Day three began with someone deciding that the haldi application to the groom's party should happen at the same time as the application to the bride's, which was not in Naina's colour-coded schedule and which Naina had a lot of feelings about.
"It's on the schedule for separate times," she said, pointing at it. "See? Eleven for Meera, two for the groom's side."
"Yes but Chachi said—" Dev began.
"I don't care what Chachi said, the schedule exists for a reason."
"The reason being that you made it."
"The reason being that I made it with careful thought about logistics and flow and—"
"Naina." Dev put his hand over hers on the schedule. She looked at it. He looked at her. "The haldi is going to happen simultaneously. This is how it goes in this family. No schedule survives contact with this family."
Naina looked at him for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, then removed her hand from under his and made a note in the margin of the schedule. "Fine," she said crisply. "But I'm noting it as a deviation."
Dev grinned. "You do that."
Meera, who had watched this exchange from across the courtyard with significant interest, filed it away next to the thing she'd noticed about Rohan and Priya on day one. She was collecting observations the way she always did — not out of nosiness, exactly, but because she had a writer's habit of noticing the spaces between what people said and what they meant.
Then the haldi started and she stopped having attention for anything else.
The courtyard had been transformed — yellow and gold marigolds everywhere, brass plates with the paste already prepared, music starting up from somewhere, the aunties appearing in force with the slightly dangerous enthusiasm of people who had been waiting for this moment. Meera was seated on a low stool in the centre of it and within approximately ninety seconds was liberally decorated with turmeric paste and also someone's tears, because Baba's wife — her soon-to-be mother, which was a thought that still made her chest warm unexpectedly — had started crying the moment she saw her.
"Ma," Anaya said, appearing with tissues.
"She looks so — and the dupatta, and your face, Meera beta—" She pressed the tissues against her own eyes with no effect. "I'm fine. I'm completely fine. Don't look at me."
"You're allowed to look at her," Rhea said from Meera's left, where she was in the process of applying haldi to Meera's arm with the focused precision she brought to everything. "You can also cry. These are both permitted activities."
"I'm not crying," Veer's mother said, crying.
Meera caught Anaya's eye and they had a brief, complete conversation without any words: this is the best and also I am going to cry too and we should both pretend we're not going to and then definitely do.
The haldi fight happened approximately twenty minutes later.
Dev started it. This was also not in the schedule.
One moment he was accepting the paste from an aunty with every appearance of cooperation, and the next he had somehow transferred a significant quantity of it directly onto Kabir's shoulder, and Kabir's expression went through three stages — surprise, the particular resignation of an eldest sibling, decision — before he retrieved his own handful and the situation escalated.
Rohan stepped back. Arjun stepped back. Naina said "absolutely not" and moved to stand near the wall. Dev, finding himself in the middle of a haldi fight with Kabir that he had technically started and was now losing, pivoted.
He looked at Naina.
She pointed at him. "Don't."
He already had his hand out.
What followed was less a fight and more a brief, decisive action on Dev's part — haldi on the end of his index finger, applied to the precise tip of Naina's nose — and Naina's response, which was swift and disproportionate and deeply satisfying, which was why everyone laughed including, quietly and with her hand over her mouth, Naina herself, once the initial outrage had passed.
In the middle of this — in the warm, golden chaos of yellow powder and aunty commentary and the music that had gotten louder — Meera felt someone beside her. She knew before she looked. She'd been aware of his presence the way she was always aware of it, the way you were aware of a change in the weather before you'd looked at the sky.
Veer.
He wasn't looking at the haldi fight. He was looking at her dupatta, which had gotten, in the chaos, thoroughly stained — a large yellow streak across the embroidered border.
"It's fine," she said before he could say anything. "It's not the good one."
"I know." He crouched next to her stool, level with the dupatta, and examined the stain with the same thoroughness he brought to actual problems. "If you put it in cold water within the next—"
"Veer. It's really fine."
He looked up. They were at eye level. Close — closer than they usually were, she realised, because the angle of the stool and where he'd positioned himself had removed the usual careful distance he maintained. Close enough that she could see the haldi dust that had settled on his sleeve and the particular quality of his attention when it was directed at something — focused, complete, like the thing he was looking at was the only thing in the room.
He was looking at her.
The sounds of the courtyard went slightly distant.
"You have—" he said, and reached out, and brushed something from her cheekbone with his thumb. A trace of haldi paste she hadn't noticed. The touch was brief and completely practical and lasted less than a second.
Meera did not breathe for that second.
"There," he said, and stood, and was gone — back into the courtyard, back to whatever required his attention, as efficiently as he'd arrived.
Meera sat on her stool in the middle of the haldi ceremony and felt that brief, practical touch on her cheekbone and thought, with a clarity that was almost peaceful: I am in so much trouble.
"Meera." Rhea was at her elbow. "Meera. Your face is doing something."
"My face is doing nothing."
"Your face is doing several things. I'm concerned."
"Continue with the haldi application, Rhea."
From across the courtyard, she heard Anaya say something to Arjun that made him smile — not his usual careful, measured smile but something quieter and more real — and she thought: at least I'm not the only one.
Across the courtyard, Priya Malhotra was reaching for a brass plate at the same moment as Rohan Verma, and their hands stopped just short of touching, and neither of them moved for a beat too long before Priya stepped back and said something and walked away and Rohan watched her go.
No, Meera thought. Definitely not the only one.
She looked at her haldi-stained hands. Nine days.
She thought about her cheekbone. Thought about the two seconds he'd crouched next to her and looked at her like she was the only thing in the room.
Maybe, she thought. Just maybe.