अध्याय 1 / 12
My Wedding Was a Trap
CHAPTER ONE
Welcome, Bahu
Three years ago my sister walked into this house as a bride and never walked out of it.
Tonight I walked in the same way. Same gate. Same red carpet, or one exactly like it. Same man holding my hand while a hundred phone cameras went up.
He touched the feet of a woman I had paid eleven thousand rupees to call herself my mother. Two hundred people clapped.
Not one of them knew my name.
It isn't Ira Malhotra.
The farmhouse sat at the end of a lane in Chhatarpur where the streetlights stopped working and the private lighting took over. Two acres. A lawn the size of a cricket ground, tented in cream and gold. Waiters in maroon jackets carrying tandoori mushroom on trays. Somewhere near the mango trees, a man with a saxophone was playing a Hindi film song from 2004 in a way that made it sound like a funeral.
I had been standing for eleven hours. My blouse hooks had been biting into my ribs since three in the afternoon. Under thirteen kilos of lehenga my feet had gone from hurting to numb to something worse, a kind of hot buzzing, and I kept smiling because that is what a bride does.
Sudha aunty, my mother for the evening, was crying beautifully near the buffet.
She was a retired schoolteacher from Rohini. The agency had sent me her photo along with four others. Widow, they'd written, plays emotional roles very well. She had asked me two questions in five months. Whether the food would be pure vegetarian, and whether I wanted her to faint at the vidai.
I had said no to the fainting.
Watching her hold my father-in-law's hand and thank God for this alliance, I thought that was probably a mistake. She would have been excellent at it.
"You're doing the smile," a voice said at my elbow.
Nishtha. My husband's sister. Twenty-four, in a green lehenga she had been complaining about since morning, holding two plates.
"What smile?"
"The one from the photos." She handed me a plate. "Eat. Please. If you faint they'll blame me, because I'm the one who's supposed to be looking after you."
"I'm fine."
"You've had two glasses of water since the phere. I counted." She put the plate directly into my hands, which is the only reliable way to make someone eat. "Also your dupatta pin is going to fail in about four minutes. Turn."
She reset the pin at my shoulder with the efficiency of a girl who has attended forty weddings. Her fingers were warm. She smelled of somebody else's perfume.
"Better," she said. "Now you look like you're being held together by hardware, which is correct, because that's what a bahu is."
I laughed. It surprised me.
She grinned like she'd won something, and I understood, in that second, why she was dangerous. Because I liked her. Because in five months of building a person out of paper, I had prepared myself for cold people. Nobody prepares you for the warm ones.
Her mother came across the lawn towards us and the temperature dropped four degrees.
Sushila Rathore did not walk quickly. She had never needed to. People arranged themselves around her the way traffic arranges itself around a cow.
Sixty-two. Cream and gold. Not one hair loose.
"Nishtha. Your Bua is standing alone near the ice cream."
"She's not alone, there are like six—"
"Nishtha."
Nishtha went.
Badi Maa looked at me for a while without any expression I could name. Then she reached out and, with two fingers, moved the dupatta pin Nishtha had just fixed about half a centimetre.
"The pandit will do the griha pravesh at eleven-forty," she said. "You'll enter with the right foot. Bansi will be at the door with the kalash. Don't kick it hard, some girls kick it like they're playing football. Just touch it and let the rice come out."
"Ji."
"You didn't eat."
"I did—"
"You held the plate." She took it out of my hands and gave it to a passing waiter. "In this house we don't hold things we're not using. It looks bad in photographs."
She left.
I stood there with my empty hands and I thought: three years ago my sister stood on this same grass, in a red lehenga, and this same woman moved her pin.
And I let her.
I need to be honest about one thing before anything else happens.
Meher didn't want to get married.
She was twenty-seven and she was doing a heritage-restoration project in Mehrauli that paid her almost nothing and she was happy in the way people are happy when they're too busy to check. And Mummy cried every night for four months, and Papa had started saying he wouldn't see the day, and I was twenty-three and tired and I wanted the house to be quiet again.
So I sat on her bed at one in the morning and I said the sentence I have replayed more times than any other sentence in my life.
He's a good family, Didi. What are you waiting for, exactly? Tell me the exact thing you're waiting for.
She couldn't tell me.
That's how you get a girl married in Delhi. You don't push her. You just ask her to justify herself until she runs out of words.
Eleven weeks later she was a Rathore. Fifteen weeks after that she was gone.
At eleven-forty I touched the kalash with my right foot and the rice came out over the marble and everyone said aayushman bhava and somebody's child screamed.
The house was beautiful. That's the part nobody tells you. It was genuinely, expensively beautiful — double-height ceiling, Jaisalmer stone, a chandelier the size of a small car, and framed photographs going up the staircase wall in perfect rows, every Rathore for four generations in black and white and then colour.
I looked for her face on that wall as I climbed.
Not there. Not one.
Fifteen weeks in this house and Meher Sethi had left no more mark on it than a glass of water left on a table.
He was in the room before me.
Aditya Rathore. Thirty-four. He had taken off the sehra and the safa and was sitting on the edge of the bed in his sherwani with his sleeves pushed up, looking at his phone, and when I came in he stood up too fast, like a man in a doctor's waiting room.
Roses on the bed. Someone had made a heart.
"They did the roses," he said.
"They did."
"Every year they do the roses." He rubbed the back of his neck. "There's a lock on the bathroom door. From the inside."
I waited.
"I'm just saying it's there," he said. "If you want it."
That was all. He picked up a pillow and a folded blanket from the almirah, and he made a bed for himself on the floor on the far side of the room without any announcement about it, without looking at me for permission or credit, and then he lay down facing the wall in his wedding clothes.
I sat on the roses.
I had spent five months building a woman who could sit in this room. I had rehearsed being touched. I had rehearsed being hit. I had not rehearsed a man putting a pillow on the floor and telling me quietly where the lock was, and I sat there hating him for it, because it is very hard to hunt something that keeps doing the wrong thing.
I took my phone out.
The voicemail is forty-one seconds long. She left it at 9:52 p.m. on the thirteenth of March, and I saw it at 11:20 the next morning, and by then it didn't matter.
I have listened to it more times than I can count.
I have never listened past twelve seconds.
At twelve seconds she says my name, and then she takes a breath, and I know from that breath that the next twenty-nine seconds are going to explain everything, and every time I get there my thumb comes down on the screen by itself.
I put the phone away.
The knock came at ten to two.
Bansi. The old one, from Almora, who had been carrying trays in that house since before Meher, since before me, since before any of this. Small. Sixty-something. Steel tray, steel glass, milk with saffron floating in a scum on top the way it does when it's been sitting.
She put the tray on the table and I picked up the glass with my left hand.
She stopped moving.
I have replayed this. She looked at the glass. She looked at my fingers around it. Then she looked up at my face, and something in her expression came apart and rearranged itself into a shape I have thought about every day since.
"Drink it hot," she said.
She picked up the empty tray. She got as far as the doorway.
Then she said, gently, the way you talk to a child who has come a very long way:
"Finish it, Chidiya."
Chidiya.
Little bird.
My sister called me that. Only my sister. She started it when I was four and she was nine, and she used it for twenty-two years, and she never once said it in front of another person, because she knew I hated it.
There were eleven people alive who knew that name.
The woman standing in my doorway with an empty tray was not one of them.
She was already in the corridor when she said the last part, half to herself, and the door was swinging shut so I only just got it.
"Three days she kept that room ready. And you didn't come."
I hadn't.
That part was true.