Destination Wedding

by Diksha Basu

  She had told Andrew this story once, over a bottle of wine and a plate of jalapeño poppers somewhere in Fort Greene.

  “I hope it’s easier being Indian in middle school in America now,” Tina had said to Andrew. “You know, my mother always wanted to name me Priyanka but she was worried I’d be made fun of for my name so she picked the race-neutral Tina. I bet all the Indian kids are named Priyanka now.”

  “Probably some white kids too,” Andrew added. “But come on, being Indian, even fifteen years ago, could not have been that hard.”

  “My classmates used to ask if I preferred eating monkey or elephant,” Tina said.

  “Okay, my classmates used to say they wanted to have sex with my mother. The term ‘MILF’ had just been coined and my mother, well, you know how she likes tight jeans and low-cut tops,” Andrew said. “Middle school sucks for everyone.”

  “But yours has nothing to do with your race,” Tina said.

  “And yours has nothing to do with your mother,” Andrew said. “Look, I’m not defending what people said but sometimes you label someone racist when it’s maybe just personal distaste. Like instead of saying this person doesn’t like you, it’s easier to say this person doesn’t like Indians. I’m not talking about your middle school classmates, all kids are assholes, but I’m talking about now. Like last week when you called the barista at that coffee shop racist because she was rude to you.”

  “I can’t believe you’re taking her side,” Tina said.

  “There was a long line and you asked to sample oat milk,” Andrew said.

  “It doesn’t sound like a real milk,” Tina had said.

  Less than a week later they had broken up.

  Another mosquito landed on Tina’s arm. She looked down at it, this terrifying tiny creature that was more dangerous to humans than any shark or roaring lion.

  Could she pitch Pixl a documentary on children suffering from malaria or dengue? She could make the opening sequence like Jaws only it would be Bites.

  A pre-winter haze hovered over the Colebrookes lawns. It looked romantic even though Tina knew it was pollution. But the thing with Delhi pollution was that it never felt sinister when you were in it for just a few days. Having constantly read about it in the news recently, she had put an anti-pollution mask in her suitcase but she knew she wasn’t going to use it. On the circular lawn, a man in a brown khaki uniform and a loosely tied turban on his head lazily raked the grass.

  Memories usually made things seem smaller in reality but Colebrookes looked bigger than Tina remembered. Shefali’s family used to come here every day, and whenever Tina had visited India as a child, she used to love being invited to play tennis or feed the horses and then have masala cheese toast, slices of creamy Black Forest cake, and bottles of fizzy, sweet cream soda. It all felt so decadent, the way the butlers wore uniforms and called them Miss Tina and Miss Shefali even though they were nine years old. Shefali’s father’s side of the family had been members for generations. It was next to impossible to get in now, Shefali’s father always bragged.

  “It’s not about the fees,” he said. “This isn’t one of those horrid new clubs where you can just pay your way in. You need to have history—ideally have a road in Delhi with your family name on the sign. These new-new clubs, they’re available to everyone and their mother and the staff act snooty and there’s no sense of hospitality. You know that new Saket Recreational Centre? An undercover journalist discovered that key parties were being organized there.”

  “What are key parties?” Tina had asked. Nobody answered, and it had taken Tina half a decade to find out.

  On the far side of the grass stood a row of cars—mostly white Ambassadors and some black, expensive-looking cars with tinted windows. Birds chirped high up in the neem trees and horns beeped faintly on the main road but, at 6 A.M., it was decidedly silent and peaceful. Except for the sudden thwack of pigeon poop landing on Tina’s chair millimeters from her arm. Tina looked down at the white splatter and considered moving chairs but then remembered she had just wiped mosquito blood on the other cushion. “Never mind,” she told herself. “This is the charm of India. Home.”

  Her father always said that Indians believed a bird pooping on you to be a sign of good luck, Tina remembered. What a country of optimists.

  Maybe Pixl would go for a documentary on global superstitions. No, that would blur very quickly into religion and somehow offend everyone.

  Her peaceful contemplation ended when a dark blue Jaguar with tinted windows thumping music came speeding down the drive, churning up dust. It stopped in front of one of the cottages a few doors short of Tina’s. Two tall men stepped out, both wearing jeans and button-down shirts, one tucked, one half-tucked. One of the men held a cigarette, but that was all Tina could make out from where she sat. The dark Jaguar pulled ahead and came to a stop in front of Tina. The passenger-side window went down and Karan, the brother of the groom, stuck out his head with hair so perfectly gelled that a tornado wouldn’t budge it.

  “Tina’s here,” Karan said.

  From the driver’s side, cigarette in his mouth, Pavan, the groom, ducked down and said, “Welcome! Shefali said you were arriving last night. Settled in? We would stop and chat but I was supposed to be home about…” Pavan looked at his watch “…four hours ago, and Shefali keeps threatening to call off the wedding so we need to go.”

  Tina had always liked Pavan, even though she was surprised at how quickly her cousin had decided to marry him.

  * * *

  —

  “AT SOME POINT, YOU’VE just got to do it,” Shefali had said. “I’m not crossing thirty without a ring on my finger like some sad sack. I don’t want to get a cat.”

  This was just over a year ago at the farmer’s market in Williamsburg. Shefali was holding a hibiscus iced tea in one hand and the huge diamond ring on her finger was catching the bright autumn sunlight perfectly.

  “I know…you’re almost forty,” Shefali added. “But, I mean, it’s different for you.”

  “Thirty-two, Shefali,” Tina said. “I’m turning thirty-three.”

  Shefali stood looking at some sprigs of lavender.

  “Sure,” she said, absentmindedly twirling the ring on her finger. “I need to get this tightened. It’ll be a disaster if I lose it. But I told Pavan exactly where to get it so I could just replace it pretty easily if I had to—not that my parents would be happy about that. You know how it is for old people—if you have to buy two rings, you better be able to show the world both rings or at least somehow let everyone know you bought a second ring that was just as expensive as the first one. But anyway, what I meant was that it’s different for you because you’ve chosen different things.”

  She gestured vaguely around and Tina shook her head at the ease with which Shefali knew she could replace a forty-thousand-dollar ring.

  “You want to live alone and be a New Yorker and make a point and you’re happy doing all that,” Shefali continued. “I wish I could be happy doing that but I want the boring stuff—I want to change my name and be married and have a home with vases that always have fresh peonies, you know? Pavan’s grandmother has a greenhouse full of exquisite flowers.”

  She glanced at a slim black woman standing near them carrying a beautiful baby, face out in a BabyBjörn, his chubby arms reaching for everything.

  “I want that,” Shefali whispered. “Look how beautiful she looks.”

  Tina turned to look and the baby caught a fistful of her hair and tugged.

  “Ow!”

  The mother grabbed the baby’s hand and started slowly undoing his fingers while laughing and said, “Balthazar! No pulling hair. I’m so sorry.”

  Tina just stood there waiting for the baby to release her and Shefali said, “Not a problem at all. We were just admiring you and your baby.”

  The woman smiled a
t them and kissed the top of her baby’s head. She handed over eight dollars for a small brown sachet of dried lavender and walked away, two strands of Tina’s hair clasped tightly in Balthazar’s fist. Tina rubbed her scalp and inhaled a lavender sprig deeply. Wasn’t it meant to help you relax?

  * * *

  —

  “YOU’VE BEEN SPOTTED,” Karan said, glancing up at the rearview mirror. “Reacquaint yourself with our friends, Tina. We’ll see you later in the day.”

  With that, the Jaguar pulled away and Tina looked up to see the two men walking toward her. The one with the cigarette in his hand, she saw now, was unmistakably Rocco Gallagher. Could she retreat back into her cottage, pretending she hadn’t seen him? She had to; she hadn’t even brushed her teeth yet. She squinted her eyes, as if the sun was blinding her, and nodded at them the way, she imagined, one would nod at a stranger in the distance. Escape at hand, she took two confident steps backward, and fell over a potted bougainvillea. The pot broke into pieces and Tina landed squarely in the spilled soil, the crushed bougainvillea nestled into her armpit.

  * * *

  —

  TINA HAD LAST SEEN Rocco two years ago in London when he had slipped out of her room at the St. Martins Lane Hotel early in the morning.

  She’d agreed to meet Shefali in London on her way back to New York after a weeklong business trip to Bombay. By coincidence, Shefali had been on her way to Nice to partake in a vintage car rally through France. Tina had worked the whole flight to finish a partnership proposal for an ad agency in Bombay—this had also never come to fruition. The VP of the ad agency gave birth to twin daughters and Tina never heard from her again—and hadn’t slept. She’d landed at Heathrow Airport early on a Thursday morning and gone straight to the hotel in Leicester Square, stopping only for a sausage puff and a cup of coffee. She fell asleep for the remainder of the day, waking up at dusk to a slew of text messages from Shefali wondering where the hell she was.

  Shefali was waiting for her at the bar downstairs with a very handsome white man and a long-limbed Pakistani-British woman who was a comedian of some repute on her way to do a stand-up set in Covent Garden. Tina wondered, as she often did, where Shefali found friends like these. She never saw Zahra, the stunning Pakistani woman, after that night but the handsome man turned out to be Rocco, from Australia, lately of Bombay, who Shefali had met at the previous year’s car rally in Lausanne. The rally kicked off at the Château d’Ouchy, and Shefali and Rocco had shared the driving of a small white and green Morris Minor convertible for the first twenty-four hours and hit it off enough to meet again for a pre-rally drink in London. Two glasses of Sauvignon Blanc later, Zahra the comedian had to head to her show and Shefali wanted to go with her. She asked Tina to come along but Tina said she was too exhausted for stand-up comedy and begged off, staying at the St. Martins Lane hotel bar with Rocco for another drink. From there, on Rocco’s recommendation, they ended up at the Boheme Kitchen and Bar sharing a French onion soup and a porterhouse steak. Rocco had ordered, and Tina remembered how odd she found it that he wanted to share soup so soon after meeting.

  Tina also remembered how much he made her laugh that night, how little he was interested in kissing her, and how interested this had made her in kissing him. After dinner, they had walked past a man on the sidewalk auctioning off a box set of perfumes, a cluster of women gathered around him shouting out numbers. Rocco had rushed up to the group and shouted out ten pounds, twenty, twenty-five, all the way up to fifty, at which point he won the box set of perfumes and handed it to Tina as a gift.

  “To remember this magical night,” he said, right as a double-decker bus turned a corner inches away from them. “May every London cliché come true.”

  Tina put the perfumes in her purse, quite charmed by this impulsive bidding, but when they went back down the same street a little while later, they saw the perfume seller sitting on a sidewalk with the other people who had been bidding, all drinking beer.

  “I was cheated. They were all in on it. Come on,” Rocco said, grabbing Tina’s hand. “That’s not a gift I can give you so that means we have to give all three bottles to strangers. Let’s go.”

  Tina remembered now that Rocco had pulled her purse off her shoulder, opened it, and looked for the bottles. Inside her purse he found a small, red mesh bag that contained her makeup.

  “You don’t need makeup,” he said. “Throw this out.”

  “Don’t be an asshole. All men think they don’t want a woman with makeup but that’s just because they’re too dumb to see well-applied makeup. It’s the best trick we play on you,” Tina said. “Give my purse back.”

  “You carry vitamin D pills around?” Rocco asked, taking out the white pill bottle and rattling it around.

  Tina pulled her purse back, took out the three bottles of perfume, and handed them to him.

  “Do what you want,” she had said. “I’m going back to my hotel.”

  “No, wait. We bought these together, we have to get rid of them together. Don’t get mad so easily,” Rocco had said and for whatever reason, probably the stubble on his face, Tina had agreed.

  They gave one to a woman in a tight dress standing in line outside a club. They gave one to a woman smoking a cigarette by herself outside Wagamama. And for the last one, Rocco flagged down a taxi, got in, asked the taxi driver if he had a wife, gave him the bottle to give to his wife, and got back out. A taxi driver in New York would have cursed him for that, despite the free perfume, but this British taxi driver apologized for some reason.

  From there, they had gone to another bar—she couldn’t remember which one now, but it was near Seven Dials and it was in a basement—and they had each done a bump of cocaine off a key, had another drink, talked for what seemed like hours, and ended up back in her room at the hotel because Rocco was staying in a hostel in Brixton, since he had spent all his money on nonrefundable accommodations along the vintage car rally route and didn’t want to take a bus or taxi all the way back out there that night. They hadn’t had sex, of that Tina was sure. They had kissed a bit, nothing spectacular, and both fallen into bed and asleep before any clothes could come off. No, she was forgetting a detail. Soon after they had fallen asleep, she had woken back up and walked downstairs in search of a McDonald’s, in desperate need of chicken nuggets. She hadn’t found any and had returned to the hotel room and looked at Rocco, marveled at his jawline, and fallen asleep again.

  The next morning, in a daze, she gave Rocco her number and told him it was a pleasure meeting him and then felt relieved when he left her alone in the big, fluffy white bed with nothing to do except order room service and laze around until she had to meet Shefali for lunch. He never called. The night had lingered in her memory and from time to time she googled him. She had been fascinated by him, his way of inhabiting the world, so at ease. How he’d traveled solo through Brazil and Cambodia, how he’d been in a motorbiking accident in Ubud and stayed there for two months recovering. How he’d moved to India.

  Back in New York City, she had met Andrew, who was everything Rocco wasn’t, and she found that safer, if duller. On a real estate site, Andrew had showed her a listing for a “compact” two-bedroom house on a quiet lane in Portland. It had a small front and backyard, and the current owners had a bright yellow plastic swing and slide set up on the grass. In the pictures, the skies were blue and the kitchen counters were clean and Andrew had said, “I should be able to afford something like this in the future.”

  * * *

  —

  “DOES THIS MEAN ZAHRA might be here too?” Rocco asked now, looking around the Colebrookes driveway as if Zahra might be hiding behind a tree. “She was a stunner.”

  “I don’t think Shefali and Zahra are still friends,” Tina said, still on the ground. “But then, I didn’t think you and Shefali were either and here we are.”

  “Here we are, indeed,” Rocco said w
ith a smile. He reached his hand down to Tina.

  She looked up at him and shook her head and said, “As you can imagine, this is humiliating. Can you both turn around so I can get myself up out of this planter?”

  The two men faced away and Rocco said, “You must be jet-lagged. I only ever meet you when you’re jet-lagged, it seems.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, back up to standing, brushing off the seat of her pants. “You can face me now. There’s just no graceful way to get up from the ground after you turn thirty.”

  “Who are you here with?” Rocco’s friend asked, looking over Tina’s shoulder. “I’m Kai, by the way.”

  Kai, East Asian–looking, at least partially, was tall and handsome and wearing a neatly tucked-in shirt. He had glasses on and was the kind of guy that Marianne would start reading obscure Chinese science-fiction books for.

  “My friend Marianne. She’s still asleep.”

  “Good morning, good morning, Rocco sir, Kai sir,” Rajesh, the butler, said as he bustled past Tina. “I saw you coming so I have brought coffee and toast for everyone, like madam requested.”

  “I didn’t,” Tina said.

  Rajesh pulled out a small vial from his pocket and handed it to Tina saying, “Freshly pressed coconut oil for you. I noticed your elbows are a bit rough. Rub this on before you take a shower and you’ll notice how smooth they become in no time.”

  Tina touched one of her elbows and pulled her shirtsleeves down.

  “Rough elbows are common these days because you people keep your elbows against a desk all day for computer usage,” Rajesh said.

  “He’s right,” Kai said. “I do publicity for Nimo, have you heard of it? It’s a Japanese beauty brand. Coconut oil and snail slime—our secret ingredients.”

  “Snail slime?” Rajesh asked. “Interesting. I’ll have to try that.”

  “I haven’t tried it personally but it works wonders in the trials,” Kai said.