Chapter 28: But How Can I Not?
Chapter 29: But Then, How Can I?
Chapter 30: Clutching at Straws
Chapter 32: On the Last Day of Christmas
Chapter 33: Dialling in My Sleep
Chapter 35: Digging Into the Past
Chapter 36: Sometimes It Fails
Chapter 37: Maybe I Don’t Want to Know
Chapter 38: Not the One I Want
Chapter 40: A Million Reasons to Die
Chapter 41: One Reason to Live
In the natural course of things, by the afternoon of her wedding, a bride is thinking ahead to all the things life will have in store for her. Love, joy, romance, silly little spats with her soul-mate that will be sorted out – hopefully in bed, nibbling on toes – and the endless harmony, the never-ending fun and the countless hours she will spend doing nothing much at all in the arms of the love of her life. She imagines that from now on things will be perfect, she will be happy, and gone forever will be anxiety, irritability, chin hair and a generalized tendency towards narkiness. In short, she will become a better, more grown-up version of herself.
She knows that all of this wonderfulness will start with an enormous slice of cake followed by a steamy night in bed, hopefully in a remote tropical island where none of her extended family will be able to call her, text her, tweet her, or otherwise be able to find her. In the normal course of things, on the afternoon of her wedding, a bride is not behind the bars of the local prison waiting for her lawyer to bail her out or for her extended family to tell her all the things that have gone wrong in her life. I’m not saying that this has never happened in the history of weddings. I’m just saying that it is rare.
Before I tell you about my wedding day, I should make a note here – actually it’s more of a disclaimer – about my enormous extended family (mentioned above). Is this story about them, you ask? Well, no. Are they always there, do they have an opinion about everything, and can’t you just ignore them?
Well. Yes, yes, and no.
I have so many cousins, aunties and uncles that live in London that I have to look at every Indian man or woman passing by just to make sure they aren’t one of them. The thing with my relatives is that they tend to feel insulted pretty easily. You should know this before I go on with my story. They keep score of who gives them regular updates about their life and grovels for advice, who invites them to what, and who sends them a box of champagne truffles for Diwali and not just a regular Indian sweet box with plain laddu in it. They also like to write notes.
Dear Rilla,
I hope you enjoy the hundred-and-fifty-piece NutriBullet I sent you. It is a superior brand to the plain three-piece blender sent by Auntie Parul. Thank you for the champagne truffles. I don’t drink (as you know), so I have given them to my cleaner. I know you are too busy to visit us (have you got a job yet?) but I thought that I would remind you that our home is your home. Don’t forget your family.
Best wishes.
Yours truly, etc.
All in all, it is better to turn and stare at every Indian person walking by, just to make sure it isn’t one of the GIF (Great Indian Family) in case you accidentally ignore them. Or, in my case, so you can make a quick getaway. Of course, since every other person you see in London looks more or less Indian, this can make you see monsters lurking around every corner, and turn you into a neurotic mess.
My GIF forms the backdrop of just about everything. They are the wallpaper and the furniture, the muzak, the Thames, London traffic, pollution and global warming rolled into one. They are always there and generally in the way. And no matter how much you think you can deal with them, the truth is you can’t.
Let’s go back now to the matter at hand, the story of the bride who got arrested on her wedding day. I’ll tell you the story the way it happened. Or at least, I’ll tell it to you almost the way it happened. Which is nearly as good.
The setting for the wedding is Bloomington House, a country estate near Cambridge, its rambling red-brick walls charmingly cocooned in a wood of crab-apple and ash. Today, cloud shadows play hide-and-seek on the lawns, and the trees that are waking up in the half-light of spring shiver naked in the breeze, their reflections playing leapfrog with the koi in the pond. Next to the pond is a Japanese meditation garden, where someone has clearly been thinking about alien invasions because there are crop circles ranging all the way from one side to the other in order of size.
In this romantic scene, a large number of cars have recently pulled up and evacuated my numerous relatives in