Heart of Stone

One day Amma comes home from work early and sees Grandmother sitting on the porch.

“It’s freezing out there,” Amma says. “How can you be so irresponsible?”

“She likes it out there.”

“She’s restless. You need to take her for an outing.”

“Where?”

Amma dumps the contents of her lunch bag into the sink. “Don’t ask me. Take some responsibility.”

I ask Grandmother. She wants to go to an art museum. When I was younger and Grandmother still lived with Amma’s sister-in-law in Sri Lanka, we would go to the museum whenever she visited. Vidya, then a teenager, came with us. Vidya and I would bring our sketchbooks in identical messenger bags and try to sketch out the paintings we liked. Once they had a visiting exhibit featuring photographs of Bharatanatyam dancers. I walked around the room for hours, sitting on the benches and trying to draw the dancers’ curves. My child hands cramped up and my fingers refused to move, until Vidya took my hand and showed me how to sketch with my arm as a brush. “Art isn’t small,” she said. “Don’t try to fit it into your fist.”

Nisha wants to go with us. I dress Grandmother in a saree because she refuses to leave the house in anything else. I push her feet into sandals and buckle the straps. She leans heavily on me as she walks out to the car.

“We could use the wheelchair,” I say. I’ve loaded it into the trunk.

She shakes her head. Her spine stands a little taller. I help her into the backseat and she buckles her seat belt. I put her walking stick on her lap.

We pick up Nisha on the way. I play Grandmother’s favorite CD of calm, melodious Tamil music from the sixties, and she drifts off to sleep. Nisha holds my hand as I drive. Her thumb makes little circles on the back of my palm.

Grandmother hobbles from the parking garage to the museum. She won’t even lean on me for support. She uses her walking stick and stands with her head high, looking more like a schoolteacher than ever, her white hair in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her eyes are clear, eager.

Nisha and I trail behind her. Nisha walks closer to me than normal, her arms brushing mine.

In front of the museum, a homeless woman sits against a tree. Grandmother stops. She pulls out the small coin purse she wears tucked into the waistband of her saree, counts out three dollar bills and a nickel, and drops them into the woman’s outstretched Au Bon Pain cup.

As we walk away, Grandmother says to me, “Always help out the beggars who sit outside temples.”

“This is a museum, Ammamma.”

She smiles and pats my cheek. “Come, Vidya. Let’s go practice your art.”

We let her lead. Instead of heading toward the MFA, she turns and walks toward the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She’s always liked it better, with its rooms arranged like a house, ready for afternoon tea. Halfway there, she stops to rest on a park bench and watches geese eat grass. Green blades stick to their beaks as they waddle from patch to patch.

“How can she know the way to the museum but still call you Vidya?” Nisha asks.

“She always came here with Vidya.”

“And you.”

Nisha buys tickets while I check our coats and bags. Grandmother looks up through the glass walls of the entrance. I wonder if she remembers the way through the museum. We used to spend hours wandering the rooms. When I was younger, I imagined that ghosts still roamed the halls, going about their business as usual, arranging their hair in front of the smoky mirrors, having tea on the silk sofas, entertaining guests with a piano concert in the Tapestry Room.

Grandmother uses her walking stick as we go through the glass corridor to the historic building. I take it in, the arched brick doorways, the courtyard with gothic windows reaching up to the glass roof, the sound of falling water and people’s hushed conversations. My muscles relax of their own accord. I hadn’t even realized they were tense.

Nisha helps Grandmother sit down on a stone bench.

“Go on,” Grandmother says. “Go see the dancer.”

She remembers. I walk down into the Spanish Cloister, with its ceramic-tiled walls and scalloped stone archway. Life-sized and framed, it’s as if the whole room was built just to house this painting. El Jaleo. The ruckus. A woman dances flamenco while black-suited men play guitars in the background. One man arches his head back. The dancer tilts at an impossible angle, her hand pointing toward the courtyard, volumes of fabric cascading off her hip. When I was younger I tried to sketch it, but my figure always seemed too stiff, too posed.

I wish I’d brought a sketchpad to try now. Maybe I’m ready. I watch the painting for a while longer. My back unknots.

When I join Grandmother, she’s dozing against Nisha’s shoulder. I shake her gently.

“Ammamma? Are you ready to go?”

She snaps awake and looks confused. “Did we see the paintings?”

“Not yet.”

She blinks clarity into her eyes and stands up. We walk through the Yellow Room, one of her favorite places, where a mirror lets us watch ourselves watch the paintings. Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach. The Blue Room, with its striped wallpaper and dainty sofas. A pale woman against the dawn, her red hair blowing in the wind. The Shower of Gold.

I wonder if Grandmother can remember the paintings’ names she used to help me memorize. Her face slides in and out of attention as we walk. At the bottom of the stairs, she turns to me.

“Help me climb,” she says.

“There’s an elevator.”

“I don’t want anyone’s pity.”

So I help her climb the stairs. We walk through the Dutch Room, where twenty years ago a pair of thieves sliced five paintings out with box cutters. The gilded frames still hang against the filigree wallpaper, empty. Grandmother has always loved this room. Every time we walked through she would say the same thing. I wonder if she’ll say it now.

Hobbling out of the room on her walking stick, she says, “It’s always about the ones who aren’t here. Remember that.”

The sentiment seems to be one that every Sri Lankan understands implicitly, we who start every cultural function with a moment of silence for those lost in our country’s decades-long ethnic civil war. Never forget the empty chairs. Never forget who should’ve been here.

“Vidya,” Grandmother says. “Let’s go to the church.”

The church is the Long Gallery on the third floor with a stained glass window on one side and small pews where people can kneel to pray. I help Grandmother kneel. She folds her palms one over the other and prays. Nisha does the same.

I stand behind them. I don’t even know how to pray at the temple. How do I pray in a museum?

Nisha crosses herself and stands up. She walks backward and takes my arm.

“Do you want to know what I prayed about?” she asks. With a glance toward Grandmother, she kisses me on the cheek.

“That you won’t get married?”

I say it as a joke but she says, “I prayed for a way out of this.” She sighs and rests her head on my shoulder.

There’s always a way out. You could be a ghost. I could be an empty chair.

“Don’t you want to sketch anything?” she asks.

“I didn’t bring a sketchbook.”

“Wait here.” She jogs out of the room. By the time I help Grandmother stand again, Nisha is back. She pushes a small notebook and pencil into my hands. “I’ll help Grandmother walk around. Go sketch.”

I can’t kiss her in front of Grandmother but I smile and hope it’s enough. I take the notebook back to the Spanish Cloister and sit down on a bench. The room is shadowed. Slivers of light float in from the garden and the courtyard, but the stone pillars and floor absorb most of it. The grays and blacks of the painting shift and slide around in my vision. What must it be like for the dancer, in front of all those men? Did she use her body as a way to keep them back?

I make a few false starts. The pencil is much too small. I adjust, and the fourth sketch captures her movement. She isn’t falling. She’s simply dancing, simply moving. I sketch. There’s no wedding. No Nisha. No museum. Just the dance. A way to keep them back. A movement like falling but you never crash.

The windows of Machine pulse with light that spills onto drunk passersby. A motley group of club-goers waits outside in line—androgynous youngsters with pierced noses, aging twinks with bright hair, hard and soft femmes in flirty dresses. Others rest against the brick of the neighboring mattress store to smoke.

I sit in my parked car and wait for Nisha. Bruins fans pass me in droves. She was supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago.

When she finally arrives, her knock on the car window makes me jump.

I get out of the car. “What took you?”

Her makeup is stronger than usual, her eyes lined and her lips red. Her hipbones jut out over her tight jeans.

I smooth down my UMass Minutemen shirt and try to run my hands through my hair. She tucks some strands behind my ears.

“You look nice,” I say.

She hooks her spangled purse under her arm. Her wrists clang with bangles. The line at the entrance thins out by the time we join in. A cute butch in front of us smiles at Nisha. I put an arm around her waist. Her T-shirt is cut in such a way that I can touch the skin of her lower back.

The bouncer at the door seems to know Nisha. She nods to us as she stamps our wrists. The bass of the dance beat resets my heart. We walk downstairs to a bar. Darkness crawls inside our eyes. People play pool and arcade games, and inside a glass-paneled room, a massive crowd dances to techno. Nisha walks to the bar and leans against it so that her hips tilt at just the right angle. The light arcs over her butt.

“Cosmo, strong,” she says to the bartender.

“Beer,” I say. “Whatever you have.”

The bartender puts down two glasses. Nisha takes hers and sips, so I pay for the drinks. Men in tight Hollister shirts laugh and bend toward each other at the pool tables. Women in shorts stand around in large groups at the tables. One woman in baggy cargoes and a striped polo smiles at me from a corner of the bar.

Nisha stays quiet and watches the crowd. The music is so loud I wouldn’t be able to hear her anyway. She stands next to a poster advertising for dancers at a club called the Mason Jar. My beer tastes like perfume. I should’ve been more careful about what I ordered. I take in the chill of the air conditioning that falls down from black vents in the ceiling. I’ve heard of this place but I’ve never been. How many times has Nisha come here? How many women has she brought?

“Do you always come here?” I ask.

The woman across the bar is still watching me, her flat-billed hat tilted slightly on her head.

“Not always.”

The woman across the bar lifts her beer in a toast and takes a drink. I drink from my glass.

“Are you listening?”

“What?”

Nisha pouts. She pulls my hand. “I used to come in college. Let’s go dance.”

The dance floor is so crowded we can’t move. Nisha pushes through and pulls me behind her. Someone’s sweaty back grazes my arm. Someone else’s elbow bumps me in the small of my back. But the beat is sinking into me. Nisha rubs her palms on mine and pulls me closer. I close my eyes against the pulsing lights. Dark. Jasmine. Nisha. I press my fingers into her waist. Skin. She breathes against my neck.

“I’m so glad you came,” she says. “I miss this.”

“You don’t have to get married.”

She draws back and looks at my face. The light glints off her blue contacts.

“Of course I have to,” she says. “I meant I miss not having to pretend.”

I see the woman from before, the one with the flat-billed hat, over Nisha’s shoulder. She smiles, and jerks her head toward the exit.

“If you get married,” I say, “you’ll have to pretend forever.”

Nisha’s palms twitch on my spine. “Pretending is better than the alternative.”

I push her off of me. “I’m going to the bathroom.” I walk in that general direction until I’m sure Nisha can’t see me, then climb up the steps toward the exit.

Bruins fans stumble around outside the club. People smoke beside the buildings. Butts litter the concrete.

The woman is waiting for me, twirling a cigarette in her fingers. She moves closer and offers me one. I take it, just in case Nisha happens to wander this way and wonder what I’m doing. The woman lights it and steps close enough that I can smell her cologne.

“That your girlfriend?” She tilts her head toward the club entrance.

“Not really.” I hope my voice doesn’t shake.

She raises an eyebrow. We smoke in silence, her shoulder almost close enough to mine that I can feel the air in between us. I should give this woman my number. Kris would say so. In a way she reminds me of the rugby girls, swagger and boyish charm. I don’t owe Nisha anything.

“I have to go.” I put out the cigarette with my foot.

The woman kisses my cheek. “Come see me if you change your mind.”

I go back into the darkness of the club and down into the bathrooms. Four people in line. Good excuse for taking so much time. I fiddle with the edge of the poster calling for dancers at the Mason Jar. Female dancers experienced in belly dance, Middle Eastern or Indian dances, to work one night a week. I should’ve given my number to that woman. Nisha’s engagement ceremony is around the corner. Female dancers, Indian dance, one night a week. Nisha’s engagement, then the wedding. She’ll be a wife before I know it. Before I can stop her. I don’t even know if she wants me to stop her.

•••

Amma is waiting up for me when I get home, her face bathed in the glow of her computer screen. She doesn’t say anything. She makes me warm milk with sugar.

“I don’t know what I did to deserve this,” she says. She trudges up the stairs, leaving me to my milk.

Would it help if I told you Amma lost a baby? Her name was Tabu, and she was supposed to be born between my sister Vidya and me. But Tabu never cried. A year later Amma and Appa had me, so that I could walk in the shadows that Tabu’s wrinkled little body never cast. Maybe Tabu would’ve made all the right decisions. Maybe Tabu would’ve made Amma happy.

In college my sister Shyama dated a man named Dave—a reserve Air Force staff sergeant who took night classes with her at Columbia—the type of man, she told me, who didn’t believe in god or extraneous appliances. His Bronx apartment was sparse and clean. She liked it for its blankness. The walls were beige, the carpet was tan, and even with the paintings from the farmer’s market that she eventually hung up, the place still looked bare with a minimum of furniture. A couch, a glass coffee table, and a bookcase that held a single row of mystery novels. Dave didn’t have plants or animals, not even photos in frames. But he had a guitar that he practiced every night from six thirty to seven, and from nine to nine thirty. He ate dinner at seven fifteen, and went to bed at ten forty-five.

Shyama told me she didn’t know if she loved him, only that he made her feel like she was doing something wrong. When in public, she wouldn’t hold his hand. Amma, Appa and I lived only five hours away, and she had this fear that we would come to surprise her one day. So they stayed in Dave’s apartment.

She knew it was coming. At every holiday when she visited home, she asked me if I’d heard Amma and Appa talking about her marriage. I always said no, but I never listened at their closed door. They sprung it on her when she came home for the summer after her junior year. I had no warning.

“Your uncle’s wife,” Amma said. “Her parents’ neighbors have a nephew in Canada. He’s thirty-two, an engineer.”

Shyama’s face went still. She looked at me. I stared at the dining table and tried to shrink into my seat.

“An engineer. He owns a house and everything.”

Shyama picked up her suitcase and tried to walk up the stairs.

“A house, Shyama. That means he’s responsible. A very good boy.”

Shyama paused on the steps and turned around, still holding her suitcase. “You’re serious?”

Amma’s smile quivered. “You’re getting old. You need a husband.”

A year after Shyama got married, Amma and Appa split up, and Appa married Laila Aunty before the ink on the divorce papers dried. Maybe they knew it was coming. Maybe they hurried Shyama’s arrangement so that her marriage could happen before theirs broke. No parents would send a son-in-law to a broken home.

“You can’t walk through life alone,” Appa said.

Shyama bit her lip. Was she thinking of Dave in his uniform? The summer would be too warm for all that heavy camouflage but that’s how I always pictured him.

“You need someone to come home to,” Amma said.

Appa coughed and put his hands in his pockets. “It’s a good feeling. To know you have someone waiting for you at home.”

Shyama had told me that girls in Dave’s unit flirted with him all the time. She sometimes found their texts on his phone. He was too polite to say no. Amma and Appa would say that he wasn’t a stable investment.

“He’s in Toronto,” Appa said. “His parents asked us to come see them.”

Amma smiled large against Shyama’s vacant look. “We’re leaving this Friday.”

Shyama couldn’t sleep that night, just tossed and turned in the bed we shared as I hovered on the edge of sleep. Her phone conversations with Dave were short and clipped. She lay in bed with the blanket over her head and whispered into her phone. She didn’t tell him about Canada. No mention of the arrangement. He was getting ready to ship out for annual training.

“You can do whatever you need to do,” she told him.

“I miss you.” His voice was muffled by the phone and blankets.

“You’ll get over that.”

“I love you.”

“You may get over that, too.”

When she wasn’t talking to Dave, I tried to console her. “Maybe you can tell Amma and Appa about Dave,” I said.

Shyama looked at me like I was crazy.

“It would stop them arranging things.”

She frowned and looked away. “They’d kill me. This thing with Dave won’t last forever.”

“So you’re just going to get married to someone else?”

“I can always say no to this guy.”

“You have to fight for your relationship.”

“You don’t get it. There’s no saying no. I say no to this one, it’ll be another one, and then another, and then another.”

“So you’re going through with the arrangement.”

Shyama’s face still had that blank, unfocused look. “I’m not done fighting just yet.”

Back then I believed in love, in forever. I would’ve done anything to fight for Nisha. But back then, Nisha didn’t want to be fought for.

Appa emailed pictures of the engineer to Shyama. I watched over her shoulder. His name was Rajesh, and he posed in his house against stark white walls and landscape paintings in wooden frames. There he was standing next to his enormous oak dining table, his fifty-inch TV, his sports Audi. He wore suits and tight smiles in every picture. He had nervous eyes.

Appa insisted on driving the entire nine hours to Canada by himself because he didn’t trust the women to drive well and no one insisted. Amma sat in the front seat and looked out the window while I sat squished between Shyama and Laila Aunty in the back. As Amma’s widowed best friend, Laila Aunty was automatically invited to join us. In retrospect, it’s hard to believe no one predicted Laila Aunty and Appa.

Except for the old Tamil songs that Appa played on repeat, the car stayed silent. When we stopped at rest areas, Amma pinched Shyama’s cheeks and said, “Don’t worry so much. He’s a good boy.”

Dave sent Shyama texts while he was on break from his training sessions in Nebraska. She tilted her phone away from Laila Aunty, but I could still read most of them. He told her she was beautiful, that he missed her and that he loved her. He didn’t seem like the kind of man to get over loving her.

We checked into our hotel rooms late that night. I shared a room with Shyama, so we opened the doors to the balcony and let the city in. A breeze wove through the metal bars of the railing. The balconies on the apartment building across the street burst with kids’ bicycles and drying laundry, potted plants and worn wicker deck chairs, signs of immigrant families making a life. Toronto had comfort to it, like I could sink my toes in, with its strip malls of Tamil stores and ethnic fusion cuisine. I didn’t know of any other place in the world where you could get Irish-Caribbean sushi with a side of refried beans and mango chutney.

“I wish you could come here,” Shyama told Dave over the phone. She stood on the balcony with her back to me, scratching her calf with her big toe.

I tried to imagine Dave walking around the streets below, with his pasty skin and blonde hair, his Skechers shoes and tan cargo shorts like in the picture Shyama once showed me. White Canadians rarely ventured into immigrant areas. When we were younger, we played Spot the White People, and the one who saw the most won. Dave didn’t belong here. Of that Shyama was right.

•••

In Hinduism, the concept of dharma outlines the way you behave—the law of the universe, the amalgam of duties you hold as a sentient being made of stardust and god. The straight and narrow path. The right path. Dharma is the reason that people like Kris get married to people like me, the reason that Shyama gave up writing for graduate school, the reason that after the divorce, Amma is shunned at Sri Lankan gatherings while Appa is received with open arms.

The next morning Amma knocked on our door before we woke up, already fully dressed.

“Hurry up,” she said, clucking her tongue. “We need to go shopping.”

“For what?”

“Sarees.”

Shyama pulled her blanket over her head.

“For you,” Amma said, looking at her.

“I don’t need sarees.”

“Rajesh’s parents are not going to meet you in those homeless-person jeans you wear. Don’t be so lazy.”

Before the store we stopped for breakfast at a Tamil shop. Shyama refused her dosai and sambar, even refused her coffee. Later, she wobbled in place and rubbed her eyes in the textile store entrance. The saree shop smelled like the back of Amma’s armoire where she kept all her Indian clothing, a sweet musty smell that tickled the space between my ears. Glass shelves covered the walls of the store, holding what looked like thousands of sarees. Here and there stood jewelry holders with heavy necklaces and earrings.

Amma and Laila Aunty apparently knew the woman behind the counter. They talked pharmacy schools and husbands. Appa wandered off to look into the glass counters. I followed him and tried to be invisible. Shyama wasn’t so lucky.

The woman slid behind the counter and pulled out sarees that she draped on Shyama’s chest. The three women scrutinized each one.

“Too long. Makes her skin look dark.”

“Blue is unlucky for a marriage.”

“Too many sequins.”

“Too plain.”

“Which one do you like, Shyama?”

Shyama pointed to a green saree with brushstroke designs.

“That is not for young girls.”

“Let her wear what she wants,” Laila Aunty said.

“She will look old.”

Did Laila Aunty know then that she was going to break our family apart? I wish I could remember if her gaze lingered too long on Appa, or if they shared secret smiles but I didn’t know to look for it then.

Amma and Laila Aunty picked three sarees and two churidars. The sales woman cut out the blouse material from each one and took Shyama’s measurements.

Next we headed to a jewelry shop that had floor-to-ceiling white bars under the glass, where we had to be buzzed inside. I looked at their display of nose rings while Amma and Laila Aunty weighed necklaces and earrings in their hands. Shyama checked her phone often.

“Do they always buy you so many things?” Dave asked that night when she told him about the sarees and jewelry. I pretended to be asleep while she talked to him. She was careful not to mention why we had come to Toronto.

“Daughters are supposed to have jewelry,” she said. “It shows the family’s wealth.”

If it were me, I would’ve told him, if only to see if he stepped up to the challenge.

•••

At night we ate takeout from the Sri Lankan store just blocks away from the hotel. String hoppers, sambol, mutton rolls, every kind of food we could hope for, wrapped in newspaper and offered for a couple dollars. Amma and Appa took Shyama so that she could practice her Tamil by ordering, even though she would barely touch the food—too much oil, too much coconut milk. She wanted to shrink down to fit her clothes from high school.

I stayed behind and drew on the balcony. The neighborhood of Scarborough sprawled out under me, its wide gridded roads, neon storefronts in Tamil and Mandarin, well-lit buses crawling along like glass beetles. I sketched loose and quick without thinking about composition or accuracy.

Laila Aunty found me, her hair still dripping from her shower. She stepped onto the balcony in her flip-flops.

“Why didn’t you go with them, dear?” She peered over my shoulder at my drawing. “You’ve drawn the sky too cloudy, no?”

I looked up. The Toronto sky was clear except for a starved moon and pinprick stars. The sky I drew—clouds streaked across the graphite in a hurry to be elsewhere.

Laila Aunty leaned her elbows on the balcony railing. “What are you going to wear to their house tomorrow?”

“I’m sure Amma has something picked out.” I shaded in the underside of the clouds.

“It’s not so bad, you know.” She watched the people on the sidewalk—Sri Lankans with skin indistinguishable from ours.

“I know.”

“Your sister will be happy. She’s a good girl. She’ll adjust.”

Laila Aunty had been widowed for as long as I’d known her, but sometimes she spoke about her late husband and son—both lost to a bus bombing in Sri Lanka. Was hers an arranged marriage? Had she met her husband on a sticky summer night like this one?

“Soon it’ll be your turn,” she said.

“I won’t get married.” I spoke to my sketchbook. I’d never said it out loud, but the words had been forming in my head for years.

“Of course you will, dear.”

My hand shook where I gripped the pencil. “I won’t.” Itching crept in from the corners of my eyes. “I’m not like Shyama. I can’t.”

Laila Aunty turned and looked at me, her eyes poring over my messy hair, my legs spread open on the wire hotel chair, the thin rainbow bracelet I’d taken to wearing.

“You’ll grow out of it,” she said.

“What if I don’t?”

She looked back down at the people sliding through each other on the sidewalk. “You will.”

•••

It took Amma and Laila Aunty over an hour to dress Shyama for the big night. They matched jewelry from old English biscuit tins stuffed into the bottoms of their purses. They fought over whether she should wear a saree or a churidar.

“A saree is just too old fashioned,” Laila Aunty said. She wouldn’t budge, so Shyama wore a churidar.

Amma draped a necklace on Shyama’s neck, placed gold bangles and earrings on the counter. No way those earrings were going to fit. Shyama’s ear holes were punched at a mall kiosk with a piercing gun—no thicker than a sewing needle. Indian earrings had heavy stems that gradually weighed down women’s earlobes.

Amma held out a tube of moisturizer. “Try some cream.”

She slathered lotion on Shyama’s lobes and hands. While Shyama squeezed the bangles over her knuckles and onto her wrists, Amma pushed a too-thick stem against Shyama’s piercing, which stretched against the pressure. Her ears flushed purple. With a pop, the stem slid in. Amma did the same to the other ear, while Laila Aunty wiped up bits of blood off Shyama’s lobes and neck.

I dressed quietly in the churidar they gave me. Thankfully no one noticed me or fussed.

•••

As we drove toward Rajesh’s parents’ house, Shyama clicked more and more manically at her phone.

Amma turned around in her seat. “Put that away. Don’t bring it into the house.”

Shyama deleted Dave’s texts before turning off her phone and stowing it in the back of the driver’s seat.

We neared the outskirts of Toronto and high rises gave way to row houses and then to new development neighborhoods with large homes on small plots. Lawns manicured green, flower boxes trimmed, decks tidy. And plenty of white people everywhere on the sidewalks, walking their dogs, jogging. After a few days of only seeing brown skin, I noticed them more than usual. I wondered if they had any idea that arranged marriages were taking place under their noses, that young men and women were marrying people they didn’t know.

Appa pulled into a driveway at the end of a cul-de-sac and turned off the car. For a moment no one moved, and then with a “Here we go,” Amma opened her door and stepped out. Shyama shivered in her sleeveless churidar. I was glad to have worn long sleeves. Steep steps led to the door, squeezed in between two houses on either side as if the front of the house was just too large for the space.

“Stand up straight,” Amma said. She rang the doorbell.

Shyama pulled her shoulders back. Laila Aunty adjusted her clothes. The door opened and a high-school-aged girl grinned at us with braces.

“Please come in,” she said so quietly that even Amma leaned forward to hear. She led us to the living room from the foyer. Rajesh’s father shook hands with Appa. Amma and Laila Aunty smiled and nodded at Rajesh’s mother. There was a lot of nodding all around. Rajesh avoided Shyama’s eyes but greeted everyone else.

We took our seats. The plastic covering on the sofa crinkled as we sat down. Shyama twirled a piece of her hair around and around her finger.

“Your parents said you’re doing your degree in biochemistry,” Rajesh’s father said to Shyama. He was a short, stout man with watery eyes and a bald head.

His wife looked shrunken in on herself, her skin saggy like Grandmother’s. Rajesh’s sister sat with her eyes on the floor. Through her tissue-thin shirt, I could see the faint outline of her shoulders.

“What are you going to do after graduation?”

Everyone looked at Shyama but she didn’t answer.

“She is concentrating on school right now,” Amma said. “Shyama wants to take some time after college to do her writing and things.”

“She’s a good writer,” Appa said. “She’s always writing these stories about our culture.”

“Lucky for you then. My son doesn’t need his wife to work, so you can do your writing.”

“She can teach classes,” Amma said.

Shyama stared at the carpet. I held a cushion against my stomach and did the same. I was good at being quiet, but Shyama never was. Until now. In between the beige carpet strands, dark ones grew like weeds. Thick navy curtains hung over the windows. Potted plants hung in seashell planters. Each wall held pictures of Rajesh and his sister at various ages.

“Don’t worry, Shyama. My son doesn’t know yet how to cook but he’s a good learner.”

The parents laughed. Rajesh looked at Shyama but when she looked back, he turned away.

“Why don’t we let the two of them go and talk?”

“I want to take a drive,” Rajesh said.

He led Shyama out to the car while the parents continued to talk in the living room. Rajesh’s mother got up to make tea.

Amma pushed me by the shoulders toward Rajesh’s sister. “Why don’t you go talk with her? She’s your age.”

I got up and sat on a hard dining chair next to Rajesh’s sister. She smiled shyly and looked at the floor again. She had a dark spot on her cheek that moved when she smiled.

“Do you like Tamil movies?” she asked.

“Some.”

“I like Rajnikanth movies.”

She sounded like Nisha, though I could never tell if Nisha actually liked the movies or if she said it because it made her parents happy.

Rajesh’s sister was called to help serve the tea. She bent down in front of me and held out a silver tray of teacups and suddenly I felt like the groom in a Tamil movie meeting the bride for the first time—this scene so iconic it’s in almost every Tamil film.

The parents talked more and more nervously as time went on and Shyama hadn’t returned with Rajesh. By the time they came back, Amma and Appa had schooled their anxiety into fake smiles.

Amma waited until we were back in the car and had pulled out of the driveway. She turned around from the front seat.

“Well?”

Shyama turned on her phone. Its screen lit her face in blue.

“He seems like a nice boy, no?” Laila Aunty said.

“Very good family.”

There were five texts from Dave.

“You like him, no?”

“Not really,” Shyama said.

“What is that,” Amma said, “not really?”

“I mean, I don’t like him.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.”

“What do you not like? He’s a good boy.”

“There just wasn’t any chemistry.”

“Chemistry?” Amma’s voice rose in pitch and volume with each word. “Chemistry? What does that have to do with it?”

“There just weren’t—you know—any sparks.”

“Sparks. So now you want sparks. Sparks cause fires.”

Shyama looked down at her phone and read the texts. I miss you. You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met. We train 10 hours a day and every minute I think about you.

“The chemistry will come with time,” Laila Aunty said.

Amma turned to Appa, who was silent. Was he thinking about Laila Aunty, about the divorce papers he knew he was going to file?

“Your daughter is a fool,” Amma said.

Shyama flies into town with her husband Rajesh and their one-year-old son Varun for Nisha’s engagement ceremony. Appa and I pick them up from the airport. Shyama’s hair jumps around her plump face like electricity. She hasn’t started to show yet, but her cheeks are a little rounder than they’d been between pregnancies. Varun rides on her hip, his smooth face on her shoulder. Rajesh lags behind them as they walk out of the glass security doors, rolling a green flowered suitcase behind him.

Shyama was never the pretty one. She was the nice one, the one who made our parents happy. She convinced a five-year-old me to take dance class, pushed me into practicing when my legs hurt, attended every single one of my performances up until she went to college.

But now, the energy seems sucked out of her. She looks small in the open air beside the building’s steel columns. She smiles when she sees us, but even that seems strained. I can’t tell if Rajesh smiles or not—his skin is so dark that I can only tell from a distance when he shows his teeth. Varun turns and presses his face further into Shyama’s shoulder. I hold out my arms to him but he clings on tighter.

“He’ll come around after he gets used to you again.”

Appa leads us through the airport toward central parking, always at the helm. Of course, he drives home. Rajesh rides in the front seat because he’s a man.

I entertain Varun while Shyama snores with her head on the window. Varun smells like baby powder when I kiss his temples. At least Grandmother will be happy now that there’s a baby in the house. Maybe she’ll stop sitting outside.

“Are you sure you want to stay there?” Appa asks as he takes the exit to Winchester. His voice is hard around the edges. Appa offered to have them at his house but Shyama chose to stay with Amma.

Rajesh turns around in his seat for help from Shyama, who’s sleeping. He turns back and makes a noncommittal grunt.

At Amma’s house, Appa follows us inside and stands in the doorway, studiously brushing lint off the suitcases until Amma invites him inside for dinner.

Amma carries Varun around, kissing his cheeks and laughing while Grandmother watches from her folding chair. Bright toys litter the meticulously-scrubbed floor. Appa sits at the kitchen table with Rajesh and watches, the two of them slowly sipping the whiskey that Rajesh bought at the dutyfree. Everyone smiles too big.

I help Shyama unpack. I set up the air mattress pump and leave it to fill while Shyama puts clothes into neat piles in the dresser drawers that Amma has cleaned out. Sleep casts deep shadows on her eyes, the skin around them almost purple. I’m not used to seeing her face so bare and tired.

“How long have you been here?” She carefully folds baby clothes in the topmost drawer.

“A month or so.” Nisha’s visits, Grandmother’s slow mania, everything blurs together.

She turns around and puts her fists on her hips, looking so much like Amma that a chuckle tries to bubble up in my throat.

“You haven’t seen Kris in a month?”

“He came for Nisha’s party.”

She narrows her eyes at me and doesn’t move.

“I miss him. It’s hard being away from him.”

She stares at me for a few more seconds, then sighs heavily and picks up some of Rajesh’s underwear from her suitcase. “Sometimes I wonder about you two.”

Shyama’s always been observant, and unlike Amma she doesn’t let facts like our marriage get in the way.

“Why did you do it?” I ask. “Why did you marry Rajesh?”

She stuffs a pile of underwear into the dresser. “I don’t regret it.” She sounds like she believes it. “Rajesh is everything I could’ve asked for in a husband.”

“You didn’t like him when you met him. You liked Dave.”

She turns around and hushes me. Her eyes linger on the doorway. She unzips another suitcase. “Dave was nice. But we always had problems. It wasn’t worth the fight. Once I gave Rajesh a chance, I was happy.” She shakes out some blouses and puts them on hangers. When she catches my eye in the mirror, she looks away and stacks diapers into another drawer. “Hard to believe that Nisha’s getting married. Then again, it’s hard to believe that you got married—how long ago was it?”

“Four years.”

“Four years. God, I feel old.”

She looks old. Gray creeps into her hair, streaking the blackness like lightning. She is starting to take on the saggy thickness of Amma’s skin. I like the look on her, but she probably hates it.

“How’s the groom?” she asks. “Have you met him?”

“I saw a picture.”

She empties the suitcase and turns it upside down over the trashcan. “And?” She bounces it up and down until a couple of crumbs fall out.

“He’s no Kris.”

She puts down the empty suitcase and heaves another one on top of the bed. “I thought Nisha would be able to do better than that, with her looks and all.”

I pick at a loose thread on Amma’s comforter. Unbidden, Nisha in her red wedding saree fills my brain. Nisha with real jasmines in her hair. Nisha with a thali. Nisha on her wedding night.

“What I wouldn’t give for that girl’s looks,” Shyama says.

I snap the thread loose from the rest of the stitching and wind it around my finger until it bites into my skin. “She’s very pretty,” I say.

•••

After a hurried and hushed call to Laila Aunty, Appa informs us that he’s staying for dinner. He laughs through the food, loudly and more often than I’ve heard him laugh in months. He loves all of us, but Shyama has always been his favorite. When she left for college, he moped around the house and started working late and on the weekends. But during Shyama’s visits home he would somehow find his weekends and nights free and would come home early with groceries to make her favorite foods. The divorce shattered their relationship. Shyama never forgave him, refusing to stay at his house, and taking Amma’s side in all arguments.

Now Appa takes generous sips of his whiskey and smiles wide enough to show his teeth. He waxes political about the first debate of the election season. Obama’s chances are dwindling, but Appa remains hopeful.

Rajesh nods mutely and stuffs his face with food. I wouldn’t brag about my ability to eat with my hands, but I feel like a saint next to Rajesh, whose plate is surrounded with spilled food. He’s one of those men who was hand-fed by his adoring grandmother well into adolescence. Will Nisha’s husband be like that? Will Nisha cook for him?

“It’s about time for Nisha,” Amma says. “She was getting so old.”

Appa and Rajesh talk about work. Rajesh is pissed about being passed up for a promotion. “You know,” he says, brandishing a drumstick at us, “I bet if I was white those sons of bitches would promote me.”

He says shit like this all the time, especially when he’s been drinking. He’s embarrassed by his thick accent and Sri Lankan degree, angry at his coworkers for not inviting him out to bars. He thinks he doesn’t get promotions because his boss is racist. I think it’s because he’s shy around white people.

“You’ll get a promotion,” Appa says.

“I need it. We have to get that extra room done on the house. The city makes us take out so many permissions, you know. They hate to see us doing so well.”

They don’t need an extra room. But they’re the kind of people who buy a Mercedes when the next-door neighbor buys a BMW.

Appa makes little noises of confirmation and the rest of us stay quiet. Shyama’s lack of embarrassment makes me angry.

“You need that room,” Appa says. He sucks down the rest of his drink and looks at Amma expectantly. When she doesn’t look up or refill his glass, he sets it aside and goes back to his food.

•••

Kris goes to a conference in Seattle and can’t make it for Nisha’s engagement. At least this time we won’t fight about how much he’s allowed to touch me. I won’t have to drag his drunk ass home.

We go to the bank to get jewelry out of Amma’s safe-deposit box. Rajesh drives Amma’s Camry through the winding, narrow streets of Arlington. Inside the small room at the bank, with the long, cold metal safe-deposit box open on the counter, Amma, Shyama and I sort through the years of gold accumulation to find suitably modern enough pieces to wear to Nisha’s engagement. Rajesh entertains his son outside.

Shyama chooses a small necklace with a grape-like cluster of black stones.

“That’s much too small,” Amma says. She pulls out a plastic pencil box and unfolds the old baby washcloth inside—I wonder if it’s mine—faded from its pastel glory to a dingy white. Amma’s wedding necklace lies inside, wrapped and carefully held onto the fabric with safety pins. Twenty-two karat gold, with white stones that look like diamonds but aren’t. She unpins the necklace carefully and holds it up to my neck, draping it around my collar. Even though I got a similar, more expensive necklace from Appa, I still love Amma’s. The gold is blackened at the corners where the links of the floral chain connect to each other. This necklace feels like it has history, even though Amma told me that the black means the gold is impure.

“Can I wear this one?” I ask. “You can wear mine.”

Amma clucks her tongue. “This one is old-fashioned, for old ladies like me.”

I take it off my neck and wrap it carefully back in the washcloth.

“You have strange taste, Lucky. You can wear it if you want.”

I put the washcloth back in the pencil case and snap it shut.

“I just want to see a smile on your face.” Amma unzips another jewelry case and collects a set of gold bangles on her finger. Two of them are Shyama’s favorites, with little pearls embedded in the filigree.

I try to pick out the smallest earrings and a necklace large enough that it will lay flat instead of twisting. I hate fussing with things I’m wearing. Plus I have to wear my thali, and that’s too thick to be comfortable. Amma’s insistent on not skipping that part—the mark of a married woman is important.

Amma ordered sarees from India and Shyama got the blouses stitched in Toronto according to each of our measurements. I haven’t even seen the saree I’m supposed to wear.

Shyama and Amma hold up various pieces of jewelry to themselves, trying to imagine the sarees and how they’ll look. They debate on this bangle or that, whether or not they should wear tikkas and what size their earrings should be. I try to busy myself with wrapping each necklace carefully back in its fabric scrap and sorting the ones we’re taking from the ones we’re leaving behind.

Tasha invites Nisha and me to a rugby game she’s refereeing. Radcliffe vs. BU. At the game, Nisha spreads out a blanket on the wet stadium grass. She crawls onto it and pats the space next to her. Tasha waves at us from the field where the two teams are warming up. Nisha shivers in the cooling air, so I hold her around the waist. People mill around us, setting up lawn chairs and trying to keep track of toddlers who’ve just learned to run.

“How do you know Tasha?” I ask. The rugby girls seem like such an odd group for Nisha, but maybe she was different in college. Maybe she was out. We didn’t talk much after high school, so maybe this was a part of Nisha’s past I didn’t know about.

Nisha smiles and watches the Radcliffe team jog around the pitch. “My first semester at Wellesley, I went crazy and thought I should try sports.”

“So you picked rugby?”

“It wasn’t so bad.”

“You played?”

She raises an eyebrow. “Why? Am I too delicate in your eyes?”

“No.” I say it too quickly.

“I played a semester. But practice started cutting into study time. I couldn’t keep up.” She rests a hand on my knee. “Plus Amma and Appa started asking about the bruises.”

“I want to see you play.” I wonder if her fiancé knows he’s marrying a rugby player. If he could see her now, kissing my neck, smearing her sticky gloss all over my skin.

“I’ll play next time,” she says into my ear.

She spends the first half of the game running her fingers up and down my thigh, explaining the rules I don’t understand.

•••

At halftime Tasha walks with us to her car. We sit inside. She offers us a bottle of Sprite. “It’s mostly vodka.”

Nisha uncaps it. She takes a swig and grimaces. She passes it to me. For the first time in a long time I don’t feel like drinking. But she holds it out so I take it. The mixture bites into my tongue and leaves a bitter aftertaste that stays in my nose.

Tasha refuses the bottle. “Later,” she says. She sits backward in the driver’s seat and watches the two of us. “Has Nisha told you she used to play?”

“It’s not that big a deal,” Nisha says.

“You were a solid player.”

“I was an okay player.”

“Remember the Brandeis game? When you tackled Lu and knocked her out?”

“I bumped her head with my shoulder by accident when we fell down.”

“It was fucking badass. I wish you’d play with us more.”

Nisha drinks some more from the Sprite bottle. I feel like I’m seeing her for the first time. When she leaves for the bathroom, Tasha smokes a cigarette and flicks the ashes out of the half-open window.

“I should quit,” she says. “It’s horrible for my game.”

“Why did Nisha stop playing?” I ask.

Tasha lowers her voice. “I think her parents found out. It wasn’t pretty. I keep trying to get her to come out to JP more. It can’t be good for her to be stuck in the house with her parents all the time.”

“They’ve always been strict.” Nisha had an eight-o’clock bedtime all through high school. She wasn’t allowed to wear shorts or skirts above her knees. The only time she could go out with her friends was when I was invited along.

•••

During the second half of the game, Nisha and I walk around the edge of the pitch to stave off the cold. Neither of us have jackets. The cool air sinks into our skin and stays there.

She walks fast around the pitch. I lightly touch her elbow and she stops.

“Amma wants us to have a sangeet as part of the wedding,” she says. “I’d have to perform a dance.”

I thread my fingers through hers. “Will Deepak dance with you?”

She winds a hand around my neck. “I miss dancing with you.”

“I can’t dance at the sangeet with you.”

Her eyes light up. “But you can dance with me now.” She pulls me away from the pitch and down past a thicket of bushes.

The noise of the game dies into a muffle. Nisha sits down in a clearing that looks like it’s designed for team meetings before games. She unzips her boots and takes them off. I untie my shoes and step out of them. She finds a song on her phone. She turns up the volume and leaves it in the grass.

“Ready?” She takes her position.

“What song?”

“Our song.” She misses the first beat of the drum, but catches up quickly.

It’s a routine we choreographed for the Boston Tamil Arts Festival. A two-person dance from a Rajnikanth movie about misplaced love and vengeance. Appropriate.

She remembers her parts well. I try to keep up. I’m not used to moving this way anymore, bending at the waist or curving with the violin notes. Nisha dances like she’s never stopped. Barefoot in the grass, her face making all the right emotions to the lyrics. Her legs lift with the drums, leaping and dancing around me.

I’d played the male part, the object of the female dancer’s affection, who had wanted a different girl instead, a girl too shy to dance in public. A good, modest servant girl who, in the music video, edged around the walls of the dance floor casting coy glances at the hero.

Nisha mouths the lyrics to me, dancing around and around, circling. You keep following me, without asking what I want. But she wants this. Don’t you want to be the one that catches the flowers that fall from my hair?

At the end of the song, the female dancer kisses the hero in front of his family, raising a scandal that moves the plot forward. In our version for the arts festival, Nisha kissed my cheek at the end and walked off the stage. As I stood there pretending to be stunned, the curtain dropped. Fade to black.

I start to remember the movement. I get better as the song progresses, and by the end I’m dancing without watching Nisha for cues. The drums beat louder, and Nisha slows her movement. She stops dancing and circles me. When the song ends she kisses me on the mouth, pulls me down into the grass, and slides my hand up her leg.

“What if someone sees?” I say. But there’s no one around. Cheering floats through the bushes from the game.

She’s wiry and dark under me. Her hair glints with the coppery sky and snakes through the grass in black coils. She throws back her head and mutters to me in Tamil, half-words that scratch and bite at my skin and make me press up against her leg, press press press until I cry into her shoulder and she holds me and kisses me softly on the cheek.

•••

For a whole three hours during the game I haven’t checked my phone, and there are five texts from Amma wondering where I am. Nisha has three missed calls.

“They’re going to be so mad,” she says. She hurriedly pulls on her boots. She swings her purse over her shoulder and smoothes down her dress. “Ready?”

“Why do they want you home?”

“They always want me home.”

“Is that why you stopped dancing? And playing rugby?”

She takes a step toward the field. “They were really mad about the rugby.” She digs up a rock on the ground, rolls her foot on top of it. “But the dancing—it just wasn’t the same with you gone. Plus they said I was too old.”

I touch her waist and she relaxes against me. “You still dance like you used to. Puts me to shame.”

She closes her eyes against the breeze. Her head falls on my shoulder. “I miss you.”

“I’m right here.”

“After—when I’m—you know.”

My feet step away from her and toward the field. I forgot, just for a moment. Misplaced affection. But my heart still beats faster when she grabs my hand and holds it all the way to the field. I still kiss her back when she leans over in the car on the way home. I still tell her I want to see her play rugby.

Nisha wants me to help her dress for her engagement ceremony, which means sitting in the room and watching a makeup artist do her face. She meets me in front of her parents’ house. The driveway is so full with cars that they spill onto the side of the street and in front of mailboxes. Her hair falls wet and stringy around her face. She pushes me inside.

The hollow wood floors echo with brown people talking over each other. Nisha’s parents and extended family cluster around the kitchen island drinking tea. They aren’t dressed yet, but the women are already wearing their gold jewelry.

Nisha pulls me up the stairs, past the walls crowded with JC Penney family portraits. The stairwell seems to tilt into the middle as if weighed down by the clutter. We climb past the massive picture of a twelve-year-old Nisha holding a lit bronze lamp at her puberty ceremony, her hair done up with purple carnations that match her lipstick—that was the first time I’d ever seen her in a saree or wearing makeup, and I thought she looked like a movie star. Nisha’s room is exactly as I remember it. She’s never decorated it beyond the two framed photos of herself as a baby and the stuffed animals twined into the curls of her wrought-iron bed. A box fan hums from her dresser.

“The makeup lady’s on her way.” She sits on the edge of the bed. Six yards of sherbet-orange silk ripples next to her. The afternoon light bleaches the waves where they crest. Gold embroidery shines like fish in the thread.

She stands up, slips off her shirt and threads her arms through the saree blouse. “Can you help?”

I hook the back of her blouse together and tie the strings. The neck is cut deep, exposing her spine. She bends back. My fingers brush her skin.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” she says. She steps out of her jeans and ties the cotton underskirt around her waist. Her smile shows her whitened teeth, long and evenly spaced thanks to years of braces. She has her blue contacts in, the ones that make her eyes look glassy like a doll’s.

“It’s good to see you excited,” I say. I hope I don’t sound bitter. “Are Jesse and Tasha coming today?”

“You should be careful around them.” She walks to the small wooden vanity next to her bed and sits down on its upholstered stool. She smiles and unsmiles in the mirror like she’s practicing. She can smile with her eyes even when she doesn’t mean it. “They could get you into trouble, if your mother sees. I know your parents aren’t as strict, but I still doubt your mother would be happy if she knew.”

The door opens and a woman I don’t know peeks her head in. Her wide face and small, upturned eyes would be friendly if it wasn’t for the heavy makeup she wears.

“Gauri Aunty,” Nisha says. “I’m ready.”

The drape of Gauri Aunty’s churidar hides her curves, but she doesn’t look much older than us. She hauls in a large silver makeup train case.

“Can you get the rest?” She points to the door.

I bring in the two plastic totes just outside the door.

Gauri Aunty combs through Nisha’s hair. “Can you plug in the curling iron and straightener?”

Both the iron and straightener are bright pink. I plug them in behind the bed and let them heat up. Nisha’s saree runs like water under my fingers.

Gauri Aunty straightens and then curls Nisha’s hair. She pins it into a high bun, pulls out three roses from the tiniest cooler I’ve ever seen, and attaches them at the base of Nisha’s neck.

I text Kris: Nisha’s getting all dolled up for the engagement.

You, too?

Fuck no.

Are you helping her get dressed? Sexy time?

I turn the phone off and stuff it back in my pocket.

Gauri Aunty rolls out a makeup brush holder and spreads it on the vanity like a painter would. She unclamps the train case and pulls out drawers of little vials, takes Nisha’s face in hand, spreads this and that on her face, brushes puffed up with powder, shimmering shadows on her eyelids, dark liner around her eyes, a deep stain on her lips. Nisha stands up, and Gauri Aunty helps wrap her saree, pinning it in places where she normally would have tucked the fabric into the petticoat, going for the thinnest silhouette possible.

I’m getting twitchy. I wish I’d brought my sketchbook. I would’ve drawn Nisha getting painted. Instead I drum on my thighs and read the labels on the makeup. Deep Throat, Virgin, Sin, Pop My Cherry, Orgasm. Who names this stuff?

Gauri Aunty jerks her head toward me. “Do you want me to do her, too?”

Nisha looks at me. She’s unrecognizable with all the makeup. She raises her eyebrows like she wants an answer.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“Do her makeup,” Nisha says.

Gauri Aunty pins jewelry into Nisha’s hair, stacks necklaces on her chest. I know how Nisha feels, so many bobby pins that your head is twice its weight, so much makeup that it’s like looking out of a mask, jewelry on every part of you so that you can’t even move. I had to endure it for my wedding. Then again, it’s Nisha. She probably enjoys the feeling. She looks beautiful enough to make it worth it.

Nisha sits stiffly on the bed and Gauri Aunty turns to me.

“Will this take long?” I say. It’s nearly noon and Nisha still has a one-hour photo session before the ceremony.

“Take your time,” Nisha says.

Gauri Aunty makes me sit with my back to the mirror as she straightens my hair and puts makeup on my face. Nisha snaps a picture on her phone. When I try to take it away, she holds it beyond my reach and tells me she’s posting it online.

•••

The photos take forever. I’m still in my jeans and T-shirt so I help the thick-spectacled, pushy-voiced photographer set up a portable studio in the den. Nisha sits a full head height below Deepak, even though she’s not much shorter than him. Photo: Nisha with her head on his shoulder. Photo: her hand lies delicately in his. Photo: she looks up at him, in profile. Zoom in on her earrings, on her eyes, on the roses in her hair.

“Smile, smile.” The photographer poses them like dolls. “No, Deepak. You don’t smile. Nisha, smile.” Nisha has always been a good actress.

She talks to me throughout the shoot. Deepak watches her and wipes sweat from his forehead with a cotton handkerchief. I watch her, too, her mouth and two perfect rows of teeth, whitened and gleaming under the bright lights, framed by maroon lips. Photo: Deepak lifts her face with a finger under her chin. Photo: she looks up at him adoringly. Photo: pitiful freak watching the girl she loves get married. Photo: two adoring best friends laughing about boys. Photo: the bride looks sad when she thinks no one is looking. Photo: composed, scripted. The real story lies in between the pigments.

•••

Nisha’s parents rent out the first floor of a gilded, carpeted hotel. White linens blanket everything like a fine dusting of snow. Giant crystal chandeliers twinkle from the arched ceilings. By the time I get there, the guests have already started to arrive, swishing their saree pleats around their glittery stilettos. It makes me think of Bollywood movies, of curvy, milk-skinned heroines and men who never take no for an answer.

My flask lies warm and full on my skin, tucked into the waistband of my saree.

I find Jesse and Tasha milling around near the mango lassi table, dressed in slacks and bow ties and looking both enthralled and confused. They smile when they see me.

“You look nice. I think we’re underdressed.” Tasha wipes at her suit vest and fixes her polka-dot pocket square.

“I’m paying for it. This saree is itchy as hell. And I have lipstick on.” At least Kris isn’t here to hold me tight to his side, to flirt with me when he thinks everyone is watching. I wonder if Tasha and Jesse even know I’m married.

Amma and Grandmother arrive just in time for the ceremony. Amma doesn’t come to most Sri Lankan functions. She says she likes to avoid the gossip—she’s only one of four divorced women in the Boston Tamil community, so gossip trails after her. She usually pretends to be sick, or says she has to work. When she can’t get out of important functions, she comes late and leaves early and tries not to talk to many people.

She looks in my direction and I turn away. She’s probably already accounted for how many people have noticed me standing with Jesse and Tasha. American friends are okay, but not if they wear men’s clothes. I’m surprised Nisha even invited them.

“How are you handling all this?” Jesse asks.

I don’t like her look of pity. I take a glass of mango lassi so I have something to hold onto.

“Leave her alone,” Tasha says.

“This isn’t fair,” Jesse says. “You know that.”

People turn around to look.

“This is Nisha’s choice,” Tasha whispers.

“I can’t believe she’d choose this. Not Nisha.”

“I’m fine,” I say. “Seriously.” They both look skeptical. “I brought a flask.”

Tasha snorts into her lassi.

“You brought a flask to an engagement?”

“Yes, I fucking brought a flask. Every man here brought a flask to this engagement. Do you want some or not?”

We find an unused room and pass the flask around. I take more than my share. It’s my fucking flask. We wander over to the official drink table with the sodas and pour some for ourselves. The whiskey works its way through my system. The drink chills my fingers. I hold the plastic cup to my forehead and let the cool seep in. Nisha won’t want Gauri Aunty’s makeup melting off my face before the ceremony even starts.

“Lucky!”

Laila Aunty’s thin frame pushes someone aside to come stand next to me. Her smile is too bright, her makeup too vivid. “These are your friends?” She looks from me to Jesse to Tasha, her smile now permanently marring her face.

I introduce them. “They’re Nisha’s friends.”

Laila Aunty asks Jesse and Tasha what they do, where they live, what they studied in school. She nods back and forth, her smile never wavering from her face. When she leaves, Tasha elbows me.

“Are we only Nisha’s friends?”

The lights dim before I can answer, and the ceremony starts. Deepak’s parents and Nisha’s parents gather around a covered table set up at one end of the ballroom. A three-tier cream cake stands on one end, and a man in a traditional veshti sarong stands at the other. The unbleached white cotton of his veshti and kurta shirt looks crisp and starched against his dark skin. He places a marriage certificate in front of him, in between six trays covered with gold and red fabric.

Nisha and Deepak walk up the aisle in the middle of the room. Her saree twirls around her as she walks, the embroidered stones splitting light like shattered glass. In person, Deepak looks even more puffed up with air.

When the man at the table nods, Nisha’s parents give Deepak’s parents three silver trays: one with the sherwani that Deepak will wear for the wedding and the suit that he’ll wear for the reception, one with flowers and fruits, and one with betel leaves, areca nuts, sandalwood paste, and other things I can’t even name. Deepak’s parents give three trays: one with Nisha’s wedding and reception sarees, one with lipstick, eyeliners, and the gold thali kodi, and one with the same assortment of nuts and spices.

After the exchange, the man at the table clears his throat and speaks in Tamil. “This is the engagement of Deepak and Nisha. Their parents have given their blessings with the exchange of gifts. Do you, Deepak, agree to this marriage?”

Deepak holds his own wrist and nods.

I translate quietly for Tasha and Jesse.

“Isn’t it rude to talk?” Tasha asks.

“Not at a brown function.” I’m thankful for the whiskey inside my system. It plants my feet to the floor and keeps me steady. Everything blurs.

“I thought this was an engagement,” Tasha says.

“Sri Lankan engagements mean signing the marriage license.”

“Nisha, do you agree to this marriage?” the man asks.

Tasha whispers in my ear. “So are you two still fucking?”

“Yes,” Nisha says.

The man produces two rings in a red velvet case and holds them out. Deepak takes one and puts it on Nisha’s finger. Nisha puts the other on Deepak’s. The saree creeps up Nisha’s back as she bends down to sign the marriage license.

I step away from Tasha. I know what Amma will say if she sees. I shake my head and hope that Tasha will take that as an answer. My fingertips are expanding at the edges from all the heat in the room.

•••

Dinner is served buffet style. I follow Tasha and Jesse through the line, explaining the dishes as best as I can. Their presence keeps most of the older people away and for that I’m grateful. No one asking me when I’m going to have a kid, when I’m going to become one of them.

Nisha comes and sits with us while we eat at a table by ourselves. Amma’s disappeared but Laila Aunty smiles at us in between bites from a table nearby.

“I’m so tired,” Nisha says. She carefully takes a bite of rice and lentils from her spoon using only her teeth. Her face is shiny with sweat.

Jesse stares at her plate. She’s piled on everything from the buffet, and her plate’s so full that she can’t mix the curries with the rice. Tasha’s spoon is a blur with the speed of her eating. Nisha’s silence grates at me. She wants me to say something.

“It was great,” I say. “You looked great.”

Nisha squeezes my knee underneath the table and takes another bite from her spoon.

“Thanks for coming,” she says to Tasha and Jesse.

“Wouldn’t miss it.” Jesse digs her spoon directly into the middle of her pile and starts eating.

Tasha says nothing.

Nisha smiles and walks away with her plate.

“I should’ve brought a bigger flask,” I say.

“We’re going to the bars after this,” Tasha says. “You should come.”

“I’m in a saree.”

“And?”

And Amma won’t let me go. I’m sure of it. It’s nine already, and by the time we finish eating and get ready to leave, it’ll be ten. Then there’s getting to the club in Boston, by car and T. We wouldn’t be done until two or three in the morning. Way past my curfew.

“You can stay over at the rugby house,” Tasha says.

“I have to ask my mom.”

If they think that’s weird, they keep it to themselves. Amma’s cornered near the cake table by Laila Aunty. Perfect. Either she’ll say yes, to prove to Laila Aunty that she’s the kind of parent who trusts her kid, or she’ll say no, to prove to Laila Aunty that she isn’t the kind of parent who will neglect the dangers of the night scene. Each would result in a fight.

I walk over like I want a slice of cake. Amma pretends not to see me, but Laila Aunty lets out a high-pitched “Lucky!” and puts an arm around my shoulders. Amma’s pinched face turns toward me.

“Amma, my friends are asking if I want to go to Boston with them.”

“Go to Boston? Why?”

“We’re going to go dancing.”

“When?”

“Now. I’ll stay over at their house and come back in the morning.”

Her nostrils quiver and flare.

“Oh, let her go,” Laila Aunty says. “She’s a grown up.”

Amma takes in a breath of air that fills up her chest. Her face crumples. I try not to smile, but I’ve won.

•••

Tasha’s car slices through the streetlights on our way inbound, Chris Pureka’s eerie low voice winding through the speakers and vibrating in my ribcage. I melt into the cracked vinyl backseat. Tasha and Jesse’s conversation mixes in with the music. My fingers are still jittery with cold. I close my eyes.

We weave through the inky night, moving along a river of headlights, the city winking with the light of a million bulbs. I wish Nisha was sitting beside me, holding my hand the way that she does only around the rugby girls, Nisha in her engagement saree, the silk fabric folding into orange waves, gold glittering like fish in the sea. The whiskey has carved me empty.

Cool air streams inside the half-open windows of Tasha’s car, the salt of the sea still riding on the wind, splashing against the mask of makeup on my face. Buildings swim past us and we’re riding the wind, too, us and the salt of the sea, hurtling toward the city on a night that isn’t special and doesn’t matter, except that it does and I want the car to slide, to give up its traction on the asphalt and fly faster until our skin melts away and we are free.

•••

At Machine, Tasha holds a ten-dollar bill in between her fingers and leans against the bar. She doesn’t tilt her hips or stick out her butt the way Nisha does. The club expands like a cave, the darkness thick between the breaks of light. Tasha shouts drink orders into the bartender’s ear and lays down more bills. “I got this round,” she yells over the music.

I stuff my money back in my purse, wishing I’d left it in the car. I pull up my saree and pin it so that it doesn’t fall over my arm. Tasha gives me a Sam Adams, raises hers in a toast, and tips her head back to drink. I let the cold beer rush into my mouth and fall down my throat. If only it could wash away the image of Nisha bending down to sign her marriage certificate, skin stretched tight over her lower back, the room too hot and I can’t breathe.

Tasha hooks an arm around mine and pulls me toward the dance floor. I take another sip of beer and let myself be dragged. She squeezes us into an opening in the crowd of people, many of whom no longer have their shirts on, their chests and backs gleaming with sweat and glitter. The crowd keeps pushing us closer. I could grab her hip, pull it to me, push my face into the crook of her neck, breathe in the smell of her. I reach out. My fingers close on the rough material of her slacks. Over her shoulder, one shirtless girl pushes another one up against the wall. Tasha moves closer. She smells like leaves. Her breath skims my ear, along the skin of my collar, slips into the fabric of my saree and down my back. She feels solid. She comes forward, slowly slowly and closer closer and kisses my neck. But Nisha’s face is stitched into the backs of my eyelids and I move away.

I push back against the crowd of dancers, turn away from Tasha. My phone buzzes in my purse. A text from Nisha: You left early.

Went out with Tasha and Jesse.

I wanted you to be my witness for the marriage license.

Sorry.

Whatever.

I said I’m sorry. I didn’t know.

I push my way off the dance floor, toward the bar. Jesse is standing next to a poster calling for dancers at the Mason Jar.

Tasha follows me. “I’m sorry for what happened back there.” She puts her empty beer bottle on the bar and doesn’t look me in the eye.

I drain the last of the beer and put my bottle next to hers. “I’m married.”

“Oh.”

I expect questions, but she doesn’t ask them until later, when we’re sitting on the deck of the rugby house and she’s smoking her cigarette and tapping the ashes into an empty beer bottle with the label ripped off.

“You’re married.” She stuffs her free hand in her pocket and looks out into the street. The wind swoops in cold through the metal railings of the deck. The peeling white paint glows in the moonlight. Voices shout at a party down the street.

“Married to a guy?” she asks.

“His name’s Kris.”

“So you and Nisha?”

“Nisha’s engaged.”

“Yeah, but don’t you have an arrangement? With your husband.”

A couple of college kids run down the street, hooting and pumping their fists into the air. She watches them until they turn the corner at the bottom of the hill. The air drips with dying roses.

“Kris is gay. We aren’t together.”

“So Nisha—”

“Nisha’s engaged.”

Tasha shivers and wraps her arms around herself. “Is this what you want?”

I wish I had a cigarette to put off answering. “What I want doesn’t matter. Not to her.”

•••

I sleep in the living room under the tie-dyed quilt. Tasha sits on the couch and talks to me until I fall asleep, and when I wake up she’s spread out flat, her head thrown back on a fuzzy orange pillow, her arm over her eyes, mouth hanging open. She makes me a breakfast that we eat out on the deck so that she can smoke. Birds sing unseen in bushes that haven’t yet shed their leaves.

“Don’t you want to do something?” she says.

I poke at my rapidly-cooling scrambled eggs. “Like what?”

She flicks her cigarette so hard that the lit end flies into the empty flowerbed. She waves her arms around. “How can you just sit there and pretend to accept this?”

She doesn’t get it. She lives in a world of polyamory and multi-lover households, where marriage means whatever you want it to mean. But Nisha’s marriage is real, and outside of stolen kisses at parties and dates masquerading as day trips to outlet malls, we will have nothing.

Tasha picks up a piece of scrambled egg from my plate and nibbles on it.

“This is what I want,” I say. I can’t tell if it’s a lie. “I can’t mess up my life. I worked too hard.” I lied too much.

She listens in silence, eats another piece of egg from my plate, and opens the door to go inside. “How is living in pain not already messed up?” she says.

•••

Amma opens the door when Tasha drops me off, and looks me up and down in my borrowed gym shorts and Patriots shirt. She looks out toward the dead-end street, where Tasha is turning her car around. “Is that a boy or a girl?”

I step inside the door and close it. “That’s Tasha. She was at the engagement.”

“Good. I got scared it was a boy.”

Amma’s in full cooking mode, three pans steaming on the range top and cutting board full of finely chopped onions, peppers, and tomatoes each in their own little pile.

“Grandmother has been asking for you.” She stirs each of the pots on the stove. She dips a wooden spoon in one, taps the liquid onto her palm, and licks it. “Hand me the salt.”

I take the salt from the counter and give it to her.

Amma sprinkles it over the bean curry and stirs. “She’s out on the deck again. Do you know why she sits out there?”

“No.” I go into the living room, open the glass doors and step outside. Grandmother sits on her folding chair, wrapped in her winter coat, thick wool socks and flip-flops.

“Vidya,” she says. “You turned into a boy. You can’t have a baby if you’re a boy.”

“It’s me, Lucky.” I put a palm to Grandmother’s forehead. It isn’t any warmer or colder than it should be.

She takes my hand in both of hers. “You should have a baby. Krishna wants a baby.” She rubs my knuckles and shakes a cough from her lips.

I pull from her grasp. She has moments of lucidity, but this is the first time she’s remembered Kris’s name in years. I go back inside.

Amma rolls leaves of cabbage into tight circles and slices them. “What did she want?”

“She wants me to have a baby.”

“Good. You need to start a family. You’re getting older, Lucky. You can’t just run around like a teenager anymore. You have to have responsibilities.” She throws the sliced cabbage into a glass dish full of water. “You don’t know how happy it will make you when you have a family.”

This is the same thing she said when she wanted me to get married, before Kris and I came up with our plan. Same speech: I didn’t realize how unhappy I was and I couldn’t even guess at the boundless happiness a marriage could give. Shyama was held up as the example.

“We want to see a grandchild before we die,” she says.

She already has a grandchild, but I don’t have energy for the hysterics right now. I sit and listen and don’t talk back. She turns off two of the burners and wipes at her eyes. I should be moved by this, the sight of my mother in distress, but I feel nothing. Her body slumps over her curries.