A little earthquake rocked me.
I might have blacked out.
When I opened my eyes, he was smiling at me again. “Do you remember that?”
I grinned lazily. “Oh, yes. We flew to the moon. We drank som ras, and we sang an entire village out of their beds to make love in the groves.”
He glanced up at the mirror-ball-spattered ceiling. “I could call Suka.”
“Yes, that’s what this wedding needs. A giant green parrot with a red beak.” Or a skinny gay flight attendant.
“We could drink champagne and sing all these people out of their clothes to make love under the strobe light,” he suggested.
I thumped him on the back of the head with my wrist. “Clown. This wedding is for my family, not for you to make a fool of yourself. Or anyone else.”
His eyebrows went up. “Oops.”
“What?” I thumped him again and he loosened his arms to let me stand. “Kama! What have you done?”
“Let’s just say that your snob of a mom is gonna be thrilled.”
The next night, we got married.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Papaji and Kama and his oldest roommate wore gold turbans. Mummy swaggered from one end of the house to the other, ordering everyone about, resplendent in blue silk. I was dressed for hours…and hours…by hundred-dollar-an-hour professionals aided by my sisters, who forgave me for having the biggest wedding because they’d married years before me. Hair. Nails. Pedicure. Jewelry on my neck, my ankles, my hands, my ears, my forehead, and a gold nose ring the diameter of a margarita glass. The choli of my bride-red lehenga was tight and the skirt tangled my unaccustomed ankles, and I was afraid to turn my head for fear I’d dislodge the demure bridal dupatta scarf worked into my hair with about three pounds of bobby pins.
The groom’s cavalcade arrived on foot, with the brass band coming first in stiff British red uniforms and gold buttons. Then the groom—on an elephant! I blinked away tears of pride. Kama wore a gold sherwani and gold turban. His roommates garlanded him with marigolds. He was short compared with every other man present, but he glowed with inner light. Whenever he caught me looking at him, his smile made me feel like a movie star.
The snarky, bitter civil rights attorney inside me didn’t make a peep.
We walked seven times around the sacred fire. We sat cross-legged and barefoot on the ground. In the sudden silence—the only silence I had heard for days—Mummy’s priest chanted in Sanskrit. Papaji put my hand into Kama’s hand. Our long sashes were tied together at the ends to symbolize our bond. Cousin Sunil, resplendent in green and silver, poured rice into our palms and we offered it to Agni by throwing it into the fire. Kama and I spoke our lines. All I could hear was our two voices repeating, “May the morning be honey sweet for us…may the earth be honey sweet…the heavens honey sweet…honey sweet…” I felt the immensity of marriage for the first time in this lifetime. The mouse Rathi settled into her tight choli, grateful for all the ritual, so very grateful to her family for being here to help carry her through it.
The goddess part of me felt deep satisfaction. I was home in India again. My husband sat cross-legged and barefoot beside me again. I knew every single thing about him and not a bit of it dismayed me. My lawyer self had some surprises coming…but that would not change what was being done here today.
The first surprise was when Kama led me slowly to the street. “Better say goodbye to the elephant.”
“What on earth? Kama, it’s going to rain any moment!”
“I promised.” The music and drumming had started up again behind us. “Shut your eyes, now.”
“Kama, I’m barefoot.” But I shut my eyes.
Open.
I opened my eyes. The elephant’s head was the biggest thing in the night. His eyes were three feet apart, but somehow they looked directly into mine so sweetly that the air in my lungs trembled.
I placed my cold palms together and bowed. “You do us honor, Lord.”
Remember there will always be more elephant than you expect.
He rumbled a blessing—and his trunk fetched Kama a slap on the butt that made him yelp. Then he raised his trunk and let loose a blast like a trombone’s that harmonized perfectly with the wedding din, and wheeled away, riderless, into the darkness.
Afterward, as the wedding morphed into the reception, we danced. Music and drumming and singing rang in my ears. Every now and then someone made me stop dancing to hug me or bless me. Then the long round of speeches started—Kama made a speech, my father made a speech, Kama’s roommate made a speech. Endless food wheeled by on big trays. Everyone but me seemed to be eating.
Moments of quiet intensity studded the night.
Irene Bentwater found me and begged me not to quit the law.
“I won’t,” I promised.
“You’re sure about that?” she said over her glass of champagne. “Because I’ll fight like a wolverine to keep somebody who can cross-examine like you.”
“I’ve put my whole life into it,” I said. “I’m committed.”
She looked across the room at Kama, who was teaching his roommates a wedding dance step using Mummy’s tall English candles for sticks. Wax droplets and broken candles flew all over their sherwanis. I met Irene’s gaze and we rolled our eyes.
Auntie Lakshmi had spent most of her visit planning my wedding with Mummy, but she made some time for me. She even wore a beautiful green sari instead of the jeans she had threatened to wear just to freak me out. “Congratulations, kiddo. You made it through in one piece. What about Mister Big Britches?”
“Lord Shiva has been most generous,” I said. “A seat on the board for us both. As equal partners in the rule of Love.”
Her eyes opened wide. “That took some doing.”
I told her about the reservoir of female sexual power I felt hanging over me, and how I had drawn on it to break up the fireball fight in the temple parking lot. She nodded approval. When she heard of the settlement, she was less impressed.
“But you’ll have to go to meetings!” she wailed.
“I am expert at meetings,” I said.
“Ugh!”
“You sound like Kama,” I said with affection. “My slacker auntie and my slacker husband. I can see that by comparison I’ll go down in history as a shrew.”
“Well, you didn’t get that from me,” Auntie Lakshmi said.
I wrapped an arm around her and bumped my forehead on hers. “I got all the best things from you. I’m sorry if I was a troublesome child.”
She patted my cheek. “That’s how I like ’em.”
If my auntie-slash-mother-in-law was happy, paradoxically, my parents seemed to be getting cold feet. Fine time for that.
“But, beti, has he any money of his own?” Mummy whined.
“Yes, Mummy. He flew all my colleagues from Chicago. He’s been saving most of his income for some time.”
She frowned across the room. Grinning in his gold sherwani, my bridegroom looked like a teenager, only a little too old to be a ring bearer. “What can he have saved from mail-room wages?”
“He was a sex demon for more than two hundred fifty years. They paid him in pure silver.”
My mother was never happy when I stated inconvenient facts, and never less so than when those facts touched on Kama’s immortality and…other divine qualifications. She bit a spicy potato canapé in half and chewed ferociously.
“Silver is almost eighteen hundred rupees per ounce and rising,” Papa said. He looked much cheerier than Mummy. “He can support you well until you are vested with your firm.”
Mummy smacked him on the elbow. “She’s a partner!”
“Considering that my billable hours are suffering due to all this wedding business, it’s a perfectly reasonable observation,” I said smoothly. “We’re all right, Papaji.”
“And he has given up this work. This demoning?” Mummy snapped.
I remembered our presentation to Shiva’s board of directors—the H
indu pantheon—about our restored and updated role as gods of sensual love. How to describe all that to my snobbish and prudish Mummy?
I called up my divine powers of persuasion and fixed her with the loving eye of the goddess. “He is a god. As am I.”
And my scolding, worrisome Mummy stopped scolding.
Miraculous.
I could get used to this.
“How are the latest tests on the jaundice?” I added. I didn’t mention chapter seven of the infamous book.
Mummy finished her potato cake and dusted her fingertips with the napkin, her eyes downcast. “Serum levels are much improved, beti.”
I smiled at my father. “Good.”
Papaji blushed.
Then Kama started introducing the gods to my parents. They all wore Western tuxedos, possibly to show that they were related to the groom.
Lord Shiva came first. He was just a bit taller than anyone, a bit bigger, a bit…more so. Making a point. Rathi, goddess of desire, felt a little mistrustful and anxious, but Rathi the lawyer took it in stride. Just another CEO with attitude. I smiled demurely and bowed with my palms together.
“Thank you for inviting me,” Lord Shiva said, bowing to my parents. My mother’s eyes were like saucers. “Well done, Kamadeva,” he told my bridegroom. “My gift to you is that you will never feel the heat of my wrath again.”
Kama bowed back. “And mine to you is that you will have the benefits of great love whenever you want them.”
They eyed one another for a long moment. I gave a tiny double cough and spilled a little champagne on the floor, and the moment passed.
Indra came next, gleaming more golden than my husband but not more beautiful, with that great moustache and his fierce sense of humor. He and Kama traded jokes, and then he blessed me. “A rainbow for your wedding morning,” he said, making tiny a gesture toward the sky that was somehow full of power. To Kama he gave a bottle that he said would never empty. Kama gave the golden god a tin of moustache wax. They punched one another on the arm.
Late in the evening, Krishna turned up, and I thought my mother would swoon with pride. There was no mistaking the blue cast to his skin or his sweet, relaxed smile.
Kama gave him an iPhone. “To keep track of your wives.”
“Chill,” the Protector of All Living Things said. “I’m not stealing yours.”
“No shit, butter thief.” Kama shook his fist playfully.
Krishna smiled. “I came to dance,” he said, and pulled a flute out of his inside breast pocket. “And to make you dance.”
Dance we did. Lotus Bride and her apsaras performed a traditional dance and their parrot-gandharvas provided music. Krishna’s flute shrilled wildly over the drums. We all joined the dance then. I think that was when I learned that alcohol is a food. Certainly I ate nothing and drank only champagne…and danced all night with my beloved.
Chapter Thirty
“If we live another ten thousand years,” I said to my bride, “I never want to go through that again.”
“Exhausting but fun,” Rathi said decidedly. She was unfurling new petals. I think five days of nonstop wedding hoopla actually helped with prati-prasav. She was my in-charge goddess more and more each day.
We danced until long after dawn, ate, drank, talked ourselves hoarse, hugged and kissed, blessed and toasted, gave and received. I’d forgotten how everyone over here was related to everyone. Rathi had eight hundred cousins, give or take, and the gods and devas kept rolling through until I abandoned the effort of remembering their names. My roommates partied like the champs they were. Veek had to leave early—his priest back home was still pretty sick—but Baz stayed, chatting up my mother in a corner for hours.
By ten the next morning even the gods looked bedraggled. Rathi and I tore ourselves away, pleading honeymoon fever. We threw our bags into the limo and drove off to visit the temple.
Boy, did I get points with mom-in-law for that.
What she didn’t know was that we stepped through the front door of the Delhi temple…and stepped out of a temple located half an hour from the ocean at Goa.
By eleven, we were almost unpacked in an oceanfront cabana. The Goa resort was charging us the equivalent of Lear jet rental, but we got the works. A skillion candles were lit in all the rooms of the suite, bouquets and bowls of flower petals sat everywhere, along with wine, trays and trays of chow, full bar, a TV in every room, two hot tubs—one out on the patio so we could watch the ocean up to our chins in bubbles—and god knew what fancy shit in the bathroom all wrapped up in bright tissue and gold ribbon. I figured I’d let Rathi explore all that.
I had what I wanted right here, all ready to unwrap.
“Look!” She pointed out the glass door at the ocean. “Indra’s rainbow!”
I came up behind her and slid my hands under her dupatta where it fell over her shoulders and her bare arms. “Nice. Can I get you into bed now?”
“Heavens, yes. Help me out of this?” she said, picking at the dupatta. I tugged at it and found it was full, and I mean full, of hairpins. Once we got that off, and she’d gingerly removed that horseshoe of a nose ring, I peeled the fancy red crop top off her, then a matching bra built like a high board fence. Her breasts popped out with a nice bounce.
She sighed hugely. I didn’t blame her. My outfit was made to dance in. Hers, not so much. “I’ve never seen Mummy so happy. Thank you for inviting—well—everybody from heaven.”
“I thought she’d like it,” I said cynically. “Besides, all the gods wanted to watch Shiva give in on a territory grab. How do you unzip this thing?”
She showed me, smiling over her shoulder. “And it was a huge boost to our campaign to reinstate positive sex.”
The skirt thingy slid off her hips. Under the skirt she wore the flowery, frilly underpants I’d bought her in Chicago. I felt a sentimental pang. “Awww. You like those?”
“I have seven pairs.”
My jaw dropped. “You already had six pairs and I bought you the same ones? Aw, nuts. Here I thought I was corrupting you.”
She giggled. “You did. I loved them so much that I bought six more pairs.”
“Don’t tell your mother.”
She turned and cupped her henna-scrawled palm to my face. “Enough of the mother-in-law bashing. I have her only another forty years. You’re the one I want for good.”
I felt my chest tighten up and then relax. “I don’t think I can get tired of hearing you say that.” It occurred to me that one of the big points of a wedding is to convince these two people that their lives have changed. They’re together. “We’re together, babe.”
I couldn’t have guessed that this luminous, shy-eyed gazelle was the same stuck-up heifer who looked right through me on her first day at the law firm. She shone with a divine light. I hoped the cabana was insured.
“I’ve remembered a lot these past few days,” she said.
“How does it feel?”
“Weird for about ten seconds. I think it’s getting easier. Sometimes the weird ten seconds doesn’t come until an hour or more later, after I’ve done something or said something I couldn’t—mouse Rathi couldn’t.”
“Mouse Rathi?”
“That’s how I keep them, I mean us, distinct in my head. I’m both mouse Rathi and mountain Rathi.”
“Mouse?” I said incredulously. “That ass-kicking lady lawyer is a mouse?”
She smiled. “Well, she is smaller than a goddess.” Her smile faded. “Are you okay with me staying a lawyer?”
“That’s your dharma, babe. You’ve committed to this path. When you’ve done the work or paid the debt you owe, you’ll know. Then you’ll decide you’re done.”
She made a face. “It’s not like you to talk about duty. Who are you and what have you done with my mail-room boy?”
“I’m more than the mail-room boy now. You’re not the only one who’s been in first gear all this time. The love god has duties as well as powers. You’ve given that back to me, R
athi,” I said, kissing her hand. “It’s funny. I’m back in harness, and I think I like it. You negotiated our jobs back. You did what I couldn’t do. I can’t help wondering if we would have saved ourselves and everyone else a lot of grief if I’d let you handle the job of waking him up back then. He might not have death-rayed you.”
“I don’t think so.” She shook her head. “No, love. The changes in how people felt about sex—they happened all over the world. Our worship and our ways went up in flame and blood everywhere. Shiva’s rule was new then. The star of asceticism was still rising.”
“And now, O my prophetic bride?” She worried me with this kind of talk. “Is it really changing back?” I looked at my hand on hers and rubbed her knuckle with my thumb. “You know, I would have been just as happy to hide out in the Lair with you—”
“Ugh. No thanks. I’ve seen it.”
“Then somewhere that gets vacuumed more than once a month.” I smiled weakly. “We could have hid out for centuries. Waited a little longer. To see if this ascetic star you talk about really is fading.”
She patted my chest distractingly. “It’s fading. Look at all the little godlings and avatars springing up—the movie stars and rock stars and people who are famous simply for, well, for being sexy. That’s been going on since the eighteen-nineties, although the electronic media have accelerated the shift. They’ll help us, too. They’re already taking a lot of the load. All we have to do is nudge. Guide. Lead.”
Frankly that sounded horrific. For a moment I totally forgot she was only wearing underpants. “Oh no. I’m not getting stuck in meetings all day! No way, no how!”
She giggled. “You in a suit? I don’t think so.” It was hard for me to pay attention to her words while her hands were on me. “I think we just need to be. To be who we are, where people can see us.”
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