
Asian name.
‘You’re wasting your time,’ my father said. ‘She’s a Hindu.’

73