“Shondeep.” We shook hands. “Cousin of the sister-in-law of the groom.”
“I’m Neil. Brother of the bride. I’ve met your father before.”
Ramesh Uncle’s treelike hands got to work on a mound of white rice and dal makhani.
“We used to hang out, like, over ten years ago, actually,” I said. “At the public library.”
Shondeep’s eyes effervesced. “That was you!”
“He talked about me?”
“Relentlessly! He went on and on about the young man keeping him company in his ‘studies,’ and he was so lonely that summer, my kids had no interest—Baba, do you remember Neil? You two were such good friends!”
Ramesh Uncle looked up from his food. “Quite a long time,” he pronounced.
Indian weddings are memory dungeons. You wander through them and everyone is throwing some version of your past self at you: I saw you when you were sho-sho-shmall . . . sho-sho shweet . . . Remember when you and Prachi did your Radha-Krishna dances and you wanted to be Radha, wore Prachi’s skirt and all? . . . And now, the one person whose memories I hoped would bubble up had, it seemed, no access to them.
“Where did you—where did he go, that summer?” I said. “He just disappeared in July.”
Shondeep thought a moment. “Oh, yes, his brother, my kaka, passed away back in Calcutta, so we left suddenly. He wasn’t so old. But that air, over there . . .”
The woman next to him tapped his shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said to me. They began to chat.
Was this just what time did to a person? Would Anjali Auntie look at me soon with those same cloudy, roving eyes? These days, she was prone to long spells of what she called “dreary mind.” She still seemed herself, at least for now—a blessing I privately attributed to that mysterious yellow light flashing above the Yuba River. I wondered, though, if she woke up every morning preparing to do battle with her own memory. If she had to fight daily to hold on to the past, both the precious and the painful parts.
“Ramesh Uncle,” I said. “Do you remember the Bombayan gold digger?”
Ramesh Uncle lowered his dal-encrusted hand from his mouth. “My god, such a tale!”
“You remember?”
“You may find it absurd, young fellow”—I won’t, I nearly said—“but some stories do not leave you alone.”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Still, sometimes, it’s quite difficult to reach the past. Almost as though we do not have the right address.” I considered telling Ramesh Uncle that our Bombayan gold digger had likely died months or a year after the beating we’d read about. That no one had known his name at the time of his death. That we were perhaps the only two people who’d sought him. Or that maybe two people looking for you in the past was something, a humble, belated mourning.
A beat, two beats of silence, and I swore I saw something swelling in his expression, but then he trained his attention back on the rice. He glanced up a minute later.
“Good evening, young fellow,” he said. “How is your medical school going?”
A pleasant, dreamy expression took his mouth and eyes. Perhaps it was not frightening to find one’s mind unmoored from time and place; perhaps it was freeing to leave yourself behind.
I felt a hand on my neck, scratching affectionately. Anita. “Your mother wants you,” she said, and I went on looking helplessly at Ramesh Uncle. “Actually, she’s quite annoyed you’re sitting all the way over here, and I am, too. . . . Your cousin Deepak is a nightmare; he’s told me three times how much his Tribeca apartment costs.”
And then I was carted away; hands were on me, and someone pinched my cheeks and told me how much I looked just-the-same, only sho-sho-handsome now, what was I doing these days, writing?! Really?! Well, what did I hope to do with that?! (“Write,” I said, to no laughs.) There was saffron pound cake being shoved in my mouth by fingers adorned with gemstones, and photographers wanted the families here, then there, and then here again. There was my brief toast—I was still known, unfairly, as the public speaker of the family; I read a Neruda poem in lieu of offering original thoughts, in part to keep from choking on the something sentimental that was coursing through the air. Soon, Prachi, feeling empowered on wedding champagne, summoned the Narayan nuclear family onto the dance floor and made us sway in a tiny circle with her to some high-pitched Hindi croon.
The next time I looked, after the Narayan family dance and the Kapoor family dance and the Narayan-Kapoor family dances, he was gone.
Anita suffered through several songs, patiently screwing-in-the-lightbulb and patting-the-dog at my mother’s elbow, before tugging me over to the dessert table, where we were hidden from view by the vat of gulab jamuns. Her skin glistened with sweat, nearly as bright as the silver-gray glimmer of her blouse. She mopped her brow with her pale pink dupatta.
She pulled her heels off and rested her wrist on my knee with just enough flounce to indicate tipsiness.
“I’m sorry about the table settings.” I took a breath, preparing to explain all about Ramesh Uncle, and the matter of the Bombayan gold digger, and all that I felt had been lost. The fiction I’d wished was true. But I exhaled, and the words left me along with the breath. “And I’m especially sorry about Deepak.”
“He kept hitting on me.” My face must have puckered. “I told him you and I had been promised to one another years ago and that our families are expecting a suitable shaadi any day now.”
She was rolling her eyes as I stared at her very seriously. “Oh, I was joking,” she said. “Don’t be gooey.”
I brought my face close to hers. Our lives existed in this realer plane now, the one she’d exhorted me to accept. And while sometimes that meant I missed the mysterious patina that
