Destination Wedding

by Diksha Basu

  In the bathroom off the master bedroom, once it went silent, Mrs. Sethi looked in the mirror. She was wearing a dark green raw silk kurta with matching dark green cigarette pants with a green-and-gold-embroidered dupatta draped across her shoulders. Her hair was down loose and the recent mehndi that she had put in was creating subtle red highlights against her dark brown hair. Her hair looked a little fried from years of—well, years of life. She wasn’t one of those women who had her hair processed much but once you get past fifty it didn’t seem to matter much what you had put your hair through. She wished her younger self had known that. In her twenties and thirties she was certain she would be able to resist old age if she just made the right lifestyle choices, so she oiled her hair regularly, took her vitamins, didn’t smoke, wore sunblock, and avoided fried food. But, much to her disappointment, it turned out that age didn’t give two hoots whether or not you processed your hair or drank gallons of water. Age was going to do whatever it wanted to do and now, in retrospect, she wished she hadn’t been quite so strict with herself. Everyone knows that death is unavoidable but aging is the sinister creeper that pretends to be avoidable and then slaps you across the face, leaving a trail of wrinkles and thinning hair. Now Mrs. Sethi was hoping her hair would start to go gray soon because she’d heard if your hair goes gray before it starts falling out it won’t ever fall out and Mrs. Sethi had recently been noticing more and more strands of hair on her brush and in the drain in the mornings. She dabbed some Biotique lipstick on her lips and lifted the edges of her eyes. She was now officially attractive for her age but at least she had that, she decided. She even occasionally had people politely claim they would never have guessed that she had a twenty-eight-year-old daughter.

  In the living room, Mr. Das was looking at a framed picture of, he assumed, Mrs. Sethi’s daughter. The picture sat on the side table next to him, next to a vase shaped like a watering jug filled with half a dozen brightly colored flowers. He looked around the room at the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with books and was intimidated. He didn’t read at all these days—maybe the occasional business book—but nothing more. Tina kept telling him to read more but he didn’t and the only reason he had this book about Tagore with him was that the guest services person at Colebrookes had bought it when he told them he needed a tasteful gift for a lady friend. Now, what if Mrs. Sethi wanted to know if he had read any of Tagore’s work? It would be embarrassing. Mr. Das was sitting and trying to think if he had seen any Bollywood films based on Tagore’s work that would at least give him a baseline but he was coming up blank. Before he could take his phone out and google “popular Tagore stories,” the door across the room opened and Mrs. Sethi stepped into the room. Mr. Das’s eyes widened in surprise at her beauty and he stood up to greet her.

  “Mrs. Sethi,” he said hurriedly. “Mrs. Sethi, so nice to finally put a face—a beautiful face—to your name. I brought you a book I think you will enjoy but I confess I myself have not read any Tagore and am deeply ashamed.”

  Mrs. Sethi laughed, charmed. Mr. Das was funny in his emails, often self-deprecating, and she hadn’t been sure if he knew he was funny or if he really was just awkward and a bit insecure, and she still wasn’t sure. But suddenly, right now, she didn’t mind which one it was because either way it was charming. She liked Mr. Das immediately.

  “Please call me Jyoti,” Mrs. Sethi said. “Or you’ll make me feel like a schoolteacher.”

  She was instantly drawn to his nervous energy, his casual yet clearly expensive clothes—not that she needed them to be expensive, but given that they obviously were, she was glad they didn’t look obviously expensive. Her late husband, who had been the spokesperson for Shell India, had worn only suits and ties.

  “Well, you picked well, Mr. Das, because I am a big fan of Tagore and I have heard good things about this one,” Mrs. Sethi said. “Please sit. Would you like a glass of coconut water?”

  Over coconut water, the conversation with Mrs. Sethi flowed as if their interactions over the last four months had been in person all along. Mr. Das wondered if, like him, she had reread all their email correspondence early this morning to make sure she had talking points.

  “Has Lavina stopped using so much oil in the cooking?” he asked.

  In the kitchen, Lavina was sitting near the door shredding coconut when she heard her name in this context. Well, that’s rich, she thought. On the one hand, Mrs. Sethi wanted tasty food but on the other hand, she pretended she didn’t like too much oil. She would fry the red snapper first tonight, Lavina decided, then drop it in the gravy. It was much tastier that way anyway.

  “Yes, she takes instruction well,” Mrs. Sethi said. “Not that I’m opposed to oil occasionally, but too much ruins the flavor of more subtle ingredients.”

  “I feel that way about butter,” Mr. Das said. “I’ve never enjoyed the taste of butter. But if you say ‘no butter,’ people smile knowingly and make jokes about your diet.”

  “I know that far too well,” Mrs. Sethi said with a laugh. “I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve accepted dessert when I didn’t want any just to avoid snide comments about the widow trying to maintain her figure.”

  “You have a wonderful figure,” Mr. Das said. He looked away, embarrassed, and took a large sip of his coconut water. Once he had told Radha that David had a good figure and Radha had told him that the term “figure” had sexual implications. He wasn’t sure if he agreed with her but now he was acutely aware that he had used that term.

  “And Anita’s daughter’s exams went well?” He quickly tried to bring the conversation back to safer territory.

  Mrs. Sethi smiled and said, “It’s as if we’ve been braided into each other’s lives for months already, isn’t it?”

  But despite the familiarity, there was also the excitement of a new connection, a new relationship. He noticed Mrs. Sethi’s repeated habit of gently touching her left earlobe with her left thumb; a million emails wouldn’t teach him that. For that he needed to be here in her living room looking straight at her. She sat with her feet tucked under, her toenails peering out, painted a light pink color. Her feet looked well-cared-for, as if they hadn’t had decades of walking barefoot in India. Most women had cracked and dry heels by the time they crossed fifty but not Mrs. Sethi, Mr. Das noted. Mrs. Sethi must have regularly lotioned her feet when she was younger. He never liked his wife’s feet. Ex-wife.

  “Did Marianne end up bringing her husband along?” Mrs. Sethi asked. Was he staring at her toes? Was it too much, the pink nail polish too girly? She curled her toes inward, trying to hide them under her legs, feeling silly that she had spent all of yesterday at a beauty salon.

  “Boyfriend,” Mr. Das said. “I was corrected. But no, she left him behind. The girls are here together, which seems to be nice for them. And Radha…I’m the only one here alone.”

  “You have your whole family here. You’re hardly alone,” Mrs. Sethi said.

  “Alone in a room at night is what I mean,” Mr. Das said. “No, that’s not at all what I mean. Although it’s true but I didn’t mean to say it the way it sounded.”

  Mrs. Sethi laughed and said, “This coconut water is wonderful but should we have a glass of wine? I know Mrs. Ray says no alcohol on a first meeting—date, whatever you want to call it at our age—but it’s different, isn’t it? We’ve known each other for months now.”

  Mr. Das was relieved and he took a few deep breaths while Mrs. Sethi vanished into the next room to get two glasses of wine. He had heard that just five deep breaths, with intent, could completely reset your brain but he wasn’t sure if Mrs. Sethi was going to actually get the wine, open the bottle, and pour the glasses herself, thus giving him the time needed, or just tell her maid to bring the wine, in which case she would be back in the room before he had finished even his first inhalation. He was overthinking it, he decided. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath in right
as Mrs. Sethi returned. Well, one was better than none.

  TUESDAY AFTERNOON

  SDA Market, New Delhi: What Tina (Fortunately) Doesn’t Know Is That Just Moments Ago a Monkey Stole a Woman’s Handbag

  SUNIL, TINA’S CHAUFFEUR FOR THE week, dropped her off at the back entrance of the IIT Gate Market and watched as Tina stood uncertainly on the street side trying to cross. Maybe he should have taken a U-turn and dropped her off on the right side of the road, he thought. Tina was throwing him off this week. When his passengers were foreigners, he always made sure he dropped them off on the right side of the road so they didn’t panic and get scared about crossing streets. When his passengers were Indian, he dropped them off at the most convenient spot and watched them in the rearview mirror as they confidently, often leisurely, jaywalked across the road. But Tina was neither here nor there. He had picked her and her blond friend up at the airport and Tina’s discomfort in India was immediately palpable, mostly because she was clearly trying so hard to disguise it. She had spoken to him in broken Hindi last night and rattled off some names of main roads in Delhi as if she knew the layout of the city. Poor girl. The names she had used were the new names, the ones that were changed for arbitrary political reasons, not the old names that all locals knew them by.

  But Sunil understood. He had moved to Delhi from Ratnagiri when he was eighteen, almost twenty-five years ago, but he still constantly worried that the terrified small-town boy was peeking out from behind his carefully crafted big-city-man persona. Should he offer to drive her around to the other side, Sunil wondered. But the entrance to the market was just fifty feet away.

  And that’s exactly what Tina was standing there wondering too. She wished the chauffeur—was it Sunil?—would drive away and not watch her trying to figure out a way to run across the road. She didn’t want him to notice how obviously disoriented she was here. She had spoken to him in Hindi last night and had even memorized some of the main road names so he wouldn’t think she was a complete tourist. They were two women in a car late at night in Delhi, after all.

  She caught his eye in his rearview mirror through the back window and gave him a smile and a half-nod. She pointed at the cars and waved her hand back and forth fast and shook her head to try and communicate, “Delhi, good old, familiar Delhi with its crazy traffic. Don’t worry about me, you drive off, I’ll manage, I’ve done this before.”

  She waved at him hoping he would understand she wanted him to leave. Right then a large DTC bus came to a halt right in front of her and what felt like hundreds of passengers suddenly disembarked and pushed past Tina. As the crowd parted she saw about a dozen men and women in saris and salwar kameezes and pants and shirts, and one woman in a pencil skirt set with black pumps, and one man in a dhoti with two huge jute bags on his arms, all clump together in a group and cross the road with traffic swerving around them. Safety in numbers. She tried to catch up with them, run across with them, but by then the bus was moving again and the angry bus driver honked at her loudly and forced her to retreat, sweating but exhilarated.

  “Stupid pedestrians,” the bus driver muttered to the bus conductor, who was standing near him on the steps of the front door. “If I hit one more, I’ll never get my license back, no matter how much I pay.”

  The man he had hit last year was fine, just a broken arm, more shouting and screaming than anything else really but a crowd had gathered before the bus could drive away and he had to wait for a policeman to come and had to pay four thousand rupees in cash before the policeman let him go. He had driven the full bus, passengers in tow, and the policeman, to a Standard Chartered ATM to get the cash.

  Tina was catching her breath near the sidewalk when Sunil reversed in front of her and rushed out to hold open the back door.

  “So sorry, madam,” Sunil said. “I should have dropped you off on the other side of the road.”

  “No, no,” Tina said. “No problem. Rush hour.”

  It was early afternoon.

  “It’s always rush hour in Delhi,” Sunil offered. “Please, sit. It’ll take a bit of extra time because the U-turn is only at the next traffic signal but I’ll drop you off on the right side of the road.”

  Tina hesitated.

  “I insist,” Sunil said.

  * * *

  —

  TINA WALKED THROUGH THE MARKET toward the café and looked around at the groups of young students sitting and drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. There were young girls—some in dresses, some in salwar kameezes in bright colors, some in high-waisted jeans and crop tops that looked straight out of a Topshop advertisement. There were some young couples, and fathers chasing after toddlers. A hookah bar had spilled out onto the main market and sweet-smelling smoke rose from the colorful hookahs. A magazine seller and a banana seller sat side by side on the ground with their goods spread out on the floor in front of them. The magazine seller ate a banana.

  Two women in bright salwar kameezes approached her and asked, in Hindi, “Where’s the Hi-Glow beauty parlor?”

  “I don’t know,” Tina said. “Nahin pata.”

  “Hm, okay,” one of the girls said, also in Hindi. “We’ll find it. Maria recently moved there—she does the best eyebrows in town. I’ve followed her here from Miracle Beauty Parlor.”

  They thought she was from here, Tina realized. They thought she was one of them.

  “I know Maria,” Tina tested. “She does my eyebrows also.”

  “She’s very good,” one of the girls said but she squinted at Tina’s eyebrows. She looked at her friend and they both looked back at Tina and looked her up and down.

  “I have to go,” Tina said. “Tell Maria I say hi.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tina. But she probably knows me just by face.”

  The girls walked off in the other direction and Tina watched them go.

  Nobody looked at Tina, and why would they? She could easily have been a teacher at the nearby college who came here every night for a cup of coffee after work. Or she could be a young mother living in one of the homes of Hauz Khas Enclave who spends the day at home with her baby but goes out for a walk every evening once her husband gets home in order to get a little bit of time to herself. Here, in this market in Hauz Khas, where she looked like everyone else, Tina could be anyone. Nobody here knew that her driver had to drive almost a mile extra to make a U-turn that would allow her to be dropped off at the right side of the road because she couldn’t cross it on her own.

  * * *

  —

  SID WAS SITTING OUTSIDE the café wearing jeans and a black T-shirt that said “KALE” on it. His jeans were fashionably torn and his chest had become broader from all the personal training. Tina remembered why he had stood out immediately when she held open-call auditions in Bombay. He was made for stardom. Not only did he have the physical presence that would sell on television but he was a tremendously gifted drummer. He mostly played the tabla and there was, of course, the exotic appeal of that for an international reality show, but he was equally good on a traditional drum set and a Spanish box. It was something about seeing him tilt back while drumming on the Spanish box that made Tina stop the audition and tell him he was shortlisted. She had then canceled the remaining auditions for the afternoon and gone for a massage at her hotel.

  In his last email to her, he had sent her a picture of him doing pull-ups, shirtless, in a kids’ playground in Bombay. He had turned it into a joke, something about scaring the kids off, but really it was obviously an excuse to send her that picture with his dark skin glistening with sweat and muscles rippling. She had saved the picture, in an album titled Potential Casting, but it was the only picture in the album.

  “Ma’am.” Sid smiled and rose to greet her. The white of his teeth sparkled against the dark of his skin. The same darkness that would cause him to be questioned at a fancy restaurant would make him a
heartthrob on the screen. That was also why she was the most disappointed about telling Sid it wasn’t going to happen—had it happened, had she managed to make Sid a household name, another Sid from another town in another world with the same dark skin would be able to enter fancy restaurants easily. Maybe that was wishful thinking. She was hardly going to eliminate prejudice with a reality show.

  “Don’t call me ‘ma’am,’ Sid. You know it’s Tina,” Tina said.

  “Tina ma’am, then,” Sid said. “I’ve ordered you a black coffee—I assumed that’s still all you drink? I remember it from the auditions. This one has become a bit cold by now but I can take it back to the counter and ask them to warm it up just a little bit.”

  “It’s fine the way it is,” Tina said. “Thank you. Sorry I’m a bit late—rush hour.”

  Sid looked at the time on his phone.

  “Your shirt,” Tina said. “I went to Yale. I find those shirts quite funny.”

  Sid looked down at his chest and looked back up at her.

  “Yale?”

  “Where did you get that shirt?” Tina said.