Destination Wedding

by Diksha Basu

  “Tina, ma’am, I’ll try to get you some also,” Rajesh said.

  “Okay, that’s enough, thank you,” Tina said. She looked down at the vial of coconut oil and added in a whisper to Rajesh, “How long do I leave it on for?”

  “Fifteen minutes will be good,” Rajesh said and went back off across the main lawn toward the clubhouse.

  “I’m still drunk,” Kai said. “The hangover is going to hit after I take a nap, I can already feel it.”

  “Take two aspirin and drink two whole glasses of water before you sleep,” Tina said.

  “That’s the American remedy. I’ll give you a Berocca before you sleep—that’s the British secret,” Rocco said. “And they know how to drink and nurse a hangover better than Americans do.”

  Tina poured herself a cup of coffee and took some toast and was preparing to return to her room when David and her mother approached from the far end of the golf course in workout clothes. It was most unlike her mother to carry workout clothes for a weeklong trip for a wedding. The clothes looked new. And both Radha and David were wearing matching New Balance sneakers.

  “Good morning, Tina. Making friends already?” David asked. “We couldn’t sleep either so we’ve been off for a walk around the periphery of the golf course. It’s all so well maintained. But now coffee and toast is just what we need. Radha, should I pour you a cup?”

  “They’ve redone all the stables,” Radha said. “And there are some beautiful, big horses. Maybe you and Marianne could have a ride. Didn’t Marianne have a horse when she was younger?”

  “Fred,” Tina said.

  “I had a horse named Gibran,” David said. “Radha, I’ll take you riding. The horses would love you. Remember that police horse in New Orleans that nuzzled your neck?”

  Radha shook her head slightly at David and Tina said, “When did you go to New Orleans?”

  “Mardi Gras,” David said. “Have you been? It’s terrific. I tried to get your mother to ride an electric bull on Bourbon Street but she refused.”

  “David, didn’t you say you had to use the bathroom?” Radha turned to Tina. “Isn’t it nice being back? Do you want to join our walk around the club? We came here a few times when you were young but I don’t know if you remember much.”

  “Actually, I’m still a bit sleepy. I think I’ll go in and try to sleep for another hour or two so I have enough energy for the day,” Tina said. A stroll with her athleisure-clad mother and her boyfriend was the absolute last thing she felt like doing.

  She entered the cottage and found Marianne still in her bed, eating toast and looking at her phone.

  “Should I have brought Tom?” she asked Tina. “He just sent me a video of his niece falling asleep in her high chair. It’s really cute. Want to see?”

  “We can go horseback riding later today if you want to,” Tina said.

  “I couldn’t. I miss Fred too much,” Marianne said. “Someday I’ll get another horse and put matching riding boots on my whole family and go out to the stables every Sunday morning. I’ll stand on the sidelines with a cup of coffee and a cable-knit brown sweater and watch my children get lessons.”

  “That sounds like Tom’s life in Boston,” Tina said. “A far cry from living in a luxurious bungalow in Lahore like you had once planned. With holidays in Mayfair, was it? Isn’t that where Riyaaz’s family had an apartment?”

  Laughter came into their room from the porch.

  “Are there people on our porch? It’s so early,” Marianne said.

  “Some of Pavan’s friends just got back from a night out and my mother and David were on a little health-giving walk around the golf course. She has New Balance sneakers on. So does he. Did you know they went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras? I certainly didn’t.”

  Tina sat down on Marianne’s bed and pulled her legs under Marianne’s sheet.

  “Shefali got lucky, don’t you think? The way their worlds merge,” Tina said.

  “I guess so. She’s marrying a guy so perfect on paper it may as well have been arranged. But what about love and passion and excitement?”

  “Does it have to be one or the other?” Tina asked.

  “I don’t know. Boston or Lahore? I don’t know,” Marianne said.

  “I’m hardly someone who has this figured out but there’s something to be said for matching résumés,” Tina said. “Arranged marriages often work out. Love marriages often don’t.”

  “Is that what non-arranged marriages are called?”

  “Did you ever watch that ridiculous Millionaire Matchmaker show?” Tina asked.

  “No, but I feel like I did because you talk about it all the time,” Marianne said.

  “Matchmaking intrigues me,” Tina said. “Good on paper or good in bed, like you said. Can you have both?”

  Marianne propped herself up on an elbow and took the remaining half of Tina’s toast.

  “That’s what you should make a reality show about,” Marianne said.

  “No!” Tina said. “The last thing the world needs is another show about matchmakers. Although can you imagine how much fun that would be? A deep dive into Indian matchmaking? You know they match horoscopes? And for some really traditional people, if a woman has a horoscope that says bad luck will befall her husband, she has to first marry a tree so that her human husband will be spared.”

  “Does it have to be a tree?” Marianne asked.

  “I think it has to be a living thing, so maybe a goat or a goldfish would be allowed. I don’t really know. Most young people we know wouldn’t be the kind to subscribe to that but some people do,” Tina said. “But that’s the problem with presenting that on a show—suddenly that becomes the narrative about India, and the next generation of young Indian kids gets made fun of in school for marrying a tree. Do you know how many kids in my school used to ask me if we rode on elephants in India instead of cars?”

  “In our church, before you get married, you have to have some counseling sessions with the priest and one of the things they make you do is write down five things about each other that start with ‘I love it when you…’ and five things that start with ‘I don’t love it when you…’ I can’t imagine how anyone follows through with marriage after reading their partner’s reviews of them. Every culture is fucked up,” Marianne said.

  “In its own beautiful way,” Tina added. “But you never have to explain white American culture. Every Indian kid, every Egyptian kid, every Japanese kid sees a hundred different representations of it from the minute we’re conscious. We all know the church wedding, the whole walking-down-the-aisle thing. But Indian weddings are a whole different deal. Can you imagine Andrew’s family in Delhi like this? Did you know that at some Indian weddings there’s a tradition that all the young cousins spend the first night stopping the married couple from getting any time alone together? So, like, basically, all the kids are there to cockblock them. Though we would never actually say it’s about sex.”

  “I think that’s amazing. There’s too much pressure to have sex on the wedding night. I can’t imagine wanting to have sex after a day spent talking to Tom’s extended family.”

  “Fair point,” Tina said.

  Marianne finished her toast and brushed her hands together. “Dropping crumbs in bed is the best part of any holiday,” she said.

  “We can also clip our fingernails anywhere we want,” Tina said.

  “And let toothpaste spackle the bathroom mirror.”

  “And kick crumpled receipts under the furniture.”

  “And flip our purses over the carpet to shake out the sand at the bottom,” Marianne said. “It’s a wonder we aren’t banned from hotels.”

  She reached for Tina’s coffee.

  “Is there milk and sugar in that?”

  “It’s black,” Tina said.

  “Why do you insist on drinki
ng gross black coffee as if it’s a personality trait?” Marianne asked, returning the cup and finishing the toast. She got out of the bed and walked to the bathroom. Tina stayed sitting in her bed sipping coffee. She heard the toilet flush and the tap run, and Marianne returned to the room with her hair tied up and glasses on.

  “I’m going to find myself an Indian man to marry,” Tina said. “It makes sense. Andrew didn’t make sense—do you know how difficult it was to find an Instagram filter that flattered both of us? He was right, it wasn’t about him coming to the wedding. I just needed something concrete to end it once and for all, you know?”

  “Listen, I don’t think at all that Andrew was the right guy for you but you could have just been honest with him. Telling him you couldn’t bring him because your conservative Indian family would object to a white boyfriend was a bit too blatant of a lie. Your mother’s white boyfriend is here. In New Balances.”

  * * *

  —

  THAT WAS EXACTLY WHAT Andrew had argued that morning at brunch. And he was right, of course. Tina had tried to end things with him several times before, but it had never stuck. Mostly, she’d made halfhearted attempts filled with metaphors and jokes and then she would go four or five days without seeing him before she inevitably changed her mind and sent him a text because he was fun and convenient and reliable. And things had sort of been hobbling along like that for almost two years.

  “My mother says you’re my payback for how I’ve treated women in the past,” Andrew had said over his eggs Benedict that morning.

  Tina had reached over, picked up a strip of bacon from his plate, and said, “That seems like a humblebrag but I can’t quite figure out how.”

  “I can’t keep doing this,” Andrew said.

  “Doing what?”

  “This,” he said. “Us.”

  A waitress picked that moment to come over, Tina remembered. Her head was shaved on one side and she had a septum piercing.

  “What a gorgeous day,” the waitress said. “I don’t even mind working on days like today. Everything feels like a celebration. I had a group of girlfriends in here earlier this morning at the end of a night out and I have never seen a group rally so hard. They had five bottles of cava between them and then left a very generous tip.”

  She had leaned over the table. Tina had looked at the butterfly tattoo in her cleavage and waited in silence while she picked up the empty coffee cups and empty side plate of hash browns.

  “I ate, like, three of these in the kitchen just now,” the waitress said about the hash browns. “I swear the chef puts cocaine in these.”

  She winked at Tina then and said, “Anything else I can get for you? I’ll be right back to refill your water.”

  “It’s fine, thanks, we don’t need any more water,” Andrew said. “Thanks.”

  The waitress looked deflated as she nodded and walked away.

  “Her enthusiasm was endearing,” Tina said. “You didn’t need to shut her down like that. I love it when people genuinely seem to be enjoying themselves. But that butterfly tattoo was questionable, I’ll give you that.”

  “We’re in a relationship, whether or not you like it, Tina,” Andrew had said. “I don’t know why you refuse to accept that or what you’re waiting for before you decide one way or another but I can’t do this anymore.”

  And after that day, Andrew never agreed to meeting up with her again, no matter how flirtatiously she texted, and now, here she was, just two weeks later, in India.

  * * *

  —

  “I SHOULD BE DATING an Indian guy,” Tina said. “Right? Should I be dating an Indian guy? From Delhi or Bombay, and then we can have children who will learn Hindi and won’t have to have weird hippie names. Or Maya; they won’t have to be named Maya.”

  “You barely speak Hindi,” Marianne said.

  “That’s true. Did you know Hindi has different words for a good smell and a bad smell? Badbu and khushbu. I once told my father’s neighbor in Jersey City that the food had a really good-bad smell.”

  Marianne sat down on the sofa on the other end of the room and pulled a nail file out of her purse and began to file her nails. Marianne always obsessively filed her nails. She used to bite her nails when she was younger and she had traded in that bad habit for this one.

  “What’s today’s plan?” she asked. “It doesn’t even feel like we’re here for a wedding.”

  “The schedule is right there,” Tina pointed at the coffee table in front of Marianne. The schedule, embossed in gold and covered with glitter, was next to a basket full of laddoos, dried fruits, nuts, Snickers bars, and little boxes of Frooti drinks.

  “Tonight is the cocktail party at the Goldenrod Garden,” Marianne said. “And then there’s a haldi lunch, a day trip to the Taj, and the final night reception and wedding. That’s it? Just those events? What are we supposed to do the rest of the time?”

  “Whatever we want,” Tina said. “Most of the guests are from Delhi so it’s not one of those packed, minute-by-minute wedding itineraries. And I think they only planned the Taj Mahal trip so those of us who flew in from around the world wouldn’t feel like we’d wasted our time.”

  Marianne took a bite of an orange motichoor laddoo. “Wow, that’s rich. And very sweet. Want the rest?”

  Tina shook her head.

  Marianne put the half-eaten laddoo back in the box and noticed two other small boxes with her and Tina’s names on them. She opened hers and found an astonishingly delicate beige cashmere stole. She took it out and touched it against her cheek. The wedding planner’s business card fell out from the folds and landed near her feet.

  “This is the softest material I have ever touched,” Marianne said. She tossed Tina’s box across the room. In Tina’s box was a similar stole in black with subtle gold embroidery. Tina also touched it to her face, another business card falling out.

  “This is amazing,” she said. “I like your color more, though.”

  “Good, because I prefer yours,” Marianne said, swapping.

  There were two other forms on the table and Marianne looked at one.

  “This is a contract of some sort,” she said. “What is this?”

  Tina reached over and took the paper and read it. She laughed.

  “It’s a waiver. It gives them the right to film us this entire week,” Tina said. “Shefali must be getting a professional wedding documentary made. She had mentioned something about a trailer release.”

  TUESDAY, 12:40 P.M.

  Colebrookes Country Club, New Delhi: Shefali, the Bride, Is Shouting at Her Facialist on the Phone for What She Thinks Is the Start of a Pimple on Her Chin (It Isn’t, but the Facialist Packs Her Kit and Rushes Over to Shefali’s House Anyway)

  MR. DAS KNOCKED ON HIS daughter’s door. No answer. One of his suitcases hadn’t arrived last night so he was wearing his underpants and socks from the journey inside out under fresh clothes. British Airways had located the suitcase, accidentally on a flight to Shanghai, and promised to deliver it to Colebrookes within forty-eight hours. After lunch he would stop by one of the malls in Saket and buy some new underpants and socks, and next time he would distribute his clothes more evenly between the two suitcases. He was carrying two suitcases because his sister, Shefali’s mother, had made him bring her two sets of glasses from Crate & Barrel and he had used all his underwear and socks to pad the fragile things in one of the suitcases.

  He checked the time. It was 12:40 P.M. and he was meant to reach Mrs. Sethi’s house at 1 P.M.

  “But, please, Mr. Das,” Mrs. Ray, the matchmaker, had said on the phone. “Please have some sense and do not arrive right on time. One fifteen is okay. And don’t forget to take something small—maybe a bouquet of flowers or a book or some good coffee beans if you have a favorite kind. Make it something that will reflect your personality but no wine, no alcohol.
Not for a first meeting.”

  Sometimes Mrs. Ray wondered if this Matchmaking Agency for Widows was a fool’s errand. But while talking to Mr. Das, she looked over at her new husband, Upen Chopra, in the swimming pool in Goa, and reminded herself that no, everyone deserved a second, third, and even fourth chance at love. Or, in the case of some depressing marriages, a first chance at love. Although this Mr. Das fellow sounded like he had quite amicably divorced his wife. He had mentioned that she was also in Delhi for the wedding. Mrs. Ray liked such stories. Upen pulled himself out of the pool on the other end and sat on the edge. From behind her large sunglasses, Mrs. Ray noticed him call a pool boy over and point in her direction. He then looked over at her and winked and jumped back into the water. Mrs. Ray watched him glide under the surface toward her, his back muscles tensing with each stroke. Age really was nothing but a number, she thought, as she watched her husband, fitter than any thirty-year-old in the area. Why should the fun end just because your skin was a bit more wrinkled than it was yesterday? Yes, everyone deserved another chance at love.

  Which was why Mr. Das was standing outside his daughter’s cottage wearing khaki slacks with a dark blue button-down shirt tucked in and inside-out underpants and socks, and holding a coffee-table book on the art of Rabindranath Tagore. He knocked again. This time finally Tina answered, looking freshly showered and wearing jeans and a kurta. Radha had always discouraged Tina from wearing Indian clothes or getting too involved with the Indian community, saying they weren’t in America to separate themselves, but Mr. Das liked seeing his daughter dressed this way.

  “Should I wear a tie?” he asked.

  “No,” Tina said, walking back into her cottage, running a comb through her wet hair. “You don’t want to seem so eager. You look nice in this. It’s casual without being sloppy.”

  “Casual but not sloppy,” Mr. Das said. “That’s good. What does one do when they meet someone I-R-L for the first time? That’s in real life.”