Destination Wedding Read online

  Destination Wedding is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Diksha Basu

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Published in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing, London.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Basu, Diksha, author.

  Title: Destination wedding: a novel / Diksha Basu.

  Description: First U.S. edition. | New York: Ballantine Books, [2020] | Identifiers: LCCN 2019056842 (print) | LCCN 2019056843 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525577126 (hardcover: acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780525577140 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Domesic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR9499.4.B376 D47 2020 (print) | LCC PR9499.4.B376 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019056842

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019056843

  Hardback ISBN 9780525577126

  Ebook ISBN 9780525577140

  Export edition ISBN 9780593237731

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Elena Giavaldi

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Sunday Night, 11 P.M.: JFK Airport: Their Flight Is Delayed Due to Technical Reasons and Everyone Is Secretly Wishing Airlines Didn’t Announce That and Make All the Passengers Nervous

  Monday Evening: British Airways Flight 143, London–New Delhi

  Tuesday Morning: Colebrookes Country Club, New Delhi, India: Jet Lag Is So Nice at First When You Wake Up Early and Energized

  Tuesday, 12:40 P.M.: Colebrookes Country Club, New Delhi: Shefali, the Bride, Is Shouting at Her Facialist on the Phone for What She Thinks Is the Start of a Pimple on Her Chin (It Isn’t, but the Facialist Packs Her Kit and Rushes Over to Shefali’s House Anyway)

  Tuesday Afternoon: Mrs. Sethi’s Home, K Block, Hauz Khas Enclave, New Delhi

  Tuesday Afternoon: SDA Market, New Delhi: What Tina (Fortunately) Doesn’t Know Is That Just Moments Ago a Monkey Stole a Woman’s Handbag

  Tuesday Night: Colebrookes, New Delhi: Three Young Men from St. Stephens College Have Crashed the Wedding and Brought an Empty Gift-Wrapped Box to Give as a Present; They Do This Every Night During Wedding Season in Order to Eat and Drink Free

  Tuesday Night, 8:30 P.M.: Goldenrod Garden, Colebrookes, New Delhi: One of the Bartenders Has Already Managed to Tuck an Expensive Bottle of Whiskey into His Pant Leg

  Midnight: Somewhere in New Delhi: Tina’s Not Really Sure—Is This Even Safe? Probably Not

  Wednesday Morning, 7 A.M.: Colebrookes, New Delhi: The Chef’s Assistant Just Dropped a Whole Crate of Eggs on the Kitchen Floor and Then the Chef Slipped on It and Fell

  Wednesday 11 A.M.: Marianne and Tina’s Cottage, Colebrookes, New Delhi: Shefali Is at the Jeweler’s Getting the Shine on Her Gold Set Dulled Down So It Looks More Modern, and the Jeweler Won’t Stop Hinting That She Wants to Be Invited to the Wedding

  Wednesday Afternoon: Lodhi Gardens, New Delhi: A Young Boy Is Sitting Under the Shade of a Tree Going Through an Old Playboy He Bought in Daryaganj and Will Have to Throw Out Before Going Home

  Wednesday Evening: Colebrookes: Across Town, Alone in Her Bedroom, Shefali Is Googling Every Man She’s Ever Kissed

  Thursday Morning: Colebrookes: Today’s the Haldi Lunch, but First Tina Wants to See Sid; She Wants This to Be Something—Anything

  Thursday, 1 P.M.: Haldi Lunch, Hyacinth Haven, Shefali Wanted the Alliteration, Colebrookes

  Thursday Evening: Colebrookes: The Pedicurist at the Salon Prefers Male Clients Because They Rarely Get Pedicures So They Have Low Expectations

  Later on Thursday Evening: Colebrookes, but Across Town Shefali Is Wearing a Face Mask and Researching Whether or Not Stopping Birth Control Will Make Her Break Out Because She Wants to Get Pregnant but Not If She’s Going to Get Acne

  Thursday Night: Mrs. Sethi’s House, New Delhi: Lavina Is Making Carrot Cake That Mrs. Sethi Will Eat a Slice of and Then Declare Too Rich and Then Lavina Can Eat the Rest

  Thursday Night: Nono’s House, New Delhi: The Guard Is Smoking a Cigarette and Reading a Dirty Magazine Wrapped in the Cover of an Old Issue of The Economist

  Thursday, 11:45 P.M.: Colebrookes: Across Town Shefali Is Nervous, Looking Up at the Ceiling—Is This It? Is Pavan the Only Man She’ll Ever Be with Again? If She Doesn’t Go to Sleep Right Now, She’s Going to Look Tired Tomorrow

  Friday Morning: Colebrookes: Across Town, Half a Sleeping Pill Later, Shefali Has Woken Up Happy; She Slept Beautifully Last Night and Her Eyes Look Bright Today and Pavan Is Perfect for Her

  Friday, Dusk: Colebrookes: One of the Gardeners Is Repotting a Bougainvillea and Looks Up and Sees the Pink Sky and Takes a Moment to Gasp with Gratitude

  Saturday Morning, 6 A.M.: Colebrookes: Mr. Das Is Awake and Watching an Exercise Video on Youtube as He Drinks His Morning Tea

  Saturday, 11 A.M.: Colebrookes: Mr. Das Hopes He Gets a Permanent Scar; He’s Always Liked Scars but Never Had One Except from Where He Hurt His Hand on His Mother’s Knitting Needle

  Saturday Night—the Final Night—the Wedding and the Reception: Colebrookes: Shefali Now Wishes She Hadn’t Planned the Two for the Same Night; She Feels Like She’s Missing Out on Fun

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Diksha Basu

  About the Author

  SUNDAY NIGHT, 11 P.M.

  JFK Airport: Their Flight Is Delayed Due to Technical Reasons and Everyone Is Secretly Wishing Airlines Didn’t Announce That and Make All the Passengers Nervous

  “I CANNOT BELIEVE MY MOTHER is here with her boyfriend and I’m here alone,” Tina Das said to her best friend, Marianne Laing, in the British Airways business-class lounge at JFK. Tina, in the hope that she would be able to sleep through the first leg of the flight to Heathrow, had rimless glasses on instead of her usual contacts. She never needed much makeup thanks to her thick eyebrows, which had been a liability when she was younger but were very fashionable now and gave her face all the drama it needed. She was wearing black North Face sweatpants that cinched at the ankle, a gray, long-sleeved T-shirt, and black-and-white Adidas sneakers. It was hot in the lounge so her Guess fur vest was hanging off the chair behind her.

  A bowl full of nuts was on the table in between them. Tina picked up a handful while staring out of the window and tossed them all into her mouth and started chewing before she realized she had eaten several whole pistachios, with shells. The hard, cracked pieces pierced her mouth and she spat them out. A grumpy old man appeared out of nowhere with a broom and shook his head at her as he swept up the pistachio shells.

  “I didn’t know they had shells,” Tina said apologetically.

  The man said nothing but kept looking at her as he swept, his broom knocking her foot aside.

  “It isn’t my fault,” Tina said to him again but he didn’t respond.

  The man walked away
and Tina turned to Marianne and said, “At the price of these tickets, the nuts really shouldn’t have shells.”

  Marianne was applying lip balm and laughing. She was so good at putting on makeup that it was hard to say whether or not she had any on, but the smattering of brown freckles across her nose was visible and, despite the fact that it was November, still had a velvety brownness they usually acquired over the summer because she had recently been to San Francisco for Tom’s college roommate’s wedding. Marianne was wearing similar sweatpants and a plain black long-sleeved T-shirt, and a red shawl was draped over the back of her chair.

  “We’re like world-weary businesswomen who travel internationally twice a month and are just so over it,” Marianne said. “I feel like I should be impatiently clacking away on a laptop but I have no work to do this week and I bet Tom’s fast asleep.”

  Marianne looked down at her phone and the itinerary that had been sent by the wedding planner.

  “It feels like we’re going to have a lot of free time,” Marianne said. “There aren’t that many events listed here. I thought Indian weddings had days and days of events.”

  “I think these days most people just pick and choose what parts they want to do. Shefali wanted to walk down the aisle in a white dress but my aunt put her foot down and said she could pick and choose what she wanted but she couldn’t change religions,” Tina said. “We’ll have time to explore the city, though.”

  Marianne nodded as she cracked open a pistachio and ate it and played with the shells in one hand.

  Their flight was two hours late so they were on glass number three of champagne and plate number two of mini sandwiches. Even on Tina’s decent income, these business-class tickets were prohibitively expensive. She had managed to book an economy flight using her own money and then used her miles to upgrade herself. Tina was the vice president of development for Pixl, a streaming network for which she sought video content, a term she hated but a job that paid her enough to live alone in a two-bedroom apartment overlooking McCarren Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her work was frustrating—ideas forever on the brink of becoming television shows but nothing concrete yet, nothing complete, nothing finished. Her enthusiasm for projects always waned as more people got involved and ideas gradually got altered and then shut down altogether.

  At Pixl, Tina was in charge of finding content from India so she had been back a few times over the past five years. But it was always to either Delhi or Bombay, where she stayed at a Taj Hotel, took a car and driver everywhere, and partied with producers from all over in rooftop bars and seaside clubs that could have been anywhere in the world. And then she returned to New York City without having seen much of actual India.

  Tina Das was conceived in India but born, nine months later, in Columbus, Ohio. Three months later, like her father, she held a coveted American passport. Her mother stubbornly held on to her Indian passport and Green Card. For the first eight years of her life, her parents took her to India every summer and they stayed with her aunt and uncle, the parents of Shefali, the bride, in New Delhi. In the eighth summer, her father got malaria and spent two weeks in Holy Family Hospital and decided, on the flight back, that he didn’t want to return to India next year.

  “Let’s go to London next summer instead,” Tina remembered him saying on the flight back that year. He had lost weight and his belt was looped tightly around, his pants bunching at the waist. Back in Ohio, he bought new pants, without pleats, Tina had noticed, and the following summer they went to London, then they went to Ubud, then Stockholm, then Buenos Aires, then Tokyo, and even Colombo the year before Tina left for Yale, but never back to India. Her mother went once when her mother died in Calcutta, but that was all before the divorce.

  Last year, Tina had come tantalizingly close to green lighting a reality show that would have featured the best musical talent from around Asia and put them together with a Bollywood music producer to create a band. She had found a K-pop singer from Seoul, a dancer from Ho Chi Minh City, two beatboxing brothers from Sri Lanka, a drummer from Dharavi, the Bombay slum, and a female spoken-word artist from Lahore, but the project fizzled, and Tina had gone home frustrated and depressed and worried about her career. She was still upset that it hadn’t moved forward and now all except Sid, the drummer, were committed to other projects. The K-pop singer had joined a reality television show in Singapore as a judge, the two beatboxing brothers had moved to Berlin, the spoken word artist was seven months pregnant and focusing on fashion design, and the dancer from Vietnam was performing with a cruise line in Halong Bay.

  Tina felt bad about having let Sid down. Sid, with his easy confidence and priceless bright smile. Sid, who was tall and slim and had a rough beard and laughed easily during the audition and wore his pants baggy and who, back in New York, Tina thought about often—what his life was like in India, who his friends were, who his family was. He was immensely attractive—his confidence, his swagger, his inaccessibility—and he often crossed her mind. After his audition, he had lifted his shirt to wipe the sweat off his face and revealed a perfect set of abs and dark hair trailing into his boxers. Tina had shaken her head, laughed, and called a lunch break.

  He had stayed in touch with her and checked in often to see if the show might get back on track and she never had any good news to give him. He had started working part-time as a personal trainer to make money while working on his music. But Tina knew that personal training was just enough money to survive, whereas the show would have allowed him to move his mother out of their slum and into a concrete apartment, and she felt awful that she had let him down. Honestly, he’d said “slum,” but she wasn’t quite sure what he’d meant. Was it one room in a slum? Was a slum by definition a room? A shack? She had marveled at the sheer size of the blue-tarp-covered expanses of Dharavi she had flown over while landing in Bombay, but she couldn’t actually visualize the homes within it. She didn’t know how to ask and she didn’t want to show up at his doorstep with a camera, even though that would obviously make for good television. Maybe this was why she was struggling to get her projects off the ground—reality television often felt too invasive for her.

  When she told Sid she was going to be in Delhi for a week, he had immediately said he would come from Bombay to see her “just to touch base.” Tina was dreading seeing him on this trip, dreading looking into his handsome, eager eyes and telling him that there was still no show and no other talent. It was easy to feed Sid fake hope over email but she knew she would have to tell him the truth this week. She would put him in touch with everyone she knew in Bombay in case they wanted to hire a personal trainer, she decided; it was the least she could do for him.

  Since she was meeting Sid, Tina could have tried to expense this trip as well but her boss, Rachel Sanders, knew the bride and knew Tina would not be doing any work. But maybe it was time to talk to Rachel about booking her business class for all her future work trips. Sheryl Sandberg said she should lean in, after all. Not that Tina had read the book but really the title told her everything she needed to know. Was Sheryl Sandberg still an appropriate role model or was that over now, Tina wondered. It was hard to keep up sometimes.

  It was nearing 11 P.M. and the lounge was gradually emptying out and Marianne and Tina were the only ones sitting at the round tables close to the bar. A bored bartender was leaning behind the bar playing on his phone, and a few others, mostly men in business suits with laptops open in front of them, sat at the tables or on the large armchairs near the floor-to-ceiling windows that spread across the entire far wall. Across the lounge and the empty tables and dirty dishes and folded newspapers, in one corner near the food station, sat Tina’s mother, Radha Das, and her boyfriend, David Smith. Tina’s mother looked exactly like Tina was likely to look in twenty-five years—her hair, still thick, was in a low bun, carefully colored to hide any hints of gray, and she wore no makeup except a dark brown lipstick. She was slim and had a long neck
and looked like she could be one of those “real women” models for the Gap or Uniqlo, a younger Rekha maybe—her mother had that Bollywood glam even though she never watched any Bollywood films. David looked like he belonged in a catalog for eyeglasses or high-end sweaters, maybe Viagra—he was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, a black jacket on his carry-on suitcase next to him, and Tina could never get used to how all-American David looked. How on earth was her mother, her Indian mother, dating a man like this all of a sudden, Tina wondered. Not quite all of a sudden—two years—but Tina still wasn’t used to it. David was the kind of man you took a hiking selfie with, maybe with a big golden dog included.

  “Have you noticed that all mixed-race couples are forever taking hiking selfies? What’s that all about?” Tina asked Marianne. Marianne was white, as white as could be. Marianne and her blond hair and light blue eyes, but her last name—Laing—threw everyone off even though it was Scottish, and seemed to confuse Marianne herself.

  For the last four years Marianne had worked in a test prep kitchen for Five Senses magazine. She worked with a team that developed and tested recipes, plated them, photographed them, named them, and wrote the recipes. She had initially been the one hired to write the recipes but now she largely focused on the plating and display of the dishes for shoots. Marianne had a confident aesthetic when it came to her work, and she always seemed to have a strong preference for exactly which way the asparagus should point. Her mother had dedicated the walls in one room of Marianne’s childhood home in Bethesda to a collage of pages from the magazine that featured Marianne’s work.