The first thing I did was click through to Diya’s profile on her favorite social media app. Her smiling face hit me in the gut, the photo one I’d taken right before the “engagement” party the Prasads had thrown us.
Diya’s parents might have thawed toward me, but they weren’t over missing Diya’s wedding. Rajesh and Sarita had convinced us to pretend that we were only engaged, so that they could throw us a full Hindu wedding in six months’ time—spread over multiple days, it was to involve a guest list of hundreds and simply couldn’t be organized any faster.
You have no idea who she is or what she needs to be happy. Do you even know that she’s kept a wedding-ideas scrapbook since she was sixteen?
Bobby’s voice, his sharp words.
Diya’s older brother hadn’t been my biggest fan, either, not when we’d first arrived. But I’d appreciated him for his cold bluntness in telling me about Diya’s girlish dreams; it’d have devastated me to realize it down the road, when there was no chance of giving Diya the kind of wedding that she’d imagined.
Bobby had been right, too. My wife’s face had lit up when I’d agreed wholeheartedly with her parents’ desire for a full ceremony, complete with all the traditional rituals.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I’d murmured to her late that night as we lay face-to-face in bed, a thin sheet pulled over our naked bodies. “You know I’d do anything for you.”
“You already moved countries for me.” A sweet kiss pressed to my fingertips. “I wasn’t about to ask you to sign on for what’s sure to be an insane and over-the-top production that’ll hijack our lives for months.”
I’d laughed at her ominous description. “Tell me now. About all the things you dreamed.”
She’d turned and picked up her phone, then tucked herself up against me, the little spoon to my big spoon, and started with showing me images of intricate wedding mehndi. “Mehndi is henna,” she’d said when I hadn’t understood that word. “And, oh, by the way, I always dreamed that my groom would learn a romantic Bollywood dance number with me for our sangeet night. Full choreography.”
I’d groaned and buried my face in her curls. “I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this, but I’ll do it—but only for you.”
Laughing, she’d snuggled in deeper and showed me more pieces of her dreams, translating terms and explaining the rituals as she went along. Ethnically half-Indian, half-white, I’d grown up “asAmerican as apple pie,” as my mother used to say on the short-lived sitcom that had kicked off her career.
Cliché words, terrible script. No wonder the show had barely limped through its first season. But while the sitcom had died a quick death, it had made a superstar out of its leading lady before it closed up shop, the “vivacious, charismatic, and startlingly lovely” Audrey Advani.
My father, Anand, had framed the review for her; it still hung in the hallway of their Malibu home, a piece of a distant past when they’d been two young people in love—both on the cusp of the next stage of their careers.
“Audrey and Anand,” my father had been known to say when he was feeling maudlin. “We were meant to be.”
He spoke fluent Hindi, but only when we were alone—or when he was speaking to my paternal grandparents. The rest of the time, the Advani household ran on English. I’d learned to understand Hindi because of how much time I’d spent in my father’s study as a child, but my ability to speak it was middling at best. And when it came to tradition and ritual, of those I knew less than nothing.
“Mehndi,” I whispered, having forgotten all about the fact that Diya had decided to get her hands done for the engagement party. She’d spent hours with an artist who’d driven out to the house, her mum and Shumi her willing partners in the day of pampering and preparation.
The final mehndi was an intricate filigree across the backs and on the palms of both of Diya’s hands.
I could see part of the design in the photo she’d uploaded lastnight when she updated her profile image. She was seated at her vanity in a robe of emerald green that she’d closed up modestly so as to not “horrify the oldies,” her makeup done and her hand lifted as she showed off her engagement ring while beaming at me.
“Just so you know,” she’d told me the moment after I’d snapped the picture, “I’m planning to be one of those obnoxious brides who has her wedding photo as her profile picture for the next ten years. It’ll be a pic from tonight until then.”
Only…she’d never had the chance to upload any of the photos from the party itself.
A broken rock in my throat, I clicked through to Shumi’s profile from an older photo where Diya had tagged her. And soon frowned, my shoulders hunching as I concentrated on the small screen. I scrolled and scrolled without finding a single photo of the other woman’s family.
Two years down and still nothing.
I kept going despite my stiff neck, until at last I landed on an image of Shumi with a youth of maybe nineteen. The two had the same eyes, the same shape to their lips. The caption read:My baby brother all grown up!
She’d tagged him:Ajay Kumar.
His profile listed the names of their parents. And at the very top of his feed were three photos from yesterday. One featured a slightly older Ajay from the one in the photo with Shumi, the second his parents, while the third one had all three of them in front of a sign for a huge gold mine in Perth, Australia.
Vacation!!
That was the only word in the caption, but the comments seemed to indicate the three had only recently arrived on the far side of the huge red continent. A quick search told me the Perth-to-Auckland flight time was roughly six and a half hours. Add in the availableflights, the time it might take them to get to the airport on their end, then travel from Auckland to Rotorua, and it would likely be well over a day before they made it here.
Now that I had the names of Shumi’s parents, however, it didn’t take me long to find some contact information for them. The first hit was her father’s job—he was a partner at an accounting firm, his details listed on the firm’s website. I figured that at his level of seniority, there was a good chance they could contact him even on vacation.
The receptionist answered on the first ring, and when I explained who I was and why I needed to get in touch with him, she said a shaken, “Oh my God. I just heard a short update on the radio about the fire, had no idea it was Mr.Kumar’s family.” A pause. “I should call him, rather than giving you his mobile number.”
