Destination Wedding

by Diksha Basu

  “He had a girlfriend but it ended. She was Muslim and her family said no. My mother wasn’t going to say yes either but they said no first so now my mother marches around proudly talking about how tolerant she is and how the Muslim girl’s family refused.”

  “Right, I remember now. Your audition tape said your story comes ready with Hindu-Muslim tensions.”

  “It sells,” Sid shrugged.

  “Is your mother putting pressure on you to get married? How does it work? Do you have a girlfriend or would you have an arranged marriage? Like, to someone like Divya? Would that be suitable for your mother?”

  Sid stopped walking and looked at Tina and smiled.

  “So many questions. And without a video camera even,” he said. “So you can’t pretend these questions are for the show.”

  “How was your night yesterday?” Tina fumbled to change the topic.

  “Uneventful. Sorry I didn’t reply to your message,” Sid said. “My battery had died and my charger wasn’t working properly.”

  That didn’t sound too believable to Tina because two blue check marks had appeared near her message so she knew he had seen them.

  “Did you do anything fun?” Tina asked.

  “Nope,” Sid said. “Just worked out, watched some TV, had dinner, went to bed early.”

  Tina had also checked his chat tab this morning and noticed that he had last logged on at 3:14 A.M.

  Around them, Connaught Place was starting to get busier with people in office clothes milling about, sipping hot chai out of small earthen pots and some sipping hot coffee out of paper cups. A group of white tourists walked toward them. British, Tina could tell immediately by the accents. She watched Sid step aside near the wall in order to make room for them to walk past. When they were again shoulder to shoulder he said, “How come you aren’t married?”

  Tina shrugged.

  “Your parents must be worried about you. You are over thirty already?”

  “Yes, but that’s hardly old these days,” Tina said, her usual response to questions like these that she had grown accustomed to in India.

  “But it will be harder to have children if you wait too much longer,” Sid said, sounding concerned instead of annoying. He wasn’t saying it because he was some catty auntie or smug newlywed; he was saying it because it was true. Tina wasn’t even sure she wanted to have children but, along with everything else, this was something she needed to decide soon. Maybe she didn’t need to get pregnant right away but she needed to decide whether or not she ever hoped to. Living alone in New York had allowed her to stay twenty-five in her mind but her body had moved along. Unlike a lot of her friends, she had never achingly wanted a child but neither had she ever felt the need to loudly call herself child-free and commit to a life without babies. It suddenly felt like everything had rushed up and caught up with her and now Tina had days left to make decisions that should have been spread out over a decade.

  “I can marry you for a Green Card,” Sid said.

  “Or I can marry you to get Indian citizenship. Does it even work that way? Everyone knows how to go about trying to get American citizenship but what if I want to do it the other way?” Tina asked.

  “I really don’t know,” Sid said. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “It’s about passport privilege, isn’t it? It’s so arbitrary but if you’re born in a certain country, you automatically have the privilege to see pretty much the whole world but if you’re born elsewhere, like in India, or Iran, you have to apply and pay and beg and shout just for a chance to visit most countries. Damn it. Now, on top of all the other privilege I have to think about and try and correct for, I have to add passport privilege,” Tina said. “How much would it cost you to get a UK visa for instance?”

  “I have no idea. Divya told me there was a website where you could see which all countries will give Indians a visa on arrival. Definitely not the UK, though. But I can’t even afford a flight yet,” Sid said.

  “It feels like the world is flipping upside down right when I need to figure things out and now I don’t even know which world I’m supposed to inhabit,” Tina said, barely listening to him. “It was easy for my parents. They wanted to live in America when America was the clear choice, they wanted to get married when marriage was the only acceptable option, and then they wanted to get divorced right around when divorce became socially acceptable. The times rolled with them. Now there are no rules. I can do whatever I want, be whoever I want, and I don’t know if I want that freedom.”

  “Your parents are divorced?” Sid asked. “I don’t think I knew that. I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Tina said. “It happened years ago and it’s been best for everyone. They’re both happy.”

  “See, my world is still the same, still small,” Sid said. “Divorce still isn’t acceptable. Your world is so big that you have more options. You’re lucky.”

  “Come on, I want to get a bottle of water,” Tina said.

  They walked past a fancy jewelry showroom with gold displays in the front window. A man in uniform with a large mustache and larger gun stood guard outside the door.

  “I can’t afford any gold, I’m afraid,” Sid said. “I’ll buy you something artificial if we get married.”

  “You’ll be able to afford diamonds set in platinum once I turn you into a global superstar.”

  “That’s what I needed to do? Propose? See, the audition was misleading,” Sid said.

  He touched her arm and Tina, hearing Marianne’s voice in her head, Rachel’s voice, her own mother’s voice, decided to make a decision and slipped her arm through Sid’s arm. Maybe their differences didn’t matter; she earned enough for them both. Could she handle a house-husband, though?

  They stopped near a man standing at a corner near a fridge and paid twenty rupees for a bottle of water. On the ground near him, a stray dog lay with three puppies nestled against her. As Tina and Sid walked away with the water, the man squatted down and pet the big dog and refilled a metal bowl of water near her head. Tina took a sip of water from the bottle and offered it to Sid. He took it and held it up high away from his mouth and let the water fall in without touching his mouth to the bottle. They continued walking. Sid asked her about the wedding and how her family was doing. He said he had looked up Colebrookes on his phone the previous night and it looked fancy.

  “I’ve decided I could never live in Delhi,” Sid announced. “I’m enjoying myself here but I think I’ll always stay in Bombay. I feel poorer here somehow.”

  “Should we have another cup of coffee?” Tina responded, unsure how else to.

  “I have a better idea,” Sid said and dropped Tina’s arm. He pulled out his phone from his pocket—not an iPhone, Tina noted. Of course not an iPhone. She was one of the sheep who was tricked into believing that was the only phone that existed. But the rose gold was so lovely. And the phone was so convenient. Wasn’t it equally silly to be a sheep who was against it for no real rhyme or reason?

  “It’s only nine forty-five. Come with me,” Sid said. He banged his phone against his fist. “Stupid, cheap phone keeps crashing. But come with me to East Delhi. Come meet my friend Suraj. He’s an electrician at a housing complex there but really he’s a writer, a lyricist. He writes only in Hindi and some Punjabi, but a lot of what I perform is his. We’ve never met in person, only over the Internet, but I’ve told him all about you. You’ll like him. Come, please. I want you to meet him. I want you to be with me.”

  Tina looked around as if perhaps the answer were somewhere in the long, narrow walkways of Connaught Place even though she knew the answer immediately. India, with Sid by her side but also as her guide, was where she wanted to be, she was fairly certain.

  And that decision was validated when the rickshaw driver automatically flipped the meter down when Sid said to him, “Mayur Vihar, phase one.”
The rickshaw driver who took directions in Hindi from a confident Sid, even though Sid opened with the confession that he was from Bombay and knew nothing about Delhi. In the rickshaw, as they rattled through central Delhi onto busier, faster roads with more large trucks and buses and fewer shiny cars with tinted windows, the cool autumn air sliced across their faces. Tina and Sid huddled together at the back, their knees pushed against each other. Tina held her arms tightly around herself and turned her face into the side of Sid’s face to avoid inhaling the fumes from the trucks that overtook their small rickshaw. He wore no cologne, nothing on him smelled artificial. Sid put his arm around her shoulders, his hand resting against her right shoulder, and Tina could feel its warmth through the cloth of her kurta. They sat in silence, entwined, not even trying to speak because it would be futile over the loud sound of traffic and the city and wide roads.

  They crossed a bridge and the horizon looked dustier than what they had left behind. At Sid’s instruction, they turned off the bridge onto a small road that led to a smaller road on which the cars were smaller, older, dirtier, and more dented. There were no sidewalks and not many trees. As the rickshaw slowed its pace, Sid smiled at Tina and removed his hand from her shoulder and said, “Almost there.”

  Tina smiled back and turned away to face out of the rickshaw and saw a cow grazing along some low bushes. Bells clanked around its neck. A cluster of women in saris squatted in the sun at the side of the road and chatted while one oiled and combed the hair of another.

  The rickshaw slowed down as Sid gave more instructions, poking his head out to try and make sense of the roads even though none were marked.

  “Suraj said we had to take a left at the yellow schoolhouse. Did you see a yellow schoolhouse?”

  Would a yellow schoolhouse show up on Google Maps? Tina wondered. Probably, actually, but she let Sid deal with the navigation while she also looked out of her side. They were stopped in front of a handful of five-story apartment buildings with all the windows protected by bars. Clothes dried on balconies and ropes attached outside windows.

  They weren’t even entering the buildings with the protected windows. They were entering the lane of small shacks that stood in the shadow of those buildings. Tina followed behind Sid, who had even more swagger in this lane than he usually did. A short, dark-skinned man with bright-white eyes and teeth came around a corner and waved at them. He looked about fifteen but a small child wearing an oversized sweater and no pants stood behind him and tugged at him.

  They entered Suraj’s home, which was one windowless room with a small lofted space at the top. Every inch of space was used. A corner of the main room served as a kitchen, and a small TV sat on the top of the fridge. Near the fridge was an aquarium with dirty glass and a turtle inside. They all sat on the floor, the little boy pushing a small wooden toy truck with only three wheels between them.

  While Suraj and Sid chatted in faster Hindi than Tina could follow, a pretty young woman—girl really—in a salwar kameez came in the door that was propped open with a tray with two water glasses, one plate of oily samosas, and one plate of silver-coated kaju barfi. She placed the plate down in the middle of them and Suraj didn’t introduce her.

  “Chintu, come, leave Papa alone,” the woman said in Hindi, and the little boy wandered off behind her.

  Sid kept talking in Hindi and reached over and drained a glass of water and started on a samosa. Suraj, who had barely acknowledged Tina so far, now nudged the tray a bit closer to her and looked at her. Tina wanted to refuse, wanted to ask if the water was filtered, wanted to say she wasn’t hungry but instead she took a few sips of water and picked up a kaju barfi. The small, diamond-shaped sweet seemed like it would be easier to digest. But it wasn’t. Or maybe the water in the glass wasn’t, because twenty minutes later, Tina felt a deep rumble go through her stomach. Her eyes widened in terror and she said, “Um, sorry, Sid, could I use the bathroom?”

  Sid looked at her and looked out of the door and then looked at Suraj and said, “Bathroom?”

  Suraj thrust his chin out toward the door and said in careful English, “Right side.”

  Tina thanked him and hurriedly got up and walked out of the door and to the right. She looked around in search of the bathroom. Sid’s wife and son were sitting on the ground outside, the son still pushing the truck around, the wife flipping through a magazine. The wife looked up at Tina and pointed to a wooden door behind her.

  Tina smiled at her and rushed toward the wooden door and opened it to find an empty room with a mud floor that certainly smelled like a bathroom. But there was no toilet, no sink, no toilet paper, no mirror, nothing except a small bucket of water in the corner with a plastic pink mug bobbing on the surface.

  Tina backed out of the bathroom and hurried past Suraj’s wife and son and back into their home.

  “I have to go,” she said to Sid. “The haldi lunch. It’s today, it’s now. I have to go right now.”

  “Did you find the bathroom?” Sid asked.

  “I’ll speak to you later, okay? I really enjoyed our morning.”

  Sid got up and said, “Wait, I’ll walk you out and make sure you get a rickshaw.” But Tina waved to him and rushed back toward the main road.

  “Cinderella,” Sid said loudly behind her. “Leave me a glass slipper.”

  Tina didn’t have time to be charmed because she knew her insides were a ticking clock and she needed to get back to Colebrookes and the clean bathrooms with toilet seats and water guns and toilet paper and large mirrors and flattering lighting before her body betrayed her.

  THURSDAY, 1 P.M.

  Haldi Lunch, Hyacinth Haven, Shefali Wanted the Alliteration, Colebrookes

  “OKAY, THAT’S ENOUGH NOW, UNCLE,” Shefali snapped. “I thought only women applied the haldi on the bride.”

  Shefali used the back of her hand to rub the turmeric off her eyebrow and squinted at the uncle.

  “Do you even know us?” Shefali asked.

  “Shefali,” Pavan whispered. But he loved Shefali’s refusal to worry about social codes. “Don’t be rude, babe.”

  “He let his hand linger on my neck,” Shefali said. “I’ll be as fucking rude as I want. I can’t stand old Indian uncles who think they can get away with being sleazy because everyone’s forced to respect their elders regardless of whether or not we even know them. Disgusting. He is definitely not related to us.”

  The uncle backed away quickly. The bride was right. He wasn’t invited to the wedding. He didn’t even know who these people were. He was on his way to use the gym when he had seen the haldi ceremony in progress and he couldn’t resist giving this young woman’s swan-like neck a little stroke. His own wife’s neck had long disappeared under her multiple chins. But he had to be careful now. Last week he had stroked the arm of a young woman on a flight to Hyderabad and she turned around, shouting, and took a video of him. He quickly, reverentially did a namaste and acted as if he were old and senile and had done it by mistake, but she was furious. The simple days of being able to pinch a girl’s bottom were quickly slipping away, he worried.

  This may have been a mistake, Shefali thought, still fuming. She had always liked the image of the haldi ceremony—she had pictured the yellow turmeric making her brown skin glow, sitting as the center of attention, looking disheveled but beautiful. But she was looking and feeling like a marinated piece of meat and she wanted to scratch her eyes but her hands were a mess so she just blinked rapidly. She should have done a mehndi ceremony instead. She had reasoned that sitting with her arms out for three hours while the henna dried would be the boring option but now she craved that boredom.

  “Where the hell are all our friends?” she asked.

  “Hungover, probably,” Pavan said.

  Marianne approached the couple, seated on a white cloth under a large white canopy.

  “This is so beautiful!” she said, taking a
picture with her phone. “What exactly does the turmeric signify?”

  “God knows,” Shefali said. “I just thought it would make for good pictures.”

  “Turmeric is a very auspicious color. It’s known to keep the evil eye away,” Bubbles said from the sidelines. “And, of course, it makes the skin glow. So many good properties. Come, come. Let Shefali touch some to your skin also; it’ll help you find a suitable partner.”

  Marianne leaned forward and Shefali removed some of the paste from her forehead and rubbed it onto Marianne’s.

  “Where’s Tina?” Shefali asked.

  “Food poisoning,” Marianne said.

  “Gross,” Shefali said. “From something she ate here? Is our food making people sick? I will die of embarrassment.”

  “No, she had gone out somewhere this morning,” Marianne said.

  “Tell her not to come out before she’s fully better. I don’t need someone vomiting all over the bushes and diverting all the attention.”

  “Where’s…where’s everyone else?” Marianne asked, looking around. “Hey, Pavan, where’s your brother?”

  “Are you sleeping with him?” Shefali asked.

  “What? No!” Marianne said quickly. She looked around to see if she could find Rocco or Kai but nobody seemed to be at the lunch yet. She decided to walk back to the cottage for a little while so Karan wouldn’t see her wandering around alone and aimless.

  Shefali shrugged. An elderly couple approached and lifted the haldi paste up with their hands and went to apply it onto the couple.

  “Auntie can put it on me and Uncle can put it on Pavan,” Shefali said. “Those are the rules now.”