Destination Wedding

by Diksha Basu

  “We don’t serve at the bar,” David said. “Listen, ma’am, if you don’t mind…”

  He took off his reading glasses and looked up at Radha. She was breathtaking. Obviously, David had a soft spot for Indian women. Working at India Fare he saw some of the most stunning Indian women walk through the door. Padma Lakshmi had been one of their first patrons. But this woman was something else altogether. “Well, if you don’t mind eating at the bar, I can make an exception this one time, just for you. We happen to have barstools at the back that we use in the evenings from 5 P.M. to 7 P.M. only but I can bring one out for you.”

  David had a date that afternoon. He had been online dating and was scheduled to have his second date with Bonnie, a history professor at Hunter, over coffee at 3 P.M. on the Upper East Side but he messaged her saying the restaurant was busier than expected, people lingering over drinks, could they please postpone. Bonnie, who got this message while applying lipstick in the bathroom at Hunter, dropped her shoulders, pulled out a rough paper towel from the dispenser, and wiped her lipstick off. Dating in this city was awful. She couldn’t stand it. Her face was stained with the coral remnants of the lipstick.

  David poured two glasses of Riesling and took them over to Radha and said, “On the house.”

  Radha stayed at the bar until 5 P.M. and David sat with her. They talked about everything, they laughed, they finished the bottle of wine, and at 5 P.M. the staff brought the rest of the barstools out and David refused to let Radha pay.

  “Could I take you out for dinner sometime?” he asked.

  “On a date?”

  “A proper date,” David said.

  “I’ve never been on a proper date,” Radha said.

  “Well, then your expectations will be suitably low, which makes it easier for me. How’s Friday? That gives you tomorrow to get a little anxious and, hopefully, excited. I promise I’ll make it fun so even if we don’t ever see each other again after that, we’ll at least have one terrific evening. Say yes.”

  “Okay, then. Yes. How does this work? Do you pick me up at eight?” Radha asked.

  “Radha Das, lesson number one of dating in New York—do not have a man pick you up and discover where you live on the first date. What if I’m a murderer? I’ll message you about where to meet.”

  And David did make it fun. He made everything fun. And since there was no chance of having children, and the ever after in a potentially happily ever after was much shorter now than it had been when they were twenty or thirty or forty, there was very little pressure. Everything with David was the opposite of how it had been with Neel Das.

  * * *

  —

  LIKE EVEN NOW, RADHA wasn’t really worried about David. She assumed he was safe—he was a strong, perfectly capable man—and she didn’t need him the way she had always needed Neel, or at least thought she always needed Neel. The anxiety she’d suffered with for years had started when she was in her third trimester in Ohio when there was a huge snowstorm one night and Neel was three hours late getting home. Radha had worked herself into a state of complete panic that night, thinking she would have to have and raise this child on her own. It was never panic or sadness about Neel himself, she admitted to herself years later, but it was sheer terror at having to navigate motherhood alone. Would she move back to India? But America was home by then and she loved it. How would she handle the start of her career while also raising a child on her own? She didn’t like cooking and didn’t know how to separate her laundry. Neel did finally get home, and then Tina was born, but Radha remained anxious and worried about Neel because she needed him more than ever.

  But she never needed David. She had fallen in love with him and had great fun with him but never felt that need and that freed her to love him even more deeply. She never knew a relationship could be fun.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER RADHA LEFT, TINA STAYED sitting alone on the dark porch when Marianne walked out wearing a short black dress that sparkled at certain angles. A black blazer was draped over her shoulders, her bare arms not in the actual arms of the jacket, and a small black clutch in her hands. The only thing true to the current Marianne were the black ballet flats on her feet.

  “I remember that dress,” Tina said. “From a long, long time ago. Many boyfriends ago. Or many personas ago.”

  “Stop being irritated with the world.”

  “What are you doing with Karan? This isn’t you. How do you not see how great Tom is?”

  Marianne leaned over and scratched at a point near her ankle.

  “Stupid mosquitos,” she muttered.

  “I have some organic citronella oil in my suitcase. Go spray it on your legs. Mosquitos are attracted to dark clothes,” Tina said.

  When Marianne went in, Tina texted Sid asking where he was. She wanted to get out of here, wanted to go to Chandni Chowk and eat kulfi and see hijras dancing as he had promised. Tina stepped out into the dark grounds of Colebrookes before Marianne could come back out.

  Tina was walking aimlessly along the driveway when David came walking down the drive holding two large bags.

  “Where have you been?” Tina shouted. “My mother is going mad.”

  “Tina? Is that you?” David squinted down the driveway. His eyesight at night was no longer quite what it used to be. “How’s your mother?”

  “She’s not thrilled,” Tina said.

  “Neither was the driver. He dropped me off at the gate,” David said. “The security at the front gate is very serious. They were not happy about me walking in looking, I imagine, a little worse for the wear.”

  Tina looked at him, his beard scruffy, his skin bronzed from the sun and no, he was still handsome.

  “I can help you with your bags,” she said. “Did you go shopping?”

  “Carry the light one—it has boxes of something called dhokla inside. I ate the most delicious dhokla and they insisted on giving me five boxes full.”

  “Who?”

  “This bag is much heavier. It has papaya and coconuts,” David said. “Can we go have a drink?”

  Tina had never spent time alone with David but she needed another drink so she agreed and they walked over to the Fountain Bar that was nestled away in a back corner of Colebrookes. As the name suggested, it was a small bar near a fountain that was fitted with colored lights. Only one other table was occupied, by an Indian couple sitting in silence with two glasses of white wine and a small bowl of peanuts. Tina led David to the table farthest away from them to give them some privacy.

  “Any Indian whiskey, please,” David said. “Something middle of the range. Double shot with no ice.”

  He turned to Tina and said, “I find I’m developing quite a taste for Indian whiskey on this trip. What are you drinking?”

  “I’ll just have a glass of your house white wine,” Tina said to the waiter.

  The waiter nodded and turned away, annoyed that this new couple had sat down right as he was hoping his shift would end. After 10 P.M., if there were no orders for twenty minutes, Amit was allowed to shut down the bar. The other couple had stopped ordering fifteen minutes ago and stopped talking twenty minutes ago so he thought he was free for the night but now he had to open another bottle of wine and wait. He texted Pravishi again and told her to go ahead and go back home to her husband. Pravishi was a nurse, very much married, who had lied to her husband and said she had to work late at the hospital tonight but was actually waiting for Amit outside the back gate of Colebrookes as she often did. She was holding a box with a slice of Black Forest cake and two plastic forks. Pravishi was tiring of the unreliability of this relationship but her husband had been diagnosed with ALS two years ago and she was so sick of being his caretaker. She would wait, Pravishi texted back. Take your time.

  “As I was leaving Lodhi Gardens, I saw a young couple sitting on the sidewalk an
d the woman was crying. Sobbing,” David said. “And the man was hunched over her.”

  “Did you get cheated, David?” Tina asked.

  “On the contrary. I went to their home and had dinner with them,” David said. “They were crying because her sister had just had a miscarriage in Udaipur and the young woman wanted to go be by her side but they couldn’t afford it. Something like that—there was a bit of a language barrier.”

  Amit placed their drinks down in front of them and whispered, “Anything else? It’s last call.”

  They didn’t need to know the club rules and Pravishi had said she was still waiting. But the management watched and listened to everything on the club grounds so he had to make it subtle.

  “I’m sorry, what?” David asked.

  “Last call,” Amit said, leaning in to whisper it into their faces.

  “That’s all for me, thanks,” David said. “Tina?”

  “I’m done too, thank you.”

  Amit texted Pravishi that he would be with her in exactly twenty-five minutes and he would bring her favorite chicken lollipop from the main kitchen on his way out. Outside the back entrance, Pravishi sat down on the sidewalk and opened the black forest cake and took a bite and put on YouTube on her phone. She would watch some Bollywood songs while she waited.

  “Anyway, one thing led to another and I ended up going back to their home—a slum, really—and had dinner with them and two glasses of Pepsi and my phone ran out of charge but I didn’t want to be rude and their home didn’t exactly look like it would have an iPhone charger.”

  David waved Amit over and asked for a bowl of peanuts.

  “You look so much like your mother,” David said. “And you have quite similar personalities too, don’t you?”

  “I really don’t think we do,” Tina said.

  “She always says you’re like her, fiercely independent,” David said. “And she told me not to dare ever treat you like a daughter because you would bite my head off and then she would bite my neck off.”

  “That part she got right.” Tina smiled.

  “Do you want children?” David asked. “I never wanted children.”

  “Have you ever regretted that choice?”

  “An evening here, an evening there of regret but that’s about all. No more or less regret than all my other choices made or not made.”

  They both sat in silence and sipped their drinks. Sudden, loud laughter broke out from the couple at the other table.

  “Weddings are exhausting, aren’t they?” David said. He set down his whiskey, rubbed his eyes, and cracked his knuckles.

  “I’ve barely seen Shefali and Pavan,” Tina said.

  David ate some more peanuts and stared at the fountain changing colors from red to blue.

  “I commend you for trying to capture this country for the screen,” David said. “It’s a complex place.”

  He stared ahead again.

  “I’m in over my head,” he said.

  He exhaled loudly.

  “Me too,” Tina said. “Although I feel like I’m always in over my head. Does my mother complain about that? I feel like she’s disappointed that I’m not as secure as her.”

  “Are you disappointed by that?” David asked. He paused briefly and added, “What am I doing? I’m turning into your mother, answering every question with a question. I’ll tell you one thing—she’s a brilliant psychiatrist. But as for you, I’ve never heard her do anything except praise you to the heavens. I was quite nervous about meeting you the first time.”

  “That’s nice of you to say, hard for me to believe,” Tina said.

  “I took a creative writing class soon after my last breakup and the teacher used to harp on about writing what you know,” David said. “I never agreed with that. The reason I took that class was in order to get away from everything I knew, you know?”

  “Okay,” Tina said.

  “Is it similar for finding content to produce?” David asked. “Or is it easier to actually create what you know? Like the couple who took me home—they were lovely and kind and their home was so small and so cramped, and I can see how they’d be fascinating, but you aren’t one of them. Right? Would you get the nuance or would it just be another voyeuristic perspective of poverty? By ‘you’ I mean ‘anyone.’ I’ve been genuinely wondering about this. I’m not sure how to even talk about India when I get back to America.”

  “I’m Indian, though,” Tina said. She paused. She looked over at the couple at the other table. The woman had slipped off her sandal and her toe was grazing the man’s ankle. A silver chain glinted against the woman’s ankle. The woman leaned her chin into her hand and smiled.

  “But I understand what you mean, I think. Like the home you’re describing right now—I don’t know the details, I don’t know what kind of plumbing or access to water they have. How do they cook? Do they have stoves?”

  “They did,” David said.

  But Tina barely heard him as she continued, “But if I now have to admit that I don’t know all this, then who am I? What am I? I’m not sure I fully belong in America but what if I don’t belong in India either? But I get what you’re saying—maybe I’m not giving India the credit it deserves. It’s not just about poverty, right? I mean, that’s exactly the kind of perception that needs to change. Is that what you meant?”

  “Sure,” David said.

  Tina looked over at him and smiled. “It’s like you’re inside my mind; I don’t know if I like it.”

  “I am inside your mind. ‘Who is this buffoon who hangs around my mother’ is your usual thought,” David said.

  “Right again. What did you end up writing about?”

  “A divorce story. But from the wife’s perspective,” David said. “I’ve never told your mother this. Can you imagine what a wild time she’d have if she read it and analyzed it? I thought it was pretty good. And for the record, I did not place all the blame on the wife. Anyway, I quit the class soon after that and haven’t written anything else since. I thought writing would be therapeutic but it’s too difficult.”

  “You’re going to have another breakup story on your hands if you don’t go and find my mother now and explain where you’ve been,” Tina said.

  * * *

  —

  ACROSS COLEBROOKES, MARIANNE PEEKED out the window to see if Tina had left before she went back out to meet Karan. Her phone flashed with a message from Tom telling her he missed her, he was on his way to a book launch in Park Slope, and he would speak to her later in the day. Marianne pictured him with his gray backpack on, slouching slightly, cigarette in hand, walking down his tree-lined lane in DUMBO. In the backpack would be an issue of the New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement, a bottle of water, and a small tin of Altoids that had opened up months ago and spilled all the little white mints.

  The patio was empty so Marianne rushed out and toward the main entrance, where Karan was waiting for her, his headlights on, windows rolled up, a low, thumping bass coming from the car. Marianne had to walk in the bright headlights to get to the passenger-side door and knowing Karan was in there, invisible behind the bright lights, watching her, thrilled her. Forget what Tina said about the dress; she wished she had been more honest with herself and carried a pair of heels. She had saved four pairs of her favorite heels and kept them in boxes on the top shelf of the shoe closet in the hallway of her apartment. She got in the car that smelled faintly of aftershave, cigarette smoke, and beer—the smells of college. Karan leaned back in his seat, looked at her, and said, “Didn’t expect you in a dress like that. You should show off your legs more often.”

  He didn’t wait for her to respond and pulled the car into reverse and then pulled forward toward the Colebrookes exit and the Delhi night streets. Marianne leaned back into her seat and put her feet up onto their toes, as if she were wear
ing heels, to accentuate her leg muscle. Tom would be on the train now, sitting down, reading, completely unaware of anyone around him. He was easily the most intelligent man Marianne had ever met. And he looked at her with the same intensity that he read—as if nothing else existed other than her.

  Karan drove in near silence with music playing, Marianne unable to tell what the music was, only that the bass was overpowering. She remembered the days she had spent holed up at the Pierre hotel with Riyaaz her junior year at Yale. He was Pakistani, grew up in Dubai, and was devastatingly handsome. He drove a silver BMW 3 Series and loved cooking. Marianne and Riyaaz were in the same English literature class the previous semester and their flirtation had started then but never turned into anything more until that Thursday night when he asked her if she wanted to go and watch Monsoon Wedding at the campus theater. Marianne skipped her lecture on the poetry of Plath and went to an afternoon show. It was the first Indian movie Marianne had ever seen and the dancing in the wedding scene had made her feel high. It was the end of February so when they came out it was already getting dark outside and Marianne was going to suggest getting a drink when Riyaaz said, “Want to go to a hookah bar and go dancing? That’s what the movie put me in the mood for. Some good Bollywood dancing.”

  Marianne smiled and they got into Riyaaz’s car and she had no idea where in New Haven you could smoke hookahs and dance to Bollywood. But it turned out it was nowhere in New Haven at all because Riyaaz drove, and then kept driving, and two hours later, they pulled into Manhattan, and on the narrow streets near NYU, Riyaaz parked his car on MacDougal Street, and as they stepped out, a blond girl in dark jeans and a black top suddenly vomited onto the pavement and Marianne had to dodge the vomit but she didn’t care. She couldn’t believe she was here and she couldn’t believe that in nearly three years of being at Yale she hadn’t come to New York City even once. Three Indian men wearing suits and eating rolls walked past, none of them bothering to make space on the sidewalk so Marianne had to momentarily separate from Riyaaz. She was hungry but she worried that eating would ruin the magic of the day.