I don't remember most of the rituals after that. People will tell you a wedding is a blur of color and sound, but mine was worse than that — it was a blur of numbness, as if someone had wrapped cotton wool around every one of my senses and set me down in the middle of my own life to watch it happen from somewhere just outside my body. I remember the fire. I remember the weight of the garland around my neck, heavier than it looked. I remember Amit's hand, warm and slightly unsteady, guiding mine through the seven steps around the sacred fire, both of us moving carefully, formally, like two strangers forced to dance a routine neither of them had rehearsed. I remember the priest's voice rising and falling, the mantras washing over me without meaning, because how could any of it mean anything when four hours earlier I hadn't even known this man's full name?
What I remember most clearly — more clearly than the fire, more clearly than the mantras — is Kajal's face.
She found me sometime between the rituals, pulling me aside for just a moment while the priest consulted with the elders about the timing of the next step. Her bridal makeup had smudged slightly at the corners of her eyes, and I realized, with a fresh stab of guilt, that she had been crying.
"Didi," she whispered, gripping both my hands, "I didn't know. I swear to you, I didn't know any of this until Ma told me an hour ago. If I had known—"
"Don't," I said, and I meant it, even through the numbness. "Don't you dare feel guilty about this. Today is your day. I am not going to let this — whatever this is — take that away from you too."
She hugged me then, hard, careless of both our elaborate outfits, and for just a moment, in the smell of her jasmine hair oil and the familiar warmth of her arms, I felt something in my chest loosen slightly, enough to breathe. Then Boro Mashi's voice called for her, the rituals resumed, and we were both pulled back into our separate currents — her toward the man she had chosen, and me toward the man I hadn't.
The bidai came sometime past midnight. I don't need to describe what a bidai feels like to anyone who has been through one, and to anyone who hasn't, I don't think words really capture it anyway — the particular grief of leaving a house that has held every version of you, every scraped knee and exam result and midnight secret, to walk toward a house that knows nothing about you at all. Ordinarily, I imagine, that grief comes wrapped in some comfort — the comfort of having chosen this, of knowing at least a little about the man waiting on the other side of it. I had none of that comfort. I only had the grief, sharp and unaccompanied, as I touched my father's feet and felt him press something — a small gold coin, an old habit from his own mother — into my palm, his eyes wet in a way I had genuinely never seen before, not even at his own mother's funeral.
"I am sorry, beta," he said, so quietly only I could hear it. "One day, I hope, you will understand why I had no other way. And one day, I hope, you will forgive me for it."
I didn't have an answer for him. I still don't, if I'm honest. I only nodded, and let Rishi walk me to the car, and did not look back at the gate of my own house as it grew smaller behind us, because I was afraid that if I looked, I would climb straight back out of that car and refuse to move, wedding or no wedding, family honor or no family honor.
The drive to the Sen house took almost forty minutes, most of it in complete silence. Amit sat beside me in the back seat, close enough that our sleeves brushed against each other with every turn the car took, and neither of us said a word the entire way. I spent most of that drive staring out the window at the dark shapes of trees and shuttered shopfronts sliding past, trying very hard not to cry in front of a man I had decided, somewhere in the last few hours, that I would not give the satisfaction of my tears.
It was Amit, finally, about ten minutes from the house, who broke the silence.
"My mother," he said carefully, staring straight ahead rather than at me, "can be... particular. About how things are done. I only want you to know, before we arrive, so it doesn't come as a surprise on top of everything else you've already had thrown at you today."
"Particular how?" I asked, my voice coming out flatter than I intended.
He hesitated. "You'll understand when you meet her."
That was not, as it turned out, a very reassuring answer.
The Sen house was larger than I had pictured, an old two-story building with a wide front courtyard, brass lanterns burning along the veranda railing, the whole place lit up and decorated for a homecoming that had clearly been planned in far more detail than the wedding itself had been explained to me. There was a small crowd waiting at the gate — relatives I didn't know, all watching with open curiosity as the car pulled in, and in the middle of them, standing very straight in a heavy silk saree with her hair pulled back so tightly it seemed to stretch the skin at her temples, was a woman I understood immediately, without needing to be told, was Amit's mother.
She did not smile when I stepped out of the car. She looked me over — not unkindly exactly, but thoroughly, the way you might examine a piece of furniture that had arrived slightly different from what you'd ordered — and then she performed the ritual welcome, the aarti thali circled in front of my face, a small measure of rice poured over the threshold for me to overturn with my right foot as I entered, all the old customs executed with a precision that felt less like warmth and more like inspection.
"So," she said, once the formalities were done and I stood dripping vermillion water at the edge of her front hall, "this is the girl."
"Ma," Amit said, a low warning in his voice that told me this was familiar territory for him, some old argument neither of us had been let in on the full shape of yet.
"I am only saying what everyone is thinking," his mother replied, still studying me. "Bimal" — I assumed this was Amit's father, standing quietly a few feet back, a tired-looking man who offered me a small, apologetic smile that was the first genuinely kind expression I'd received since stepping out of that car — "Bimal insisted this was the only way to save the factory. I only hope, for all our sakes, that the astrologers were right about tonight's timing, because I did not raise my son to marry into scandal and rushed arrangements."
I felt my spine straighten, some old stubbornness rising up through the numbness despite myself. "I did not ask to marry into your family either, if it comes to that," I said, before I could stop myself.
There was a sharp silence. Somewhere behind me I heard Rishi, who had come along to see me settled, suck in a breath. Amit's mother's eyebrows rose very slightly, the first real reaction I'd gotten out of her, though I couldn't quite tell if it was offense or, strangely, something closer to reluctant approval.
"Well," she said finally, turning on her heel toward the staircase. "At least she has a spine. That's more than I expected from a girl who apparently ran for the gate in the middle of her own wedding." She said this last part without turning back around, and I felt my face go hot, understanding immediately that whatever had happened in that side room and at that gate had already, somehow, traveled the forty minutes between our two houses ahead of me.
Amit caught my eye then, something almost like the ghost of an apology in his expression, and gestured toward the stairs. "Come," he said quietly. "I'll show you the room."
I followed him up the wide, unfamiliar staircase, past photographs of relatives I didn't recognize hung in ornate frames along the wall, my new mother-in-law's parting words still ringing faintly behind me, and thought, with a strange, hollow clarity, that whatever this house was, whatever family I had been folded into without my consent, it was not going to be a place I could simply survive by staying quiet and waiting for it to be over.
I was going to have to learn how to live in it. And judging by the look Amit's mother had given me at the door, I was not entirely sure yet whether that would be possible at all.