Everything Was Good-Bye (17 page)

As he uncorked the bottle, I wandered into the family room. Unlike the other room, it was a mishmash of old furniture that hinted at his parents’ working-class days. I sat down on the leather sectional and fiddled with the elaborate stereo system that Sunny had recently purchased. Kal sat on the sofa across from me and handed me a glass of wine. “Sunny hasn’t figured out how to use it yet.”

I laughed. “That doesn’t surprise me.” My smile faded into silence. “The two of you couldn’t be more different.”

“Well, I am adopted, remember.”

“Oh, so you favour nature over nurture do you?”

“I don’t know. I’m too drunk to know much right now,” he said as he lay down, legs sprawled out over the edge of his sofa. “But even our nurture was different; after all, my parents are the poor relations.”

“Stop it. You’re hardly poor.”

“Compared to Sunny’s family we are.”

“Were you two close growing up?”

“No, not really. They lived on the island, so we only visited them a few times a year. When we did visit, it was always kind of weird. Our moms don’t really get along and Sunny, well, he was always a jerk.”

“Ouch. What did he do to you? Steal your girlfriend or something?” I giggled and leaned back into the couch cushions.

“Ha ha,” he said, mocking me. “No. I knew better than to introduce them to him, that is until now.”

“I wasn’t exactly your girlfriend.”

“But you weren’t exactly
not
my girlfriend either.”

I looked away, not knowing quite what to say.

“I guess it’s not really his fault, him being the way he is.” He took a sip of wine. “I mean his mom, you’ve met her, she’s a piece of work. Always bribing him to get him to do what she wants.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh come on, you know. His life has been bought and paid for by his mommy and daddy. In high school his parents gave him a hundred dollars for every a+ he brought home. When he agreed to go to law school they bought him a bmw, and when he agreed to marry you, they gave him the money for his latest real estate venture as a wedding present.”

“Serious?” I leaned forward.

He sat up. “I’m sorry; I thought you knew. I heard him talking to you about the investment so I figured you guys had talked about it.”

“No, he neglected to mention that part.” I took the last swig of my drink and set the glass down. “But I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t change anything.”

“It doesn’t?”

I shook my head.

“It’s not too late. You could still change your mind.”

“It
is
too late. The invitations have been sent out. The caterers have been booked. Everything’s arranged. My mom… everyone expects me to do this. Nothing has changed
that
.” I walked over to the window and stared out at the room that was reflected in front of me. Kal got up and put his drink on the table. “So that’s it? You’re really going to go through with it?”

When I didn’t answer, he stepped closer until he was standing directly behind me, his hands on my hips. I strained my neck to his breath, anticipating a moment of intimacy where I knew there wouldn’t be one.

2.6

I
crouched down on the small wooden board that Masi had covered with red silk, my eyes fixed on the intricate and colourful rangoli design she’d created on the ground in front of me. My sisters held a canopied chunni over my head, while my mother knelt by my side and tied a red string around my wrist. She curled and stretched her lips with each twist of a knot until she knew that no one could undo what had been done. Settling into her own satisfied smile, she passed the ball of red yarn to my sisters, who tied a length on all those present.

My mother called to Masi to say that she couldn’t remember the words to the old songs. Masi sang in her place and my mother strained to find the tune as she scooped the turmeric paste into her palm and smeared it across my forehead and cheeks, cleansing me in ritual preparation for my wedding. She dipped her hands into a bowl of flour and wiped them over my face, pushing the paste into dough, until it fell away, leaving my skin with a smooth saffron stain. My sisters and cousins joined in and rubbed the paste into my arms and legs. Aman stood by, ready to slap any hands that got too close to my hair.

“Watch the hair, she just had it done,” she kept saying. “For God’s sake, the hair… it has to stay like this until the wedding,” she said, occasionally dousing me in a spray of vo5. “Okay, only a few more minutes. Meena
needs to have her bath before the photographer gets here,” she pleaded, all the while dispatching my cousins on various errands.

In the months before the wedding, I’d lived by the weekly checklists and colour-coded calendars that she’d created for me, each task a new distraction. Every Sunday she had come over and assessed what was left to do, pacing back and forth like a drill sergeant strategizing about colour schemes or planning the next week’s shopping excursion, in which we methodically replaced every item I owned with something new. By now nothing remained of what I had owned or who I had been. Tomorrow I’d leave my mother’s home with a new life wrapped in Cellophane, packed into a series of suitcases or stuffed into the Louis Vuitton trunk that Sunny’s mother had bought for me. When my mother cleaned my closet of its contents, the last thing to go was my box of journals. I came in to find her sitting on the carpet cross-legged, staring at the stack, fingering the print in each one, her eyes troubled as if she had deciphered the meaning. It was then that I knew I couldn’t keep them or leave them behind, so I loaded the box into my car and drove to the beach, where I read each one, flipping and ripping pages, tearing them up until only bits of paper hung from the threaded binding. I placed them into a paper bag and lay them on a float of driftwood, which I carried into the water. As the tide pushed in, I knelt over the bag and lit it on fire. The rising flame singed the ends of my hair before the current and earth pushed the pyre out of reach. I stood still, buried to my knees in dredged silt and seaweed, watching my thoughts bob and capsize until the ocean made me an island.

“Okay, Okay. That’s enough,” Aman yelled, pushing back the auntie who had elbowed my updo. She stretched her arms out as if she were part of a crowd-control squad and held the others back as I made my way to the washroom. The aunties followed us down the hall, their shrill singing voices penetrating the closed door.

I sat in the tub, and leaned back until only my breasts were above the waterline. I ran my hands over my body, as if I were cataloguing parts of myself. I turned over and lay face down in the water, ears submerged, dampening and drowning the sound of the aunties during their back-and-forth processions in and out of the house, steel pots and jugs of water in
hand. They had started arriving this morning at seven, each of them with their barrel-shaped middle-aged bodies and dishwashing hands invading with offers to help with the food and preparations for the party. There was no spot in the house safe from their prying eyes and spiked advice, and at several points I retreated to my mother’s walk-in closet, to sit waiting beneath the empty embrace of my father’s suits. For what, I wasn’t sure.

When I emerged from the bathroom, the aunties were dancing in the family room, swinging their chunnies and singing folk songs that brought forth short bursts of laughter. I smiled when I heard my name inserted into a song, and though I didn’t know what they were saying, I blushed. Over and over, they danced short sweeps of a circle while all the other women clapped the ill-timed beat. Aman translated one of the songs for me and I was taken aback that women who appeared so chaste and proper would sing such crude lyrics, but by then I’d learned that nothing was ever what it seemed. This was what I was thinking when the photographer lined us up from tallest to smallest, pulling us into frame and focus. He held his fingers up, counting them down one at a time, all of us smiling except my mother, who had long since forgotten how. Sweating beneath the camera lights, the photographer clicked offrolls of film, telling us all in his Indian accent, “Say cheese. Smile. Everyone happy. Look this way.” I knew that when the film was developed, these pictures, like all other wedding pictures, would be placed in a twenty-pound photo album that would only ever be dragged offa bookshelf to be shown to the aunties who came to tea on Sunday afternoons. The aunties would flip through the plastic-covered pages, their oily pakora-eating fingers leaving marks and stains on every moment.

I was relieved when Sunny’s family arrived. The attention diverted from me to the small delegation who came bearing gifts that were laid out in the living room for everyone to see. The gold jewellery and heavy silk saris were passed around for all to admire and as the fat aunties judged the weight and value of the gifts, girls jostled to get a better view, some of them
giggling when Kal glanced their way. When Masi teased him that it was not appropriate for him to be there, he reminded her that he had been my friend since we were children so in fact was a member of both sides of the family.

My sisters made several passes in and out of the crowded room, carrying trays of soda pop and tea for our guests, who fanned themselves with the ends of their chunnies. The aunties continued to dance, this time with ornate pots of candles balanced on their heads as they sang the same cele-bratory Jaago song that had been sung for them when they were to be married. Masi held her small pot with one hand, and with the other, strong-armed people into dancing. Even my mother made a short-lived attempt and danced around the room once. Time looped on itself and when the dancing finished, old songs were resung, toddlers fell asleep at their mothers’ feet and scores of nameless distant cousins sat in huddled conversation.

Masi opened the window. The room flooded with the sounds of the children who had been sent outside to decorate the cars with plastic pompoms—which they were instead using for a game of dodge ball. Masi leaned out the window, hollering at them to begin the task of attaching the pompoms to the Styrofoam “Just Married” heart. “Fluffthem up so they look like roses,” she yelled.

After dinner, my nieces and younger cousins sat in a circle drawing henna peace signs and love hearts on their palms and cheeks as if it were face paint. The mehndi artist held my hands in the air, and twisted them to the light. The little girls watched with curiosity. “Sometimes the palm dictates the design,” she said, and filled the trenches with fine swirls and paisley budded branches that bloomed in my fingertips. “Your life is a twist of fate,” she said, continuing with a pattern of roots and vines that wrapped around my wrists.

“How do you know? Can you read palms?” I asked. “Can you read mine?”

She put her henna pen down and looked at my hand, and for a moment I recognized sadness in her expression. “There is no life but the one at hand,” she said.

I shook my head, not wanting to understand, and as I waited for my henna to dry I remained quiet, disappearing into the sound of the house as
guests came and went, as dishes clattered and cleared, as the voices of many strangers became the whispers of a few family members.

Serena came into the living room, picking up stray paper plates and cups before collapsing onto the loveseat. The grandfather clock struck midnight.

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” Aman said, rushing into the room, banging a pot with a wooden spoon as if it were New Year’s Eve.

I looked up at her and then down at my hands, flaking offpieces of hardened henna.

She put the pot down and sat beside me. “Aren’t you excited? You’re getting married today.” I nodded, chipping offanother piece of henna, letting the green crusty bits fall into the shag carpet.

“Stop that. You’re making a mess of it,” Aman said, grabbing my hands. She removed a patch to see if the dye had taken. “Sometimes the colour is too orangey, but this looks really nice.” She held my hand up and showed Serena, who agreed that it looked good. “You can probably go wash it off if you want.”

When I didn’t answer, she looked up at me. “Are you okay?”

I got up, my legs cramped from sitting cross-legged for so long. “Yeah…I just need some air. It’s too hot in here. I’m going to go outside for a bit.”

“Well, wash that offwhile you’re out there,” she hollered as I opened the porch door. “Or the stain will get too dark.”

I stood in the backyard, rinsing the dried henna offwith the garden hose until all that was left on my palms was the blood red pattern of pais-leys. I stared at them, tracing the fine swirls with my fingertips over and over again, falling into a frantic trance. Hands shaking from the cold, I turned the tap back on and scrubbed harder in a futile attempt to regain my sense of self.

“Meena?”

I turned around. It was Kal. “I thought you left,” I said, quickly drying my hands on the end of my sari and trying for composure.

He nodded and lit his cigarette. “I did, but your mom asked me to come back and drop some stuffoff for tomorrow.”

“For tomorrow,” I whispered. “You mean for today.”

He checked the time on his watch, exhaled, and without looking at me, handed me his cigarette.

“I don’t smoke.”

“I know,” he said, still offering.

I took it from him, alternating drags until there was nothing left.

THREE FOR LOVE

3.1

I
ran my fingers along the bolts of fabric that lined the walls and watched a mother-in-law type haggle with the turbaned shopkeeper at the sari-covered counter. The shopkeeper’s frustration grew in the perspiration stains under his arms and the spittle on his lips as he smiled and replied repeatedly that $895 was his best price. The daughter-in-law folded her arms over her chest and examined her fingernails, cracking the already chipped red polish, thumbing her wedding bracelets in boredom. I wondered how long she had been married, and counted her bangles as if the number meant something.

My mother-in-law had been furious that I’d taken my churah offafter the wedding—these bangles, she’d reminded me, were meant to be worn until they broke off. “The longer they last the happier your marriage will be,” she’d said while examining my naked wrists. When I told her that they were too tight, she hissed that taking them offwas like throwing my marriage away. Sunny assured her that we would be happy, and asked me to put them back on for the reception, for appearance’s sake.