The haveli on sangeet night was not the haveli on any other night.
This was the thing about Indian weddings that Meera had known abstractly for years and experienced directly only once before, at a cousin's wedding that had been smaller and calmer and not in a haveli that had hosted celebrations for three generations. The sangeet transformed the space — the courtyard was lit with a thousand fairy lights, the ones from the neem tree spreading outward to the walls and up to the second floor, warm and golden and slightly too beautiful to be real. The smell of flowers and incense and cooking from the kitchen that had been producing things since six in the morning. The sound, even from her room where she was getting ready, of the band tuning up.
"You're not nervous," Rhea observed, watching Meera in the mirror with a slight frown. She was doing Meera's eyeliner with the focused intensity of a professional, which she was not, but she had always treated cosmetics as a domain requiring technical precision.
"I'm not nervous," Meera agreed.
"You should probably be nervous. This is the biggest night of the pre-wedding schedule."
"Don't let Naina hear you say that. She'll want to revise the schedule."
"Naina has already revised the schedule twice today." Rhea tilted Meera's chin up. "Look up. I'm saying this because if you cry and ruin this eyeliner I'm going to be annoyed."
"I'm not going to cry."
"Everyone cries at sangeets."
"I'm not everyone."
"Meera." Rhea paused with the liner brush in her hand. "I need you to know that in the last five days I have watched you be very brave and very composed and I think that's wonderful. I also think that tonight is going to be a lot and if you cry that is fine and also not actually a problem for the eyeliner because I bought waterproof."
Meera looked at her best friend in the mirror. Rhea looked back with the expression she used when she'd said what she meant and was waiting for acknowledgment.
"I know," Meera said.
"Good." Rhea resumed the liner. "Now look up."
— ✦ —
The sangeet was everything.
Meera had expected it to be beautiful, but she hadn't quite anticipated the specific way that a Malhotra sangeet was beautiful — full-hearted, slightly over the top, with no awareness of its own excess because the Malhotra family did not do things by halves and had never apologised for it. The band was live. The food was extraordinary. Baba and his wife were both already emotional, which meant the tone of the evening was set early: this was a celebration that felt it deeply.
The girls' performance had been Anaya's idea, which surprised everyone because Anaya did not usually volunteer for things that required being the centre of attention. But she had been the one to come to Meera three weeks ago and say, quietly, 'I want to do something. For you. Can we plan something?' And they'd planned it — four of them, Anaya and Rhea and Naina and Meera, a fifteen-minute performance that had taken two weeks of practice stolen from various corners of busy schedules.
They performed for Meera.
And Anaya danced.
This was the thing that undid the room. Anaya, who moved through the world carefully, who kept herself pulled back in crowds, who rarely let herself be completely visible in a large group — she danced. Really danced, with the same completeness she brought to everything when she felt safe enough to let herself. Meera watched her from her seat of honour and felt the tears arrive without warning and let them, because Rhea had bought waterproof liner and also because Anaya had choreographed something specifically for her and was performing it fully, holding nothing back, and that was not something you could watch dry-eyed.
She was laughing and crying simultaneously by the end, which was a talent she'd always had, and when the music stopped and her friends came to her and hugged her all at once in a four-person pile she pressed her face into Anaya's shoulder and said something she couldn't find the words for, and Anaya held her and said "I know."
She looked up, eventually, and wiped her eyes, and the rest of the evening moved around her warmly.
And then the boys performed.
She'd known it was coming — Dev had been mysterious about it for days in the specific way he was mysterious when he'd organised something and was very pleased about it — but nothing had prepared her for the precise nature of the performance, which involved all four of them (Arjun, Kabir, Dev, and Veer) in coordinated outfits that Dev had clearly selected, performing a dance that was enthusiastic in direct proportion to how technically sound it wasn't.
Arjun executed it with the same calm precision he brought to everything, which made it significantly funnier because the moves were objectively ridiculous and his expression was completely sincere. Kabir, who was on record as a man who did not dance, had decided that if he had to do this he was going to do it with his full commitment, which he did, and the combination of his expression and his commitment was extraordinary. Dev was having the time of his life — pure, uncomplicated joy, completely in his element.
And Veer.
Veer danced like a man who had agreed to do this, which he had, for a reason that mattered to him, which it clearly did, and was not going to pretend to be good at it, which he wasn't, and was going to do it anyway with complete seriousness of purpose. It was mortifying in the best possible way. It was also, somehow, the thing that made Meera laugh harder than she had laughed all week — not because he was bad at it, but because he was doing it. Fully, seriously, without embarrassment, because someone he loved was getting married and he'd been asked.
She laughed until her eyes watered again.
She had her hands pressed over her mouth and she was still laughing when she looked up and found that he was looking at her.
He wasn't dancing anymore — the performance had ended, the crowd was applauding, Dev was bowing with great theatricality. Veer had stepped back from the group and was standing at the edge of the performance space, and he was looking at her.
Not with the careful, measured attention he usually directed at her — the kind that was controlled, that gave nothing away. He was looking at her the way he looked at things that had his actual, complete attention, the way he'd looked at the vendor contract and at the mandap design and at the stain on her dupatta. Like she was something that required being taken seriously.
She stopped laughing.
The moment lasted less than a second. Then someone touched his shoulder and he turned away, and Meera sat in the warm light of the sangeet with her waterproof eyeliner and the specific feeling of someone who had just understood something she didn't quite have words for yet.
Something had shifted in him. Something had been shifting for days, and she hadn't let herself see it because she'd been too busy managing her own feelings to be paying attention to his. But she'd seen his face just now, in the moment after the laughter, and she'd recognised the quality of what was in it.
She'd been looking at things with that quality for five years.
She picked up her chai. Set it down. Picked it up again.
Six days, she thought. But differently than before. Not as a countdown to something she was dreading. More as a countdown to something she didn't know the shape of yet but was no longer afraid of.
Six days.