This is for your wedding, Mini.
For something so delicate, it felt heavy. The price of gold back then was not astronomical, apparently. Talk about return on investment. Well played, Mom, well played.
I opened another box. Earrings with missing pairs. Broken chains. All gold, though. The note in it said matter-of-factly: Junk, but it has value—sell it if you girls ever need money. I had to smile. Mom was nothing if not practical.
I closed the lid on the broken jewelry and picked up the necklace Mom had designed for Vinnie. What would Mom think of a simple civil ceremony with twenty guests? The answer to that was staring me in the face. She wouldn’t have saved and scraped for such fancy jewelry if she hadn’t wanted a proper Punjabi wedding. That’s what she would have liked. Lots of family, food, flowers, music. Vinnie in a gorgeous lehenga. Her groom in a red turban on a white horse, like in one of those Bollywood movies.
No way was that happening, the way things were.
I stroked the peacock pendant with one finger. Maybe…
I bundled the jewelry into my messenger bag and zipped it up carefully. Stepping out of the tiny room, I knocked on the glass pane between the teller station and the vault and gestured that I was done.
The younger teller, clearly Indian and recently married—going by her glass bangles and the red sindoor powder in her neat, straight-down-the-center parting—sized me up in one glance. Tall, by Indian standards—thanks to Dad’s genes. Lean—thanks to cross-country running and the fact that neither Dad nor I could cook as well as Beeji, my grandmother, who had returned to India four years ago. Long dark hair, olive skin, brown eyes—pretty, I’ve been told. I’ve been mistaken for South American/North African/Middle Eastern, but not by other Indians.
I smiled back and wondered if she’d bring up region, caste, or marital prospects.
“You’re Gujarati?” she asked. There it was.
“Punjabi,” I said.
“Oh!” she said. “In senior year?”
“Starting in the fall,” I acknowledged. Good guess.
“You’re Mr. Kapoor’s daughter!” She looked proud to have placed me. “Your sister is doing medical, I heard?”
“She just graduated in May,” I said.
“Very good! You must be a good student too, like Winnie?” She looked to me for confirmation.
I smiled at how she pronounced Vinnie with a W, the way Beeji did. “I’m okay, I guess.” Something made me add, “She’s getting married. In two months!”
“That’s great,” the teller said, genuinely happy. “Is she marrying an Indian boy?”
“South Indian,” I said.
She nodded in sympathy. Gujaratis and Punjabis, though different, are at least both not South Indian. “Well, it’s better than, you know…” Her spread hands encompassed the plethora of humanity that is not Indian at all. “He’s a doctor too?” she asked, and smiled her approval when I nodded. That is almost as good as being Gujarati!
“It would have made your mummy happy,” she said. Apparently nothing is a secret from bank tellers at the intersection of Routes 30 and 27. “If there’s anything I can do, only ask,” she added, awkward yet sincere. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I promised, but automatically stuck her offer in the forget-about-it-zone of my brain.
They always meant well, the people who wanted to help because they knew about Mom—but they just totally embarrassed me instead. The extra weight in my bag dragged down more than my shoulder as I walked to the parking lot, but my mood lifted as I caught sight of what was waiting there like a faithful pup—my one-week-old pride and joy on wheels. One-week-old for me, that is. The car was actually a 2010 model—though Dad had made sure it had low mileage, no accidents, and only one owner—but it totally rocked.
“She was always so level-headed, you know?” Dad said. He was still grappling with the notion that Vinnie was getting married—whether he liked it or not. “No dating in high school or anything. I never expected her to rush into something like this. She should be thinking of her career. She’s much too young to get married!”
He looked like his hair had gained some extra gray since Vinnie had announced her engagement. That and the worry lines on his brow were the only physical changes in him in the last decade.
“Dad, she’s twenty-five!” I said. It was hard work being a Vinnie apologist.
Given that my parents’ loving marriage of twenty years was a match made in the Times of India matrimonial section, I didn’t expect Dad to understand about dating. Mom was a pretty and popular good-girl type who only crushed on guys from afar. And Dad was seriously uncool in high school. I mean, dork-glasses, skinny-frame, peach-fuzz-mustache uncool. Let’s face it. They needed the help. Vinnie did not.
But from sophomore year all Vinnie thought about was grades—and Mom. There was no time for dating when Mom, in the final stages of cancer, was fading away before her eyes. That was also the reason Vinnie didn’t want to waste time now.
“I tried to explain it to her. And you know what she said?” Dad was still going on. “She said there will never be a good time. First she had seven years of medical school, now there’s three years of residency, and then she’ll probably do a subspecialty fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine. She said if she’s old enough to help deliver a baby, she’s old enough to get married.”
“She’s kind of right,” I pointed out.
“I don’t know.…” He scowled at the picture of Vinnie and Manish that I had framed and set on the mantel: Vinnie in her graduation gown and Manish in a suit and tie with his arm around her—both glowing with happiness. “He’s from Bangalore.…” He paused. “They’re… you know.”
“What?” I asked, and watched with amusement as he tried to articulate his misgivings without coming off as insufferably North Indian. Funny how he was usually so openhearted but
