The silence falls thick around us. An impenetrable wall of bricks rises from the floor to the ceiling. I hold my hands between my knees, my heart thudding. This is it. This is the moment she slips away forever. I keep my eyes open, stare blind at the wall I know is just in front of me.
She stretches her hand over the miles that separate our beds and catches my shoulder in her fingers, the grip of a drowning woman. She pulls me toward her and I reach out my hand and she takes it and I tumble out of my bed onto the floor and then am dredged up into hers. Then we are against each other, body to body, and she sighs against my cheek, and when we kiss it is rougher than I have imagined but also delicious and her body with all its gentle fallings and swoopings and depressions is melting against mine. She pulls off the heavy sweats that cover my skin. I feel like a snail slipped from its shell, vulnerable but also released. The white sari hangs like a threat in the corner. It glows, the only point of light in this room. I grab fistfuls of her hair and pull it around us like a tent of silk. It blots out the sari, the room, everything. It is squid’s ink, a darkness where no one will ever find us. I realize I’m not scared. That my pulse is not thrumming through my body as it has every other time. I feel only love and desire. Her chest rises against mine, our legs dovetail. There are mutterings and moanings and softness. I lick the salt at the corners of her eyes. There is the slide of skin, a tumbling together, her sobbing softly against my chest. Her opening for me, my bare feet against hers. Later we fall asleep tumbled together, entwined in the tiny cocoon of her single bed.
*
In the morning we hear a voice just outside the door, and we jolt apart as if electrocuted. I have barely jumped into my bed and pulled the covers over my bare shoulders when Aunty Mallini comes into the room singing, “Good morning, darling. It’s your big day!” She leans down to kiss her daughter. Both of us holding our breath, hoping she doesn’t note the scent of sex that hangs heavy in the room. But it must have been too long since she had known this particular perfume, so she doesn’t seem to notice. We don’t look at each other, both of us startled by this thing that has happened.
Aunty Mallini sits on Dharshi’s bed, my thrown-off clothes right at her feet. She ticks the day off on her fingers. “First we have to go to the hairdresser’s. And then after that, the makeup artist’s, and then we have to dress you. That will take time because we have to make sure the sari is draped perfectly. It won’t be easy with that much work on it. And then the boys will bring the bouquets. Red roses. Such a good choice, no?” She turns to look at me then, and I, the covers still pulled to my shoulders, nod frantically. She rotates back to her daughter, says, “And then there are photographs to take and then the poruwa ceremony in the hall and then of course dinner and dancing. So hurry up, girls! Get up!” We are both terrified that she will pull the covers off Dharshi, reveal her small, naked body, when instead she jumps up and flounces out of the room, no doubt remembering some urgent wedding business.
Dharshi’s face has gone black and uninviting. I don’t dare talk to her. I wrap the sheet around myself, rise to grab my sweats, and pull them on with my back to her to hide from her eyes the body she has kissed and loved for hours. When I come out of the bathroom, she’s already gone to the many hands that will transform her into a bride.
*
When I see her next, it is in the wedding hall. She is draped in the white sari, a row of deep red rosebuds like bloody spearpoints in her elaborate folded hairdo. Her face is painted several shades lighter than her jawline so that it floats disembodied above her darker limbs, a beautiful mask. Her long eyes are shadowed and outlined, the lashes coaxed to sweeping stiffness, her lips coated in scarlet. The shape of them reminds me of Samson’s orchids.
Her husband is handsome. He’s tall and well built and towers over her. His jaw is sharp, and a tumble of hair falls over his eyes. He might be kind or he might not be. It is impossible to read the quality of his tenderness from where I sit. I remember Dharshi jumping from couch to couch with the hairbrush clutched in her fist yelling about how much fun girls want to have, about being a material girl, about feeling like a virgin. I have to turn away so that no one sees the lone bridesmaid in the terrible pink sari tearing up.
When we hug goodbye, she says in a shaking voice, “He’s handsome, right? You should be happy for me.” I nod against her neck, kiss her under the ear where her own dark shade is spared. A surge in my heart almost spills through my lips. The thing I want most to tell her: “I love you. Come away with me.” But the words stay stuck, and then the crowd carries her away from me, a hail of confetti obscuring the bloody rosebuds in her hair. She climbs into a car bedecked with trailing jasmine; Roshan follows her. The car starts and she is gone. In my hands, her bridal bouquet, crimson roses so dark their edges crisp outward toward midnight.
Part Three