Destination Wedding

by Diksha Basu

  “That’s true. I settled for Tina. And her fancy hotel room so I wouldn’t have to pay for a cab all the way back to my shitty room. But who knows? Maybe this week we’ll finish our unfinished business.”

  He nudged Tina with his elbow and she couldn’t help but laugh. There was a reason he had stayed on her mind after that night. He had intrigued her so much that night; she had found it so difficult to imagine his life in Bombay. She remembered interrogating him about his life, she recalled now.

  “Do you get stared at a lot in India?” Tina had asked him at that bar in London.

  “Not in Bombay. Not in Delhi so much either. Or Bangalore. Or the airports, come to think of it. The only time I’ve felt really aware of being an outsider was on a train from Benares to Calcutta but that could just as easily have been because I was tripping on bhang and thought there were miniature Mughal paintings coming alive and performing Hindustani classical music on the upper bunk across from me. But in Bombay, in Bandra, half the restaurants are owned by French people who are much paler than I am,” Rocco had said.

  “I’ve been to India for work a few times lately but I don’t know if I could live there,” Tina had said.

  “It’s not for everyone,” Rocco had said. “But no place is, I guess. One of my friends I was traveling with moved to Wellington in New Zealand because he couldn’t handle the chaos of Asia anymore. I went to visit him and I couldn’t stand the peace of it for more than a fortnight. Dreadfully bland. Why go to heaven before you’re dead?”

  Tina had looked into her wineglass and emptied the remaining drops into her mouth.

  She did the same now, sitting next to him in India. He fit in here so seamlessly. How? When it seemed Tina didn’t fit in anywhere, even here, where she looked like everyone else. Rajesh knocked on the door of the cottage and Rocco got up to answer. Rajesh peered in over Rocco’s shoulder and saw Tina and Marianne sitting in the living room around the fire. All the Colebrookes staff had strict instructions to never turn the fires on when they were cleaning the rooms because the electricity charges were enormous but Rajesh always loved those fake fires and appreciated guests who turned them on.

  “Looking handsome, sir,” Rajesh said as he handed the fresh ice bucket to Rocco. He stepped in to take the other bottle and ice bucket away and looked around the room. “Everyone looking lovely.”

  He loved the big weddings that took over the club this time of year. In a different world, under different circumstances, Rajesh would have been a fashion designer. Whenever he worked at these fancy weddings, later at night, in his shared room at the back of the club, he took out a little notebook and drew sketches of the best women’s outfits he had seen that night. He looked over at Marianne and Tina—they both looked beautiful but they weren’t fashion-forward enough to go in his notebook. Rajesh bowed at them all and stepped back into the night.

  There was another knock and Tina went to open the door. The bride and groom stood there, Pavan wearing a perfectly tailored navy-blue suit and Shefali wearing what could only be described as a floor-length Indian cape with gold embroidery running through it. Under it she wore skinny black ankle pants and a black crop top that showed off her slim waist. On her feet were a new pair of gold Louboutins with sharp spikes at the back that Tina had seen her buy in New York City. The towering heels made her stand about an inch taller than Pavan and she had both her arms wrapped around his torso. Shefali’s hair was tied into a tight, low bun with a perfectly straight, thin middle part and her eyes were heavily lined with kohl. A large red bindi dotted her forehead. She looked stunning.

  “We escaped,” Shefali said with a laugh and entered the cottage. “Getting married is so much more boring than I thought it would be. We’re just standing there shaking hands with a thousand people we barely know. I don’t understand why my mother wouldn’t let me wear a white dress and walk down an aisle.”

  “An old lady kissed me on the lips,” Pavan said. He sat down on the sofa and Shefali sat down next to him and tumbled toward him, kissing his cheek.

  “I don’t blame her,” she said. She wiped her lipstick off his cheek.

  Shefali kicked off her heels and pulled her feet up. Pavan leaned back and put one arm around her and took out a steel flask from his pocket.

  “Warm Old Monk,” he said. “Cheers.”

  He had a large gulp and passed it to Shefali, who also had one.

  “We need Thums-Up to go with this,” Shefali said, wincing. “And ideally a cigarette, but my mother will have a heart attack if she smells smoke on me.”

  Tina looked at them, so comfortable in their Indian clothes, leaning into each other, drinking the sweet Indian rum.

  “This reminds me of my college drinking days,” Shefali said.

  “I used to sneak Old Monk into movie theaters,” Pavan said.

  “Same! And into the tombs in Lodhi Gardens,” Shefali added.

  There was another loud banging on the door and this time Marianne walked over to open it. Outside stood Karan, Pavan’s brother, broad-chested and handsome, wearing a plain black sherwani, his hair flopping over into eyes that betrayed his intoxication. He looked at Marianne and said, “Oh, hello. Aren’t you stunning? I’m Karan, brother of the groom.”

  Marianne instinctively tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled.

  Karan dropped his cigarette onto the ground and crushed it under his foot. He stepped into the cottage and stopped and looked at Marianne again and said, “You’re really gorgeous.”

  “Wow, thank you. I mean, I didn’t really have much time to—” Marianne began, but Karan walked straight into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of wine while Marianne stood in the doorway staring at him, her whole body feeling as though it would dissolve like a cube of sugar in tea.

  “Shefali, I’ve been sent to hunt you down,” Karan said. “Your mother noticed you two slipping out of the side gate.”

  “I can’t do anything without Ma noticing,” Shefali said. “Such a hypocrite. She and Papa secretly went and got legally married two weeks before their real wedding to take the pressure off and still she sends someone after me because I left the venue for two minutes.”

  Pavan looked at Shefali as she spoke and removed her bindi that had gone off center and put it back perfectly in place. Shefali kept talking, and Tina instinctively put her own fingers up to her forehead even though she wasn’t wearing a bindi tonight. Shefali stopped abruptly and said, “Oh no, Tina, I just realized I didn’t tell you Rocco was coming this week.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Tina said.

  “Rocco, you never called her, did you? Asshole,” Shefali said. “Tina, is this awkward?”

  “It is now,” Tina said. She threw a pillow at Shefali, who ducked and laughed. “Stop it! If my hair gets messy, my mother is going to think I disappeared to have sex with Pavan.”

  Pavan reached over and tousled Shefali’s hair and said, “Then we might as well.”

  “You didn’t say where you’re going for your honeymoon,” Marianne said.

  Karan looked over at her when she spoke and said, “You need a nose piercing. And a nice big pair of jhumkas for your ears.”

  “Please, no,” Tina said. “That beret you wore for six months when you were dating Samuel was enough.”

  “Your honeymoon, Shefali?” Marianne tried again to change the direction of the conversation. That beret really had been misguided. She had bought it at Nordstrom Rack the week after meeting Samuel, the French artist with whom she had also taken up rolling cigarettes and learning all about Toulouse-Lautrec. For a brief period there, she had had very passionate views about commercial sex work.

  “Right. That’s because I don’t know,” Shefali said. “Pavan’s planning all of it. I only know that we’re starting in Singapore. The rest is a surprise.”

  “You are setting up high expectations for the rest of
your married life,” Rocco said.

  “And I’ll meet those expectations,” Pavan said. He looked over at Shefali and said, “Chalein?”

  “Already?” Shefali asked. “Ek aur sip. Then we’ll go back.”

  They took another swig each from the flask. Shefali stood up and leaned against Pavan’s shoulder as she put her heels back on.

  “And all of you please make sure you sign the waivers for the wedding video and give it to Bubbles. I’d really rather not have her make that assistant of hers forge a bunch of signatures,” Shefali said and followed Pavan out of the cottage.

  The assistant was Bubbles’s driver, Ritwik, who was the only one on her staff who could read, and he was sitting in the dark with an assortment of pens trying to figure out how to ask Bubbles for a bonus for committing fraud.

  In the cottage, Karan got up to leave with the bride and groom but stopped in front of Marianne and said, “Head over soon. I want to know everything about you.”

  Marianne nodded and started wondering what she would tell him about herself, who she could be with this handsome Indian stranger. She would tell him about her time in Condesa in Mexico City, she decided, but she would be vague and make it sound like she went there every year, instead of admitting that she had only been there once. Fancy international men loved tales of annual globetrotting, she found. Tom’s family spent every summer on the Cape but that didn’t have quite the same ring to it as Condesa.

  After Shefali, Pavan, and Karan left, Tina searched through her email for the correspondence she had had with her boss, Rachel, when she was auditioning people for the making of the band. She found what she was looking for—the picture Sid had submitted with his initial application. In it, he was leaning against a dirty wall wearing jeans rolled up at the ankles, no shirt and no shoes. His dark skin glistened in the sun and he was smiling at something just past the camera.

  “Dating app?” Rocco asked as he poured a refill for Tina.

  Tina looked down at her screen, shook her head, and nibbled her cuticle. Her nail polish was chipping but she hadn’t had time to get a manicure. She always wished she could be one of those women with perfectly done nails, and she tried from time to time. But she inevitably lost interest and left her gel polish on for too long and ended up cutting her nails with the polish still on and hating the sight of her hands for weeks.

  “It’s someone I’m auditioning,” Tina said. “I think. I was auditioning him, anyway.”

  “You have a picture of the drummer? You never told me that,” Marianne said with a laugh. “Show me. You’re so secretive about him.”

  “No, it’s nothing,” Tina said. She locked her phone and placed it facedown on the sofa next to her. Something about that shirtless picture of Sid felt too intimate at the moment, even though Tina had passed it around her office and pinned a large printout on the corkboard in the conference room. “Let’s not talk about work.”

  TUESDAY NIGHT, 8:30 P.M.

  Goldenrod Garden, Colebrookes, New Delhi: One of the Bartenders Has Already Managed to Tuck an Expensive Bottle of Whiskey into His Pant Leg

  “IF THIS IS THE COCKTAIL party, what will the wedding be like?” Marianne whispered to Tina as they approached the main entrance to the reception.

  “You’ll have to wait and see, darling,” a woman with a smoky, raspy voice said behind them. “But let me just assure you that it includes a full Bollywood dance number, performed by actual Bollywood stars. Zara and Zarina are coming in for the wedding.”

  “Shefali knows Zara and Zarina?” Tina asked, surprised that her cousin was friends with the famous Bollywood actors.

  “No, darling. She isn’t friends with them but she can afford to fly them in for her wedding to pretend she’s friends with them.” The woman shook her head. “You’re on the bride’s side, I assume?”

  Tina and Marianne introduced themselves to Mrs. Bubbles Trivedi, the wedding planner. In actuality, Bubbles was frantically trying to find Zara and Zarina impersonators because Zara and Zarina had canceled last minute due to pregnancy rumors surrounding Zara and Vikram Abraham, the very married cricket player.

  Mrs. Bubbles Trivedi was wearing a gold sari with the pallu draped across her shoulders, and had matching gold hair, hanging loose, and diamonds sparkling all over her body. She was short and round and glamorous. When Marianne and Tina extended their hands, she slipped the familiar gold business cards into them, laden with more glitter to stick to their hands.

  “You two look marriageable age. Keep my card,” she said and added to Marianne, “I plan weddings anywhere and everywhere. The world is your oyster, darlings, but don’t wait too long. Oysters go bad very quickly. Enjoy the cocktails, ladies.”

  Bubbles went past them to find Arun and Maria Goswami, the owners of India’s largest e-commerce site. She had heard rumors that their daughter, Leia, was dating someone distantly related to Prince William and she needed that contract. This was really only the second wedding Bubbles had planned. The first was her own son’s in Goa last year. Her daughter-in-law happened to be a fashion designer in Bombay who’d invited some real A-list Bollywood celebrities, and the wedding had been so successful that Bubbles found herself telling people she had organized the wedding with no mention that it was her son’s, and next thing she knew, Shefali’s mother, who had been there, called her to help arrange a similar wedding in Delhi for her daughter. Bubbles quoted what she thought was an astronomical amount, and when Meera agreed easily, Bubbles discovered it wasn’t terribly difficult being a wedding planner if you had a big budget.

  She straightened her diamond necklace and surveyed the crowd. This was going to be terrific for her portfolio. Once the wedding video was finished, she would buy a hundred thousand YouTube hits and promote it on social media. The rest of the hits would naturally follow.

  Ten horses lined the main entrance with ten white men in some sort of uniform sitting atop them on sturdy leather saddles. They all had blond hair parted on the side and wore riding boots. Bubbles had found them all at a backpackers’ hostel in Daryaganj and offered them five thousand rupees each and a free dinner. One of the men was bent over on his horse chatting with a young Indian woman in a sheer black sari. Bubbles went up to them and hit the man’s boot with her purse and said, “I didn’t pay you to flirt. You sit upright and look British.”

  “I’m from South Africa,” the man on the horse said.

  “Nobody needs to know where you’re from,” Bubbles said, shaking her head at him and walking ahead.

  She checked that all the other men on horses looked suitably distinguished and then spotted Arun and Maria Goswami, Maria in a crushed-velvet, purple floor-length jacket with huge solitaire diamonds in her ears.

  “Maria! Arun!” Bubbles said. “How lovely to see you. Gosh, it’s been ages.”

  Technically not a lie; she had never met them before.

  Large speakers at the four corners of the lawn played instrumental shehnai music. Kai and Rocco wandered off to the bhel puri stand and Tina and Marianne headed toward the huge, round bar in the middle of the lush lawns. There must have already been close to three hundred people milling about. Looking around, Tina realized that cocktail night meant Indo-Western wear, not just traditional Indian attire. The men were mostly wearing jeans with blazers and the women were all in some variation of Indian clothes that weren’t quite Indian. On the other side of the bar, Tina could see Shefali and Pavan standing side by side and glowing. Glowing more than everyone else was. Was this really the effect love had?

  They shook hands with the people they were talking to and Tina watched them stay glowing and bright as they approached some other guests, and that’s when she noticed they were in a spotlight that was being controlled from behind the trees in the distance. If she followed their subtle glow carefully, she could see that they were being very strategically bathed in a soft, diffused yellow light that wasn’t so
bright as to be obvious but was just bright enough to let the couple shine brighter than the rest of the people in the crowd. There must have been someone tasked with keeping the light moving smoothly around with them because they maintained this perfect glow no matter where they went. So it wasn’t love, it was just good lighting; at least that was something money could buy.

  “I could find a husband here,” Marianne said. “And come to parties like this every weekend. Maybe someone like Karan.”

  “You have Tom,” Tina said.

  “He’s not going to propose,” Marianne said.

  “Maybe that’s because you’ve never given him a reason to think he should,” Tina said. “How can you not see that you’re meant for each other? I have never seen you happier than when you’re with Tom—I mean like truly, truly, deeply happy. I’m not talking about the contact highs you got with Sven or Riyaaz or Minh or Seydou—wow, you really have been around the world. Karan is your typical handsome asshole.”

  “So handsome,” Marianne said, scanning the crowd for him.

  “Extremely handsome. But you just know he’s going to be another Riyaaz,” Tina said. “I, on the other hand, need to find my own Pavan—someone reliable who will straighten my bindi and drink Old Monk with me.”

  Tina looked over at a tall, handsome Indian man standing alone, his arms crossed in front of him. His chest was broad and he looked powerful.

  “Someone like that,” she nudged Marianne. “He looks different from the rest of the crowd somehow.”

  They both looked over at the man, now surveying the crowd. Tina caught his eye for a fleeting second and smiled. He nodded at them.

  “Should I go and say hi?” Tina asked. “Let’s go talk to him.”

  They made their way over to the man, who now looked above their heads and continued staring at the crowd.

  “Unavailable men are so attractive,” Tina whispered to Marianne.

  Tina stopped to grab a tandoori prawn off the tray of a passing waiter. She pulled the prawn out of the tail and ate it and then held the tail and looked around.