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Destination Wedding

Page 20

by Diksha Basu


  Riyaaz walked with a swagger, a cigarette forever between his fingers, his wealth giving him confidence beyond his twenty years. Marianne felt immature and inexperienced. Riyaaz did most of the talking and she did most of the listening. A homeless couple sat on the ground with tarp and sheets and dreadlocks and a large dog by their feet. A cardboard sign sat in front of them next to an empty coffee cup with coins. The sign said: Lost everything, expecting a baby, anything helps, God bless you.

  “Maybe getting a job would help,” Riyaaz said and Marianne laughed and they walked past them and straight to the entrance to Falucka.

  Ten, fifteen, thirty minutes into sitting in Falucka, drinking gin and tonics, and smoking a hookah, Marianne couldn’t stop feeling guilty that she had laughed. She excused herself from Riyaaz, slipped out of Falucka, and gave the homeless couple ten dollars, more than she had ever given away before, and came back into the club and kissed Riyaaz while he was mid-sip. They ended up spending four nights at The Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue, Marianne surviving on cosmetics and deodorant bought at the Duane Reade on Lexington and some clothes she bought at Bloomingdale’s one morning when Riyaaz disappeared for a meeting. He never said what the meeting was and she never asked. On that trip, Marianne first snorted cocaine and loved it, she wore all black and loved it, she had sex with Riyaaz at least twice every day (including once in the bathroom of Jules while a live band played jazz right outside) and she loved it, and she learned to walk on the cobbled streets of the Meatpacking District in stiletto heels (the trick was to lean forward until your calves burned).

  They returned to New Haven at 4 A.M. on Sunday, straight from a night of partying. They had been drinking in the back room of Spitzer’s when Riyaaz suddenly said, “Well, this is all getting a bit too repetitive. Let’s go back.” She thought he meant to the Pierre and was looking forward to a quieter glass of wine in the dark hotel bar but instead they went upstairs, packed their things wordlessly, got in the car, and drove back to New Haven. With anyone else, this would have been annoying but with Riyaaz she found her lack of say and independence absolutely thrilling. On the car ride back, Riyaaz barely spoke, this time listening to Tupac on a low volume, muttering along to some of the rapped parts. Marianne had a feeling of impending doom about returning to Yale, returning to her normal backpack and classes, returning to a life outside the Pierre, outside Manhattan, and even though a strange unease and sadness was creeping up on her in the car that night, she vowed that she would move to New York the minute she graduated.

  * * *

  —

  SHE THOUGHT OF THAT now as Delhi sped past the darkened windows of Karan’s car.

  “This seems far,” she said. “Where are we going?”

  Karan lowered the volume and asked, “What?”

  “This is far,” Marianne repeated. “Where are we going?”

  “It’s my friend’s farmhouse right outside the city. It won’t take much longer and the cops rarely cause trouble out there. Plus he has a huge pool, you’ll see.”

  Marianne felt a little scared by the mention of cops and why they should be a cause for concern at a party but she said nothing. Certainly, nothing about the party looked frightening when they got there. Fairy lights sparkled in the trees and heat lamps and bonfires were scattered around the rolling lawns of the party. The pool glistened, empty but filled with rows of small candles, and well-dressed people in boots and jackets and scarves stood around drinking champagne and wine and smoking cigarettes and reminding Marianne of Riyaaz in a way that made her ache.

  “Come, let’s get a drink,” Karan said and grabbed Marianne’s hand.

  Two drinks later, Marianne excused herself and went to the bathroom to rinse some mouthwash through her mouth. She hated mints and gum so she always carried a small bottle of mouthwash in her purse. She swirled it around her mouth, spat it out, rinsed the light blue tinge off her teeth, and reapplied her lipstick.

  Two beautiful Indian women came in, both wearing fur coats draped over their shoulders, their slender arms with gold bracelets on them clutching small purses. They smiled at Marianne and placed their purses on the bathroom counter. One of them leaned back against the sink and sipped from a glass of wine while the other one leaned into the mirror and examined her face.

  “Have you seen how great my pores look? I’ve been doing vampire facials,” she said.

  Her friend glanced at her and asked, “Do you go to Fatima?”

  “Of course,” her friend said. “Despite what she’s done to her own forehead. Have you noticed?”

  “It’s impossible not to. She is not currently her own best advertisement,” her friend said. She opened her clutch and took out a little Altoid tin.

  “I want a mint,” her friend said, reapplying her lipstick in the mirror.

  “It’s E,” her friend said. “I’m just going to do a half. Do you want the other half?”

  Marianne watched them both place the half pills in their mouths and swallow them down with quick sips of wine. In the past, whenever she wore this dress, she was always offered whatever drugs were available. She looked down at herself now. Maybe it was the flat shoes that made her look like an unlikely candidate for E. She would have accepted half a pill, she thought, and walked back to the lawn. Karan was standing alone by the edge of the swimming pool. Marianne walked straight up to him, the way she had to Riyaaz, and she kissed him—except, unlike Riyaaz, Karan pulled back with a laugh and said, “Drinks went to your head pretty fast. Do you need some water? And here, come, I’ll introduce you to the hosts.”

  He took her hand again and technically nothing he had said or done was offensive but Marianne felt her stomach sink and she felt a hot embarrassment that he would have smelled her fresh, mouth-washed breath and known that she had prepared herself to kiss him. She followed him through the crowd and stopped to pick up a vodka shot from a white waitress dressed like a nurse who was carrying around two trays with different-colored test tube shots.

  “Easy, tiger,” Karan said. Marianne downed her shot and continued after him. She wanted to leave but how could she? She didn’t have a car, and Delhi at night in a little black dress wasn’t safe. So she picked up another glass of wine and told herself she would enjoy this because surely she hadn’t changed that much since the week in New York with Riyaaz.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER RIYAAZ AND MARIANNE had returned to New Haven, they continued seeing each other off and on for the remainder of her junior year. She never messaged or called him first but whenever he called, he picked her up in his car and drove her to his off-campus apartment and cooked her elaborate meals and then she spent the night. He introduced her to the world of competitive cooking shows and taught her how to pair her wines with her food. One night he took her to the local grocery store and they spent an hour in the produce section working out which tomatoes would be the juiciest, which cucumbers the crunchiest, and which avocados would be the perfect shade of green that very day, and Marianne swore she had never experienced anything so erotic. He told her all his business plans with the confidence of a man who would never have to work for his money.

  “So much product gets wasted,” he said to her over a simmering pot of minestrone soup one night, the smell of bacon wafting through the air. “Like lotion or shampoo or conditioner. Right? Like you just use it as long as it’s easy to get out of the bottle and then you probably throw it out. So I’m designing this rotating piece of plastic that will help scrape out the small bits left in the bottom of bottles. It’ll end up saving people millions.”

  “I don’t think anyone spends millions on lotions and shampoos,” Marianne said.

  “Whatever, thousands,” Riyaaz said. He pulled a spatula out of his kitchen drawer and said, “See, the edge would be something like this.”

  He went to open all the windows. His parents didn’t know he ate pork and they were
coming for graduation the following weekend. Marianne stayed on campus for graduation because she had a part-time job at the library but also because she hoped maybe Riyaaz would introduce her to his family. He didn’t. He didn’t call her that whole weekend even though he knew she was there. She saw him across the quad with his family one day and waved but he just nodded back in her direction. The night before he left campus, he came to her dorm for the last time and they had sex on her creaky single bed. He gave her his juicer and his portable DVD player, kissed her on the forehead, and left. She never heard from him again. She still checked his Facebook every so often so she knew he was married to a woman named Arzoo, had one son who looked more like Arzoo than like him, and was living in Dubai, but she knew nothing else.

  She especially didn’t know that in Dubai, Arzoo often looked at Marianne’s Facebook page because whenever she had an argument with Riyaaz, he would talk about Marianne as if she was the one that got away and now he was stuck with Arzoo.

  Her senior year, Marianne started hanging out with the rich Indians and Pakistanis of her year and took Tina along with her. These South Asians had all grown up in South Asia and planned to return there as soon as they finished studying. Marianne never found another Riyaaz and missed him continuously her senior year. Soon after she graduated, she met Samuel at a Starbucks in Union Square and traded in her South Asian shawls and bangles for the infamous beret and zipped off to Paris to eat escargots and smoke cigarettes and pose nude for Samuel to draw. He was a terrible artist, and despite the romance and glamor of being stretched out nude for him, she had cringed when she saw the final sketch and quickly put her clothes back on. And then there had been Sven and Minh and Seydou, and Archie, and with them Marianne had gone to Amsterdam and Hanoi and Timbuktu and a sprawling manor in Essex. And after all that, there was Tom and his apartment in DUMBO and his parents in Newton and they spoke the same language and they had watched the same television shows and read the same magazines and attended the New Yorker Festival every October and both had glasses from Warby Parker. It was wonderful, it was safe, but was that really it?

  * * *

  —

  TONIGHT, ON THIS FARMHOUSE LAWN on the outskirts of Delhi, senior-year Marianne was waking up again. Now, with the alcohol warming her blood, Karan’s hand still holding hers, Marianne started to wonder which Marianne was a performance, which Marianne was true, and perhaps more important, which Marianne made her the happiest. The party was picking up, the crowds getting fatter, the room to move scarcer, and Marianne was pressed up against Karan as they chatted with his friend Kavya and her fiancé, Faisal. They were talking about their upcoming wedding in Bali but all Marianne could concentrate on was the smell of Karan’s cigarette mingling with the smell of his cologne, the loud music, and the feeling of Karan’s hand that had dropped hers and moved instead to her hip. He squeezed her hip; she smiled and leaned into him. Kavya and Faisal noticed and smiled at each other and Kavya said, “I think we’ll leave you two alone instead of boring you with all our wedding talk.”

  Kavya reached into Karan’s shirt pocket and pulled out his pack of cigarettes. She took two, put the cigarette pack back in his pocket, patted it twice, kissed him on his cheek, and walked away with Faisal following.

  Faisal stared at Kavya’s body from the back and decided he would follow her to the end of the earth if she asked. She was magnificent, that small mole on her ear, her slender fingers, her vicious sense of humor, and her willingness to overlook the fact that he had once kissed her sister. He still couldn’t believe Pearl had told Kavya. What a betrayal.

  THURSDAY MORNING

  Colebrookes: Today’s the Haldi Lunch, but First Tina Wants to See Sid; She Wants This to Be Something—Anything

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, SUNIL was dozing in the sun outside but jumped up and dusted himself off when he saw Tina approaching. She waved him down and said, “I’m just going to take a rickshaw today, Sunil. You relax.”

  A rickshaw came to a loud clattering stop outside Colebrookes and Tina got in and said, “CP, M Block, Nirulas ke paas,” as confidently as she could, Google Maps open on her phone in case the rickshaw driver took her off in a completely different direction. She noticed he hadn’t flipped the meter down so she added, “Bhaiyya, meter se.” But he looked at her in the rearview mirror and said in English, “Madam, what meter? You pay what you think is right.”

  Tina looked back at him and adjusted the collar of her kurta so even the sliver of skin down her neck was no longer visible. The middle of Delhi early in the morning in the middle of autumn was beautiful. Despite all the headlines about the pollution, the air felt fresh—Tina knew it wasn’t, of course, and that was clear when she washed her hands at the end of a day out—but here, driving through the leafy lanes of central Delhi, it felt fresh and healthy.

  The rickshaw took a left turn away from the main road that Tina’s maps showed. She watched her rickshaw go in the wrong direction for almost a minute, wondering if she should say something. They were on a quiet road now, with big houses with tall gates and hardly any cars. A woman in a yellow sari and brown blouse raked leaves along the wide sidewalk. Two dogs wrestled around in a dusty spot under a tree. Tina looked at her phone again—they were on a road perpendicular to the road they were meant to be on. She looked out of the open side of the rickshaw and as she was looking back in, she made eye contact with the rickshaw driver again. She pulled out her sunglasses from her purse, put them on, and pretended to be doing other things on the phone, trying to act uninterested in the roads because of their familiarity.

  Still, she did what she often did anywhere out of New York City and went to the sounds settings in her phone and pressed Ringtone and clicked on Default to make her phone ring. She turned it off and held the phone to her ear and said loudly, “Yes, I’m on the way. I’ll be there in a few minutes. I’m just off Barakhamba Road. I’ll be there soon.”

  She pretended to turn the phone off and dropped the phone back into her purse and decided instead to look ahead and try and keep track of her general direction. They drove past a man sitting beside a pushcart piled high with green grapes and guavas. A school bus was stopped on the side of the road and dozens of small girls in red-and-black-checkered uniforms milled about near the bus, their hair tied into braids with red bows. Two women, teachers, presumably, in saris, drank tea from flasks and chatted. The rickshaw stopped at a traffic light near them and Tina watched one of the teachers shout, “Stop pushing each other this instant. Anyone who starts a fight is being sent straight back to school and isn’t going on any other field trips all year.”

  “It’s a shame we can’t slap them anymore,” one of the teachers said to the other.

  The rickshaw took a sharp left, the road curved gently to the right, then he took another right, then that road curved left but more sharply than the previous road had, and finally Tina gave up and admitted that she had no idea whether or not they were going in the right direction. She was trying to find the right sequence of words in Hindi to casually ask the driver which route he was taking when he took a right turn at an intersection with no traffic lights and the large, imposing white structures of Connaught Place suddenly loomed up in front of her.

  In front of Nirula’s, Tina pulled out two five-hundred-rupee notes from her wallet. She was going to stand firm and not pay a rupee more than that, she decided. She wasn’t going to be charged foreigner prices by this rickshaw driver who thought he knew her so well that he refused to answer her Hindi with Hindi.

  The driver took the two bills and handed one back to Tina.

  “Madam, even this amount that I’m taking is too much because I know you aren’t from here,” he said. “But one thousand I would feel bad taking.”

  A documentary on rickshaw drivers in Delhi?

  * * *

  —

  DESPITE THE SLIGHT WINTER CHILL in the air, Sid insisted on getting sundaes because hi
s mother always talked about the famous Nirula’s sundaes in Delhi. He ordered a vanilla one with chocolate syrup and Tina got a black coffee, and they decided to stroll through the arches of Connaught Place instead of sitting in Nirula’s, which was dimly lit and depressing and empty.

  Tina looked at Sid and was annoyed with herself for still seeing him as a casting choice instead of a potential romantic partner. He was so attractive, she told herself. Why wasn’t she drawn to him the way she ought to be? She would make herself be. Sometimes these things needed a little nudge, even if it was forced at first.

  Sid was wearing a dark blue sweater and looking at him made Tina feel hot but the very first thing he said was that he wasn’t used to even slightly cold weather after a lifetime in Bombay.

  “Then you’ll never survive in New York,” Tina said.

  “I’ll learn. I’m going to teach myself snowboarding once I move there,” Sid said. And Tina tried to picture him on the slopes. “Do you know how to make sushi?”

  “No,” Tina said.

  “Me neither. So I’m going to take a class on sushi-making in New York. I was at one of my client’s houses one day and her daughter was watching some documentary on a sushi chef and it was brilliant. What perfection, what an art. I bet sushi chefs live longer than others on average. That documentary was based in Japan somewhere but I looked it up and there are all kinds of sushi-making classes in New York too. Sushi-making and snowboarding—two more things you have the power to make happen for me, Tina.”

  A woman in a blue synthetic sari and gold jewelry walked past them and turned to look at Sid. Tina turned as well and locked eyes with the woman, who quickly turned away. Sid didn’t seem to notice. He crumpled his empty coffee cup and dropped it at the side of the road. He stopped at a man sitting with a large tin box open in front of him and squatted down to buy a fistful of beedis to smoke later. When he stood back up and they continued walking, Tina asked, “When you auditioned, your brother was about to get married, is that right?”

 

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