I felt fingers clasping my wrist and turned. It was Dia’s hand on my arm, gesturing toward the woman she believed to be my bride. “Look at her,” she said, as though she had made Anita herself. “Doesn’t she look lovely.”
The diamond-shaped tikka connected to those jhumkas dripping against a fat choker. Her arm jangled with bangles. She’d clipped a huge ring to her nose. Perhaps it was regressive of me, but that picture of her—a demure, historical bride on top, the dominatrix-clad body beneath—was enormously appealing. I grabbed her face and kissed, wetly, but as the heat rose in my cheeks, my eyes flashed open a millisecond and through their slitted vision I saw Dia, saw Shruti, looking right at us, not glancing away, following the basic script of propriety, but looking with an intensity that implied she was seeing more than this moment. Her shaggy hair shook, and her marble eyes bore into the back of Anita’s gold-draped head, and there was something grisly about the way she was taking us in, as though this kind of perpetual, even haunting would always be her very basic right, having been denied the chance to live this way herself.
And then I heard Shruti’s voice. Just like you kissed me. There was a satisfied squeal at the fact that we had kissed. You’re kissing her just like you kissed me, look at you, Neil. Everyone wants something from someone else. You like-like Anita for the same exact reason you went out with me. Everyone wants something from someone else.
I withdrew from Anita. I muffled a gag.
Prachi, wandering up, cheerily: “Did I miss something?”
“Dia,” Anita mumbled, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and beginning to remove all the pieces. “I wanted you to show Prachi the more South Indian designs—could you?”
Dia, cheeks tinting violet, dipped below the glass counter. Prachi stumbled over. The moment during which Prachi and Dia were fully occupied was so brief that Anita couldn’t get everything we’d planned. She managed to knock the mangalsutra and a few rings off the counter, into my open palm, before I tossed her ajji’s necklace and two forgeries onto the glass. Surely—I hoped—surely I’d chosen the right pieces, the ones for which we had Chidi’s replacements.
Dia rose. “Do you have a date set?” she asked Anita.
Prachi’s eyebrows furrowed, but Anita spoke forcefully before questions could be raised. “Dia, thank you so much, we’d better get going.”
Before following Anita out, my eyes fell on Dia, who was rearranging a necklace on a velvet bust. She felt me looking too hard at her. Shruti raised a thick eyebrow.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. To the wrong person. At the wrong time.
“Excuse me, sir?” Dia said.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “For what you went through. With that boy. That man. Your wedding. He sounded. He sounds . . . like a really bad guy.”
• • •
Anita had to tap Minkus Jhaveri on his shoulder several times before he would look up from his phone. His single flimsy stall was only a few inches wider than his sizable waist on either side, and he yet he had crammed perhaps thirty or forty pieces into the glass case.
“Mukund,” she said. “I’m sorry, Minkus.”
Prachi leaned over his messy tangle of jewelry—gold, silver, precious and semiprecious stones. She rapped on the glass. “Do you think you could open this? I may like that bangle set, if I could see it—and those chokers.”
Minkus drew a key from his pants pocket. He was wearing a faded jacket that looked as though it had once been emblazoned with camouflage print. The jacket shifted as his arm shifted, and that was when I saw the shape of something black and bulky wedged between his back fat and jeans. I had never seen a gun from so close before. I glimpsed it so briefly, and Minkus was so big, that I didn’t immediately identify the object. It might have been a retro cell phone holster.
His large hands dug into the case, and he began to roughly pull the pieces loose.
“Oh, be careful,” Prachi said. Minkus’s eyes flashed up at her. His pupils tightened and I did not see what Anita had seen—a lazy layabout—but a man defensive about his manhood.
As Minkus Jhaveri thrust a baroque choker at Prachi, and as Anita instead requested the one for which we had a Chidi-forged replacement, a woman I identified as Linda came bustling up the jewelry aisle, shouting, “I’ve been looking for you, where’s your walkie-talkie?” Bright orange hair crested above her head; she wore a pink sweater bedazzled with butterflies.
Tottering behind Linda was a decrepit auntie in a sari. Her Coke bottle glasses were slipping down her nose.
“This little old lady has lost her family,” Linda heaved when she approached Anita. “I did warn you this is what happens when you don’t go with outside security firms, see, I did tell you that I’d have to be chasing you down, now, can you talk to her, sweet little thing I’m sure but I keep on trying to tell her please talk slower, all right, and your interns, I can’t find them an-y-where.” She began massaging the dimpled flesh above her knees.
“Neil,” Anita said. The tense articulation of my name, and the surmised plea within it, was all she could get out, for Linda was steering Anita toward the auntie, who had removed her glasses to reveal eyes misting up with fear. I heard Anita snap, “She’s speaking English, Linda . . .” and realized I was on my own. If we had not just failed to get the best of the Screwvala gold, I might have walked away from Minkus, and all might have gone differently. But we had only eight pieces in my bag. We’d wanted closer to thirty.
From the loudspeaker, “DJ Jai Zee in the
