By the time they arrived in Kolkata, she was too jet-lagged to do homework. Too busy as well. Insisting that they shouldn’t nap, Aunt Deepa took Prakrti, Durva, their cousin Smita and their mother shopping first thing. They went to a fancy new department store to buy utensils, silver forks, knives, and serving spoons; and, for the girls, gold and silver bangles. After that, they walked through a covered market, a kind of bazaar lined with stalls, to get the rice and vermillion powder. Back at the apartment, they began decorating for the holiday. Prakrti, Durva, and Smita were given the task of making Lakshmi’s footprints. Barefoot, the three girls stepped into trays of moistened powder laid outside the front door. Carefully, they stepped out again, and made a path inside. They created two sets of footprints, one in red and one in white; and because Lakshmi was supposed to be bringing prosperity, they didn’t miss a room, making footprints lead in and out of the kitchen, the living room, even the bathroom.
Rajiv, their other cousin, who was a year older than Prakrti, had two Xboxes in his bedroom. She spent the rest of the afternoon playing Titanfall with him, in multi-player mode. The apartment’s Internet connection was super fast, and didn’t glitch. On previous trips to India, Prakrti had pitied her cousins’ obsolete computer equipment, but now, like Kolkata itself, they had leapt ahead of her. The city looked almost futuristic in places, especially compared with poor old Dover with its redbrick storefronts, its leaning telephone poles, its roads full of potholes.
Prakrti and Durva had packed their saris in plastic dry cleaner’s bags to keep them from wrinkling. That night, for Dhanteras, they put them on. They slipped the new bangles on their arms and stood before the mirror, watching the metal catch the light.
As soon as it got dark, the family lit the diyas and placed them around the apartment—on the windowsills, coffee tables, in the center of the dining table, and on top of her uncle’s stereo speakers. Music streamed from these black monoliths, as the family gathered around the dining table, and feasted, and sang bajahns.
All night long, relatives kept arriving. Some Prakrti recognized but most she didn’t, though they knew all about her: that she was a top student, a member of the debating team, and even that she planned to apply for Early Decision to the University of Chicago next year. They agreed with her mother that Chicago was too far from Delaware, and also too cold. Did she really want to be so far away? Wouldn’t she freeze?
A group of old women, white-haired and loud, wanted a piece of her, too. They clustered around her with their sagging breasts and bellies, and shouted questions in Bengali. Whenever Prakrti didn’t understand something—which was most of the time—they shouted louder, only to give up, finally, and shake their heads, amused and appalled by her American ignorance.
Around midnight, jet lag caught up with her. Prakrti fell asleep on the couch. When she woke up, three old ladies were hovering over her, making comments.
“That is so creepy,” Durva said, when Prakrti told her.
“I know, right?”
The next few days were just as crazy. They went to the temple, visited their uncles’ families, exchanged gifts, and stuffed themselves with food. Some relatives observed every custom and ritual, others only a few, and still others treated the week like one long party and vacation. On the night of Diwali they went down to the water for the festivities. The river that ran through Kolkata, the Hooghly, which looked brown and sludgy during the daytime, was now, under a starlit sky, transformed into a black and sparkling mirror. Thousands of people lined the bank. Despite the throngs, there was little jostling as people approached the water’s edge to release their rafts of flowers. The crowd moved like a single organism, any lurch of activity in one direction compensated for by a retraction in another. The unity was impressive. On top of that, Prakrti’s father explained to her that everything that was going into the water—the palm fronds, the flowers, even the candles themselves, which were made of beeswax—would decompose by tomorrow morning, the entire blazing ritual winking out and leaving no trace.
The glittery nonsense surrounding the holiday—Lakshmi, goddess of prosperity, gold and silver baubles, shining knives, forks, and serving spoons—all came down to this, to light and its brevity. You lived, you burned, you spread your little light—then poof. Your soul went into another body. That’s what her mother believed. Her father doubted it, and Prakrti knew it wasn’t true. She didn’t plan on dying for a long time. Before she did, she wanted to do something with her life. She put her arm around her little sister and together they watched their candles drift out until they became indistinguishable in the sea of flames.
If they’d left on the weekend, as scheduled, the trip would have been tolerable. But after Bhai Dooj, the last day of the festival, Prakrti’s mother announced that she’d changed their tickets to stay a day longer.
Prakrti was so furious she could hardly sleep that night. The next morning, she came to breakfast in sweats and a T-shirt, her hair uncombed, her mood sullen.
“You can’t wear that today, Prakrti,” her mother said. “We’re going out. Put on your sari.”
“No.”
“What?”
“It’s all sweaty. I’ve worn it three times already. My choli smells.”
“Go put it on.”
“Why me? What about Durva?”
“Your sister’s younger. A salwar kameez is fine for her.”
When Prakrti came out in her sari, her mother was unsatisfied. She took her back to the bedroom to rewrap it herself. Next she inspected Prakrti’s fingernails and tweezed her eyebrows. Finally—a new thing entirely—she applied kohl around Prakrti’s eyes.
“Can you not?” Prakrti said, pulling away.
Her mother seized Prakrti’s face with both hands. “Be still!”
A car was waiting outside. They drove for over an hour to the outside of the city, where they stopped before a compound with walls topped with razor wire.
A gatekeeper led them across a dirt courtyard into the house. They passed through a tiled entryway, up a flight of stairs, into a large room with tall windows on three sides and wicker-bladed fans on the ceiling. Despite the heat, the fans weren’t running. The room was severely underfurnished, except in one corner, where a white-haired man in a Nehru jacket sat cross-legged on a mat. The kind of man you expected to encounter in India. A guru. Or a politician.
Across from him, a middle-aged couple occupied a small sofa. As Prakrti and her family came in, they waggled their heads in greeting.
Her parents sat opposite the couple. Durva was given a chair just behind. Prakrti was steered to a bench or platform—she didn’t know what to call it—slightly apart from everyone else. The bench was made of sandalwood inlaid with ivory. It had a vaguely ceremonial air. As she sat down, she caught a whiff of herself—she was beginning to perspire in the heat. She wanted not to care. Had an urge even to inflict her body odor on all these people and embarrass her mother—but of course she couldn’t. She was too mortified herself. Instead, she sat as still as possible.
During the conversation that followed, Prakrti heard her name spoken. But she was never directly addressed.
Tea was served. Indian sweets. After a week, Prakrti was sick of them. But she ate them to be polite.
She missed her phone. She wanted to text her friend Kylie and describe the torture she was presently undergoing. As the minutes passed on the hard bench, and servants came and went, other people passed along the corridor, peering in. The house appeared to contain dozens of people. Curious. Nosy.
By the time it was over, Prakrti had made a vow of silence. She got back into the car intending not to say another word to her parents until they got home. So it was left to Durva to ask, “Who were those people?”