* * *
? ? ?
“That’s why you called me? After all this time?” I lowered my voice. “You want me to do it again?” I inched my stool away. The intensity of her attention on me earlier in the night, the willingness to confess heartbreaks—all a calculation. To get me on her side. For a ridiculous cause! Anita seemed unperturbed. She signaled to the bartender for water.
“For a proper Indian wedding,” she explained, willfully ignoring my agita, “you need certain things, as I’ve discovered over the past few years of every brown girl I know shaadi-ing up. You need someone to do mehendi—henna. You need a DJ, a caterer. Someone to tailor your lehenga. Get the point? Yes. And these vendors may not be available if you live in, say, some bumblefuck American suburb. So people come to these big convention centers to do all their wedding shopping.”
“And some people get jewelry there.” I felt spittle fly from my lips.
She swigged, then replied. “Yes. Some people have their inherited wedding trousseaus, though not everyone. These days women want modern, lighter gold or they rent. But desi brides always get high quality, high karat. And that gold—it contains—”
“Well-adjustment.” I remembered Prachi’s party, seeing happily engaged Maya’s earrings and wondering at all they contained, at all I could have if I took them.
The faith to make it from day to day. Faith to lead Anjali Joshi out of bed, to new life.
The bartender was mopping up after a clumsy guy who had just spilled his cocktail. I had to imagine last call was soon; it was past midnight. The klutz had been eyeing Anita hungrily. Her bony knee knocked against mine, and she left it there.
“Don’t you have enough money to buy wedding gold yourself?”
“You know how this works.” Of course—if she bought it, it’d be her own luck, her own energy, her own ambition. Which was insufficient.
And then Anita’s hand was briefly—so briefly—cupping my knee, calling on the old me. A shiver at the hand of that girl, the only girl, touching me, needing me. I felt that old Neil jonesing, his wants deep in my tissue. I pictured three generations, Lakshmi and Anjali and Anita, huddled around a huge pot on the stove on some sunny afternoon, a concoction bubbling. I, in the corner, inhaling the fumes. Intoxicated. Wedging between the women. Bringing the pot to my lips.
“Your mom doesn’t know about this.”
She shook her head.
“Because it’s insane.”
“She’d worry.”
“Because it’s insane.”
“To a degree,” Anita hedged. “But I’m in charge of this expo, Neil. I know how to manipulate things, and we’d take so little, out of so much stock—and not all from one store. It isn’t like . . . with Shruti. We’re not going to unhook some poor bride’s necklace on her wedding day. We’ll take it from vendors, a single earring, one bangle. They’ll think they just lost it.”
“Are you sure the gold would contain—everything we, I mean you, need?”
Her inky eyes flashed nervously at the bartender, who was still ignoring us. “When we drink the stuff, we’re drinking the intention that the owner has imbued the gold with. Yes? Yes. But the gold’s power begins earlier than that. Remember how my mom explained it years ago? A jeweler imbues his pieces with intentions when he’s making it—when he sources the gold itself, when he starts to design, et cetera. Picture some desi jewelry maker in Bombay or Dubai or wherever. If he’s bad at his job, he’s working mindlessly, and we get shoddy craftsmanship. Drinking that crap is as useless as drinking seltzer.
“But if he’s a good artisan—and my expo jewelers only stock the best artisans’ work—he’s making it with awareness that someone’s going to get married in this. Indians have a lot of gold made specifically for a wedding. Mangalsutras, big maang tikkas, Mughal-style matha pattis, South Indian–style temple gold, bajubands, kamarbandhs, naths—the big-ass nose rings . . . These are pieces you simply don’t wear any other time. So someone making a high-quality—”
“Bajuband?” I didn’t know most of the words Anita had just recited.
“That’s the fat gold armband. Or mangalsutra, the marriage necklace—your mom wears one. Someone making that bajuband or nath is infusing it only and intensely with the intention for domestic settlement.”
“I get the point.”
“No, the point, Neil,” Anita said, positively clenching her fists in a way that suggested she did not believe I’d gotten it, “the point is that in India and America, something powerful happens at the start of marriage, something we can take for my mother. The start of the marriage, when two people are optimistic about each other—the American rom-com, love-shuv version.