The wedding of Anila Mukherjee — eldest daughter of the family three doors down from the sweet-seller’s stall, and a girl who had grown up trading marbles and mango-thefts with Debabrata and Kamala in their younger years, before she’d been sent off to her grandmother’s house in Serampore for her final schooling — was, by the standards of the lane, a modest affair.
It was also, by the far more reliable standards of every aunt, grand-aunt, and second cousin twice removed who attended it, the single greatest gathering of gossip material the para had produced in over a year.
Bipin Babu and Satyen Babu, seated together on the men’s side of the shamiana with the particular comfortable proximity of two men who had shared a wedding bench at every function in that lane for two decades, found themselves, within the first hour of the evening, cornered by no fewer than three separate relatives on the subject of their own children’s futures.
“Debabrata must be nearly finished at Presidency now,” said Anila’s grand-uncle, a stout, cheerful man named Haripada who considered it his personal duty to know the marital status of every eligible young person within a half-mile radius.
“A fine boy.
Fine family behind him too, on both sides, if I may say so — everyone in the lane knows the Basu and Sengupta households are as good as one already.”
“He has one more year,” Satyen Babu said, with the careful modesty of a proud father determined not to appear too proud.
“Then we will see what direction suits him.”
“The direction,” Haripada said, with the confident air of a man delivering news rather than speculation, “is very obviously toward that lovely daughter of Bipin Babu’s, unless my eyes have gone entirely wrong in my old age, which I assure you they have not.
I have watched those two children grow up walking half a step apart from each other since they were in short trousers and frocks.
The whole lane has watched it.
There is nothing left to arrange, gentlemen, except the actual arranging.”
Bipin Babu, who had spent the better part of that year growing accustomed to exactly this kind of observation, allowed himself a small, private smile into his cup of sherbet, and said nothing that could reasonably be interpreted as either confirmation or denial — though the smile itself was, to anyone paying proper attention, confirmation enough.
On the women’s side of the shamiana, the conversation ran along rather more direct lines.
“You’ve kept us all waiting long enough, the two of you,” said Anila’s mother, settling herself between Saroj Bala and Bidhu Ma with the satisfied air of a woman who had just successfully married off her own eldest and felt entitled, on that basis, to opinions about everyone else’s children as well.
“Half this lane has been watching your Kamala and your Debabrata grow up together and wondering when the two of you would finally stop pretending you hadn’t noticed what was in front of you.”
“We have noticed,” Bidhu Ma said, with considerable satisfaction.
“We have simply been letting the children arrive at it in their own time, rather than dragging them there by the ear.”
“And a fine job they’ve done arriving at it.
I saw the two of them not twenty minutes ago, standing by the sweet table, and I tell you, Saroj-di, Bidhu-di, I have never in my life seen two young people look more like they already belonged to the same household.”
Saroj Bala, following the direction of the older woman’s gaze, found her daughter exactly where the observation placed her — standing near the sweets with Debabrata, the two of them laughing over something, Kamala’s hand resting, without either of them apparently noticing it, on his sleeve in the easy, unconscious way of people who have long since stopped keeping careful track of where their own bodies end and a beloved person’s begins.
“Soon,” she said quietly, more to herself than to either of the other women.
“Once his studies are settled.
Soon.” This story is hosted at novelping.com.
“And the other two?” Anila’s mother asked, with the particular relish of a woman who had noticed rather more than she’d initially let on.
“I saw your youngest and Bipin Babu’s boy over by the musicians earlier.
Practically inseparable, those two, and getting more so every year, unless I am very much mistaken.”
Bidhu Ma and Saroj Bala exchanged a brief, unreadable glance across the older woman — the kind of glance two women exchange when a thought has occurred to both of them separately, on many occasions, and neither has yet found the right moment to say it aloud to the other.
“They are still very young,” Saroj Bala said, carefully.
“They are the age Kamala and Debabrata were when the whole lane started saying exactly what I’ve been saying to you this evening,” Anila’s mother said, entirely unbothered by the caution in Saroj Bala’s tone.
“Mark my words, the two of you will be arranging two weddings between your houses before either of you have gone properly grey, and everyone in this lane will say the same thing when it happens — that it was obvious for years, and that you were simply too sensible to rush it.”
Near the musicians, entirely unaware that they had become, for the second time that evening, a subject of considered adult speculation, Arun and Uma were engaged in a dispute of their own — one concerning, specifically, whether the sitar player had missed a note in the second stanza of the evening’s opening raga, a question Arun considered self-evidently answered in the affirmative and Uma, who had been taking sitar lessons for the better part of a year and considered herself, on this basis, the superior authority, considered self-evidently answered in the negative.
“You wouldn’t know a missed note if it bit you,” she informed him, with the particular confidence of a twelve-year-old who has recently acquired real expertise in something and intends to make full use of it.
“You have never played a single instrument in your entire life.”
“I don’t need to have played one to have ears, Uma.
The note was flat.
You heard it too, you’re only arguing because you don’t want to admit I noticed it before you did.”
This was, in fact, precisely true, though Uma had no intention whatsoever of confirming it, and the argument might have continued in its usual comfortable circles indefinitely had it not been interrupted by the arrival of a boy neither of them knew particularly well — a distant relation of the bride’s, some sixteen or seventeen years old, who had clearly been sent by some watchful elder to make polite conversation with the younger guests and had settled, for reasons of proximity rather than any particular design, on Uma.
“You play the sitar?” he asked her, with the easy, slightly condescending friendliness older boys sometimes affect toward younger girls they consider it harmless to be charming to.
“That’s a fine accomplishment.
My sister gave it up after a year — said her fingers never toughened properly for the strings.”
“My fingers are perfectly fine,” Uma said, holding up her hand as evidence, an entirely unnecessary gesture that the boy nonetheless received with a smile Arun found, without being able to articulate quite why, immediately and thoroughly irritating.
“I’m sure they are.
You’ll have to play for us sometime — I’d like to hear it properly, not just secondhand through an argument with your friend here.”
It was a perfectly ordinary, perfectly harmless remark, the kind exchanged between polite strangers at a wedding a hundred times over without a second thought from anyone involved.
Arun, however, found himself, quite without meaning to, stepping half a pace closer to Uma’s side, and saying, in a voice rather sharper than the moment strictly called for, “She’s very good.
Better than anyone else her age in the lane.”
The older boy, mildly startled by the interjection, looked between the two of them for a moment with the dawning, faintly amused understanding of someone considerably closer to adulthood recognizing something the two younger children in front of him had not yet recognized in themselves, and said, with careful diplomacy, “I’m sure she is,” before excusing himself with a polite nod and drifting back toward the safer waters of the older guests.
“Why did you say that?”
“Say what?”
“That thing.
About me being better than anyone else.”
“Because it’s true.”
“You’ve never once heard me play properly.
You always leave the room and complain about the noise.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t know you’re good at it,” Arun said, with a certain defensive heat that surprised even himself, and then, when Uma continued to look at him with an expression he could not entirely decode, added, rather more quietly, “I just didn’t like the way he was talking to you.”
“He wasn’t talking to me any particular way.
He was just being polite.”
“He was being something,” Arun said, unable, at thirteen — nearly fourteen now, though he would not have thought to count it that way — to find any better word for the small, hot, entirely unfamiliar feeling that had prompted him to speak at all, and Uma, watching him struggle visibly with a thought he clearly did not have the vocabulary to finish, found that she did not, in fact, want to push him any further toward finishing it — not because she understood it any better than he did, but because some new and equally unfamiliar instinct in her recognized that it mattered, and that pressing on it too hard might frighten it away before either of them were ready to look at it directly.
“Well,” she said instead, after a moment, in a tone that was gentler than her usual sharpness, “next time someone talks to me in a way you don’t like, you can tell me instead of just standing there looking thunderous.
I can handle myself, but I don’t mind you minding, either.”
It was, though neither of them recognized it as such, the closest either had yet come to naming, out loud, the thing that had been quietly growing between them since a spelling test three years earlier — not a confession, not quite even an acknowledgment, but a door left very slightly ajar, for later, when both of them were old enough to walk through it properly.
Kamala, catching sight of the exchange from across the shamiana — Arun’s flushed, defensive stance, Uma’s unusually gentle reply, the small charged silence that followed — found Debabrata’s eye across the same distance and saw, in his answering expression, that he had witnessed it too.
“They don’t know yet,” she said softly, “but I think everyone else already does.”
“The whole lane’s known for months,” Debabrata said, echoing, without knowing it, almost exactly what his own mother had said to Saroj Bala not twenty minutes earlier.
“I don’t think it’s occurred to either of them that the rest of us can see it.
I remember feeling exactly the same way, not so very long ago, about something rather closer to home.”
He said it lightly, but his hand found hers as he said it — an entirely deliberate gesture, this time, not the unconscious closeness of childhood but the new, careful, wondering touch of two people who had only recently begun to understand what it meant that they were allowed to reach for each other in front of the whole lane, and intended to be married, and had, in fact, very little left standing between the life they’d always half-known they wanted and the life that was now, plainly, publicly, unstoppably arriving.
Above the shamiana, the wedding lamps burned late into the night, and the whole lane — every aunt, every grand-uncle, every gossiping relative who had ever watched those four children grow up half a step apart from one another — went home that evening with exactly the same story on their lips, told a hundred different ways but arriving, every time, at the same settled, contented conclusion: that the Basu and Sengupta households, joined already by nineteen years of friendship under one mango tree, were simply, inevitably, on their way to being joined by something even less easily undone.
None of them — not Haripada, not Anila’s satisfied mother, not even Saroj Bala and Bidhu Ma themselves, dreaming quietly together of a double wedding still some years distant — had the smallest reason yet to imagine that a friendship this settled, this publicly certain, this thoroughly woven into the fabric of an entire lane’s expectations, could ever come apart at all.