My best friend's wedding
19:02 - Posted by Shilpa K - 2 comments


Best friend’s wedding
The pleats of her off-white saree with the dull gold border had ruffled at her feet like the leaves of a fully bloomed cabbage flower. In her ears she wore big gold hoops in a traditional design and if one looked closely, one could see her ears droop a little by their weight. Her hair was pinned neatly into a bun which was laced on its well defined circumference by a string of delicate saffron and pale white flowers. Behind her ears she had applied liberal drops of her favorite French perfume, placing it exactly on the nerve endings, leaving behind its sweet smell as she moved with confident steps in and around the cloth canopy. Her neck was bare except for a weightless gold chain with no locket that she always wore. It was gifted to her on her tenth birthday by her parents & she had never removed it since then. She seemed to have grown in it and it fitted snuggly around her slender tall neck. The air buzzed with the conversations the guests engaged themselves in and who by now were seated uncomfortably under the canopy in their embellished attires and awaiting impatiently the arrival of the bride and the groom.

Sunita – the bride, was Riya’s best friend from school, the kind you go around distributing sweets with on birthdays, the one with whom you venture out on bicycles outside of your building gates, with whom you have night-outs for studying, with whom you share your stories of the first heart-break and twelve years from then you throw a surprise bachelorette party before the nuptials. Riya was doing a last minute check on the food arrangements, when all heads turned to watch the bride arrive in an elaborately decorated palanquin. Riya had missed most of the pre-wedding ceremonies while she was making sure all things were in order from the flowers on the table where the guests were seated, to the ribbons that were tied on the chairs where they made their backsides comfortable, to the food arrangement which was a lavish spread of cuisines both Indian and international, to the accommodation of close family and friends and giving away sweets and return gifts to them. Sunita was the only child of her parents who had conceived her at an age when her mother had already crossed her mid-thirties. They treated Riya as their second child and could dispense authority over her with no second thoughts, also showering her with affection in equal measures. Riya was orphaned when she was fifteen. Since then she and her younger brother lived with her maternal uncle and aunt who had three kids of their own, all younger than Riya and her brother. Riya never sensed affection in their interactions with her, neither did she sense disappointment or hatred. Instead, she concluded that they had assumed this role of raising two additional children as some sort of a responsibility. A responsibility they assumed that was bestowed upon them by a higher force, a greater power and hence they carried it out with utmost sincerity. They believed something unfortunate would happen to them or their own children if they relinquished it.

 Riya used to spend most of her time in Sunita’s house, her mother making the girls evening snacks as they finished their notes, driving them to the mall for their shopping excursions, and accompanying them to their dance classes where they learnt classical dance forms. In a way Riya filled up the space of another child that Sunita’s parents had always yearned for but could not find the strength to conceive. Yet, they never considered adopting Riya when her parents were gone and her uncle decided to shelter them. The thought had crossed their minds, and unsettled them for weeks but they never discussed about it and let it pass. It had occurred to Riya only once, when she had felt extremely lonely at her uncle’s house while her brother was busy watching television in the same room. She let it pass too believing her brother would be an added burden for Sunita’s parents.

 She stopped to look at Sunita, who was wearing a peach netted saree with silver sequins, a silky glazed petticoat inside, her dusky complexion bore a soft luster partly out of the well done make-up and partly because of the excitement of finding the right guy after all those stories of heart-breaks that Riya had talked her out of. Riya felt envious of her in a weird way. She stole her look from Sunita and got back to stuffing ornate envelopes with crisp five hundred rupee notes to give away as part of some ritual she didn’t know. However, the feeling refused to shy away and only grew stronger with every passing minute as the nadaswaram bugled in the background and the notes became faster and more palpable like her heart now. The more she observed Sunita from the distance, her face set aglow by the incandescent lights that lit up the altar, the smile never leaving her, the more the thought pronounced itself repeated in her mind. Sunita was three inches shorter than Riya, about a handful of kilos more, her complexion darker; yet her poise, her elegance and her demeanor was something Riya had always coveted. Today, it was the same elegance that graced her and made her the beautiful bride that everyone talked about. She looked happy, happier that Riya had ever seen her and she had seen her in all her times - of happiness and of grief.

 Riya had never sought a friend outside of Sunita. When they started working, the only thing that had separated them as individuals if not as friends, Riya had always been contented with the weekend meet ups with Sunita. On weekdays she used to spend time reading amidst the television set that her brother rarely ever turned off, or helping her younger cousins finish their homework, or helping her aunt in the kitchen with chopping and grating, or working out her finances. Sunita on the other hand had acquired a circle of friends who decided to hang out often after work on weekdays and made movie plans for Sunday. She never missed inviting Riya for the weekend plans. While initially Riya joined them to keep Sunita’s heart, she started to feel distanced from Sunita with every passing week. Her choice of topics didn’t seem to interest her, her speech seemed foreign, her attempts at humor felt superficial and her mannerisms forced. She missed those days when they just sat in the balcony outside Sunita’s house for hours, watching the road and the lawns below, the road which had lesser trees than it had when they were kids, sipping coffee, discussing little nothings. However, Riya always made it a point to drop in at Sunita’s when she could to meet her mother even when Sunita was away at the movies. Her mother had started to take the place of Sunita in Riya’s life. Both of them acknowledged their loneliness in the company of each other, for one from a grownup daughter always away from home and for the other from an outgrown friend.

It was on one such evening that Riya was spending with Sunita’s mother that her mother started talking about the wedding planning for Sunita. “I thought she would have told you already about it! Silly girl”, her mother exclaimed when Riya showed no signs of knowledge about this life-event. Riya kept quiet and vowed not to congratulate her until she broke the news herself. “I deserve to be told”, she reminded herself. That night, Sunita updated her Facebook relationship status to ‘In a relationship’. By the time Riya noticed it, others had already poured in congratulatory messages and the post had acquired close to a hundred likes. She did not comment on it, angry that she had to blurt the news in a public forum without even having told her.

 As the date drew closer, she started helping out Sunita’s mom with the wedding preparations and volunteered to take up the role of the wedding planner. Her mother in return trusted her completely. She had always been the diligent one of the two girls and it eased a lot of the pressure that Indian weddings usually bring with them. On first of the shopping trips for the wedding, the two girls met after a whole month. Sunita was her effervescent self, clearly excited by the thoughts of her wedding. It still bothered Riya that Sunita had not spoken to her directly about it and even today she was comfortable having known that it was her mother who had told Riya about it. Their eyes floated on the sea of sarees flung open to show the intricate work, they felt the texture between the palms of their hands, occasionally carrying a few sarees outside to confirm the color under natural light. The contrast in their choices became obvious when Sunita remarked “too old fashioned”, “very dull”, “I’ll look like an aunty”, “these make you look fat” to most of the sarees picked by her mother and approved by Riya. The salesman unaware of the relationship the girls shared now, also passed some unnecessary wise comments on their drastically different preferences to create some light moments, grinning as he talked revealing his scarlet red teeth stained with beetle-nut juice. When they were confused between two sarees, he used to make Riya stand next to Sunita and drape the other one around her. Every time this happened, they always ended up choosing the one that was draped on Sunita while she posed in the mirror, looking this way and that. Riya felt that she couldn’t do enough justice to the sarees and it was her fault that they went ahead and made all the wrong choices. It was one such ‘wrong choice’ of netted peach with silver sequins that seemed so perfect on Sunita’s body right now.

Early next morning, the canopy had been pulled down. Folded chairs were stacked in a corner one above the other, ready to be loaded into trucks. Sunita’s father was settling some last minute expenses with the contractor; odd little crushed paper cups were strewn across the lawns reminding them of the guests from the previous night who had seen the couple off on their honeymoon before retiring to their homes. Sunita’s mother was dabbing the corner of her eye by the tip of her pallu in the balcony overlooking the lawns and the road; the same balcony where Riya and Sunita had spent hours chatting and sipping coffee. When the wedding photos arrived, Sunita’s mother had called Riya over. They went through it one after the other, noticing minute details that they couldn’t notice on D-day, crackling up in bouts of laughter. They went through the thick deck, her mother leaving her finger prints on the corners of the photographs that were yet to be arranged in an album.

 “Where were you hiding Riya, you don’t seem to be there in single photograph. What’s the use of having all these unwanted people in the pictures – these uncles and aunties standing next to Sunita? Look at them; they stand next to her as if they are so close. Am sure they didn’t even give her any flowers, let alone an envelope!”, her mother remarked. There were only two pictures of Riya in the entire deck, one close-up and one full length which Sunita’s mother had reminded the photographer to take. “Oh how pretty!”, she said when they looked at those pictures. “These are perfect to be sent for your wedding proposals”, she said teasingly. Riya smiled in return. The thought of her wedding had never been on her mind, and it suddenly occurred to her that she would need to go through the entire process again, this time choosing sarees for herself. She wondered if Sunita would ever accompany her for her shopping, if she would stand awkwardly next to her as she had allowing the salesman to drape a saree just to compare and choose, she wondered if they would still pick the saree draped around Sunita.

 When they were done going through the pictures about three times, each time discarding a handful of pictures because they were either not very clear or were not suited to go in the wedding album, or had people her mother didn’t particularly like, Riya sat in the balcony and arranged them chronologically in the album. She knew the order of events as if they were scenes from her favorite movie. She tucked away a picture of Sunita, believing it would be the last thing of hers that she would be able to keep and which would survive longer than their friendship had. The past few months were like a marathon, where she had given herself completely to the feat of achieving the Great Indian Wedding dream for her best friend from school and for her mother. Now that it was all over, she wondered if she would find reasons to drop by again at their place, she wondered if Sunita would ever bother to meet her again, if she would be left with nothing to do on the weekend, that for the first time in her life would she be alone? The thoughts grew in her mind and exploded like the long string of firecrackers they burst right after the wedding. She left hastily when she was done arranging the album, with a smile that had survived an outburst of tears, the tip of her nose red and her eyes glistening with the first signs of tears. Sunita’s mother sensed her state of mind. Mother’s can read signs of human emotions like no one else. That night Riya kept tossing in the bed, the picture of Sunita, tucked between the pages of the book she was reading before going to bed. Her cellphone beeped in the middle of the night, filling up the corner of the room with the fluorescent glow of her screen light. It was Sunita. “Hey, just wanted to drop in a Hi. Missing you and mom too much L L. We are in Switzerland ^^ right now, and have a balcony with a direct view of the Alps. It’s beautiful. I wish we could just sit here and sip our mugs of coffee! I am so tired from the wedding L Need to come home and catch up on some sleep zzz before returning to the routine. Will be back next weekend…Mom said the snaps have come out great. Am dying to see them! Will see you then! Take care J”  For the first time after many days, Sunita had initiated a conversation, she had mentioned her mom and Riya in the same sentence, infact Riya first, she valued the time they spent in the balcony so much that she reminisced it, and hinted from across the distance that she felt a desire to meet her like old times. The next morning Riya scanned the picture she had carried with her home and posted it on Facebook with the caption – My best friend’s wedding.


Just not good enough
18:49 - Posted by Shilpa K - 0 comments


Just not good enough

It was yet another Monday morning, and Riya was seated at the back of her chauffer driven car on the way to work. Her ironed linen shirt had started to gather creases as she made herself comfortable for the long drive, the driver adeptly maneuvering the car and wading through the stream of slow moving traffic. Her shirt had become wet from her damp hair she had let loose. It had acquired a transparent see-through mark at the place where the tip of her layered hair met her back, slightly revealing the hem of the white cotton slip she wore underneath. She had rolled down the windows hoping the wind to blow dry her hair which she hadn’t found the time to set before stepping out of the house. Instead, dust powdered the clear skin of her flawless round face as cars and two-wheelers scurried over the unpaved sides of the road. She amused herself by the unusual sights the road offered. Light music played on the car stereo mostly muffled by the noise outside, except for a few high notes which were feebly audible. Ladies clad in salwar-kameez, with dupattas draped around their face leaving only a slit open for their eyes, wearing gloves that went right up to where the sleeves of their dress ended and open slippers that exposed their toes that hadn’t experienced a pedicure in a long time, had their feet dangling by the side of their two-wheelers which showed the level of confidence or rather the lack thereof while they rode on the uneven roads that led them to their workplaces. Men stuck their cellular phones against their ears inside their helmets and with great dexterity, as if it were some kind of a circus act, rode on the road with their heads tilted to the left supporting the phone. They passed by traffic cops who were too busy to notice them, either fiddling with a gadget or adjusting their cowboy hats with one side upturned, or just seemed oblivious to the dearth of law and order as unruly traffic clogged the roads. She engaged herself in a silly game, observing those seated in the rick and trying to guess what they looked like basis the shoes they wore, the bags they carried, the color of their nail enamel, or the way they had crossed their legs. As the car moved ahead of the ricks, she turned her head casually or noticed them from the corner of her eye, keeping a mental score of the hits and the misses. Despite the viscous flow of vehicles, occasional brushes of metal against metal led many to exchange irate looks. The scratches on the sides of cars signifying the lack of patience that the city had started to inherit from the migrant population from up north to this Silicon Valley in India.

It was in one such IT company that Riya worked as a junior analyst, a job her father had secured for her through this high-profile business contacts. With her low grades she wasn’t eligible for the aptitude tests of most companies during placements, and the ones for which she was eligible were all based outside of Bangalore. Her father had decided against sending her outside of the city, for he had nestled her in the lap of luxury and knew that she wouldn’t survive long in the absence of it given her levels of maturity. Her father had worked hard all these years to fill up the void that her mother had created when she left them for another man. As years passed by the lack of her mother’s presence didn’t seem to affect Riya as much as the presence of her father did at social gatherings when he always kept introducing her to everyone, or when she was out with her friends and he called to check if she was okay, or the time when she flunked her exams and he had offered her a sermon when all she wanted to do was hide her face under the pillow and sleep over it. However, that was three years back. And work, no matter how menial, makes you grow as a person and come in terms with the realities of the world. Her father now thought of her as more responsible individual, even if she attended office in a chauffeur driven car and refused to go by public transport, or blew her paltry salary over needless clothes, or still received pocket money from her father which was more than her salary, or had forgotten to wish her father on his birthday last year.

That day when she reached office, her manager called her in. Overall the mood on the floor was grim, as if some sort of calamity had just announced its arrival. She saw Sabrina, her friend from college days who was working in the same company but with a different team. She was packing her things clumsily in a brown cardboard carton, trying to hide her tears but doing little to hide the phenolphthalein pink complexion she had acquired, like in the experiments in the chemistry lab she had helped Riya in. Another girl was crying in a corner and was being consoled by some of her teammates. “What the hell is going on?” Riya murmured to herself, as she walked into the meeting room and closed the door behind her. Her manager had called for a meeting with her, something that had never happened in the past. There was nothing about the work she did or the profile she held that ever demanded such a thing. Plus she also felt it was too boring for someone to be called into a meeting to discuss performance, too lame to discuss future plans and definitely a sheer waste of time to discuss career growth.

“Hi Riya! Come have a seat” he said to her, his voice dampened by the news he was about to give her. He pronounced her name and addressed her as if it was the first time they had met. Of course there were no occasions where they spoke before. She smiled awkwardly, not sure what led to such a meeting. “You know we have been downsizing owing to the financial turmoil in the west. We don’t have enough projects coming our way with the cuts on technology spends. So the management has decided to layoff a few people…” he took a deep breath before he spoke further as she stared at him closely, her hands tucked under her thighs on the chair, shoulders hunched and a slight lean of the body towards him. “Sorry to say Riya, you would need to leave. But am sure you’d do well. I know it’s tough to be in a situation like this but…” he continued for some time as she absorbed the words that had just fallen on her ears. She had stopped listening after he let out the news. But he seemed to go on with the ease of a rehearsed speech that tele-callers have.

She returned home in her car, this time the windows rolled up. It wasn’t the first time she had failed. It wasn’t the first time that she had been rejected, or that she was considered a second choice or not considered as a choice at all. She had felt no shame in mediocrity which she maintained consistently throughout her schooling and days of attending college. Yet today, she felt something inside of her growing weak. She remembered the day when her mother had walked out of the house never to return, with a man of a hefty built and a thick beard who refused to look at Riya in her eyes. Her mother did not seem to have any remorse in her eyes as she left, and left behind a part of her as easily as leaving behind an abandoned piece of furniture in an old house. She felt hurt even then, but was too proud to cry and she had fought back her tears like bunds holding back rain waters on the streets. She had gone back to her room and torn off all pages from the photo albums that pictured her with her mom to erase all memories of her. It helped little at that age, but time blurred the picture of her mother in her mind and she could barely remember her face or the color of her skin or how she spoke. She remembered the day when she had to leave behind her friends and shift to a different city. She had cried the whole night, in the morning her eyes were swollen like buds of pink roses that grew in the balcony of their old house. They hadn’t flowered since her mom left. With the new city, came new surroundings, new people who asked her new questions about her old past. Of where her mom was, of why she never attended the open house at school, if she were dead.

She withdrew herself from the company of others and had no friends. Not until she entered college, where she didn’t have uncomfortable questions to confront. She discovered a new life, she found happiness in the spells of SMS that beeped throughout the night, she found freedom at movies and at malls with her buddies, she picked up new hobbies and bunked classes to pursue them, she made friends wherever she went and instantly added them on Facebook, her network of friends growing rapidly - the guy she met at the book store and cracked up a conversation with, the girl who sang at the concert, the old man who was playing the piano in the hotel lobby – she spoke so much that her jaws ached at night. Amidst this frantic socializing she drowned the fears of her past, her days of loneliness when she had sat alone in her room watching the DVDs of her favorite sitcoms over and over again until she grew sick of them and dumped them away and cried silently in her bed while her father was away at work. Her grades lowered at school. Yet as she always told her friends she was “high on life” and nothing else mattered. She had fallen in love with life again. But today, as she held the pink slip in her hands, seated in her car she felt she had crossed boundaries in her attempt to embrace life again. That her ambitions were limited only to planning the next movie outing, that her skills were recognized only in her circle of friends and tags on Facebook – Style icon, fashion fiesta, chatterbox, Party Animal; that she had lost a lot more than she had thought she had gained as she walked on the path of wilderness. She wondered why her father never stopped her, why was he always in agreement to her pettiest of all demands, why did he not ground her like other dads did when she had failed the exam, why had he been so complacent to her outrageous habits?

That night after many months she was home for dinner and sat across the table while her father occupied his usual seat on the cherry wood table on which there was always space for four, and three chairs were always empty. She could notice he had a smile on his face and talked with the food in his mouth, maybe out of excitement. She listened to him silently, playing listlessly with the food in her plate avoiding him in the eye. She knew the news of her unemployment wouldn’t affect him, or at least not in a way that would wipe the smile off his face. Yet she felt guilty of proving to be a child that had only learnt to fail. As her father was describing an incident at work today, she cut him short and said “Dad, I am fired.” She grew red out of anger, grief and shame that seemed to have gripped her at the same time. She started crying incessantly not wanting to look up. This time she did not run back to her room to hide. Instead she sat at the table, head lowered, and her face hidden by a veil of her layered hair. Teardrops ran like rivulets across her face and toppled over her prominent cheek bone to land on the dinner table like rain drops from the tips of tree leaves once the thunderstorm is over. Her father was not prepared for such a situation. He had never seen her cry; he had never seen her disappointed at failure. He gently put his fork down, chewed the food in his mouth, gulped down half a glass of water, dabbed the sides of his mouth with the table napkin and placed it messily at the side of his plate. He crossed his fingers to create a mesh and then gently supported his chin on it, his elbows placed firmly on the table. “Did they tell you why?”he questioned. “Downsizing because the west is so messed up”, she replied. He sensed helplessness in her voice, as if she had tried to defend herself against failure and had not succeeded. “It’s happening everywhere. You know it right? There is news about layoffs everyday in the newspaper”, he said trying to make it look like an ordinary happening. “But why me, Dad? There are about a hundred other employees in that company! Maybe I know why…because I was never good enough for anything. Neither good enough to give mom a reason to stay back, nor good enough to answer back to those kids who questioned me about her, nor good enough to secure good grades at college, nor good enough to get a job on my own, and now not good enough for the company when it decided to clean its floor and throw all the rubbish out. I am just not good enough. And you knew it all along Dad. You knew it, didn’t you! Why didn’t you ever stop me? Why did my poor grades never bother you, even when you knew I could do much better, way much better so much so that I could have been at that guy’s place who handed over that letter to me?” He nodded in agreement and began to speak, “I thought she had left you miserable. I couldn’t see you being alone. I wanted you to have friends, to be in the company of people who admire you and want to be by your side, and not give up on you the way… she did. I guess I let it stretch far enough. You’d become the sole purpose of my life and in your happiness rested mine. All this while I was surely disappointed to see your low grades, to see how you had let them slip away so easily, how you had adopted a casual life of existence. Yet, I was afraid. So afraid to say to you anything that would hurt you. I am sorry. I really am…for being a bad father” Tears welled up in his eyes and he couldn’t talk anymore. The maid came in and cleared the dishes on the table while they were still seated, ignoring them as if they were invisible. They showed no signs of embarrassment in return. She had grown to understand them over the years, and also their vulnerabilities. She placed two mugs of hot coffee and left. Riya walked up to her father and hugged him, patted him gently, rubbing her petite hand over his broad shoulders trying to comfort him as he looked crestfallen by the weight of what he had just said. She knew she had pushed him too far to admit things that were better left unsaid.

The next morning she was awake while he was still watering the plants in the garden. She left a “Thank You Dad”, card for him on the coffee table along with a form for a CAT coaching class and left for the gym in her usual style. He smiled as he sat down to have his coffee. He picked up the card. It had no wordings inside, just a ‘Thank You’ in a Lucida handwriting font and her name she had scribbled messily at the bottom with a big heart. She had forgotten to put the date at the top. He was convinced that it was the reason why she forgot to wish him yet again on his birthday. He picked up the newspaper; the smile had dawned back on his face with the morning sun. The headlines read “Why 2008 is the best time to enter B-schools.”