Sunday morning: a Marriott ballroom inside the perimeter. Prachi, who in the end wore the standard red-and-gold when my mother threatened hunger strike at the prospect of white, led Avi around the fire, which flickered a subdued orange. I found myself scanning the room for the massive shape of Ramesh Uncle. He was such an immense man that I should have seen him if he was there.

On the marital platform there came a hubbub as the officiant—not a priest, but an amateur Sanskrit scholar, a family friend of a family friend—was revealed to have sent Prachi and Avi the wrong way around the fire. My mother’s sister, Kalpana Auntie, hurdled onto the stage, braced Prachi by the shoulders to physically turn her around, and in the process trampled upon the edge of Avi’s trailing sherwani, causing him to knock his forehead against Prachi’s. They righted themselves and laughed, Prachi’s mehendied hand pressing tenderly against Avi’s receding hairline. The error undone, they decided, for good measure, to circle fourteen times rather than the prescribed seven, to plentiful chortles.

I used the commotion as an excuse to stand, making as though I was preparing to help with things up front. I once more swept the bobbling heads. (No tears were visible. This was an unsentimental affair, and besides, too many of us were lost among the Sanskrit. Who knew what promises were being uttered through the untranslated chants?) I thought I saw a knobbed nose, bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows… but the profile was too low, belonging to a shorter man… oh, but a few rows back, there were Anita’s perennially roving eyes, and she, like me, was glancing about, fidgeting with her old simple gold hoop earrings. Those eyes landed on mine and lit, and lingered, and I momentarily forgot the quest.

One of Prachi’s white sorority sisters leaned over her husband. “Do you throw rice at Indian weddings or is that offensive?” she whispered.

“Why would that be offensive?”

“Because people are starving in India.”

“Sit down,” my cousin Padma hissed. I obeyed. It was the kind of weekend during which one must obey any and all Indian women’s orders. When it was over, Padma and I processed together back down the aisle. Anita smirked gently, for reasons I couldn’t entirely ascertain—maybe at the formalities, or just at how time had landed us in this room now. Padma and I trailed the newlyweds and cousins and Hae-mi and Avi’s best friend from his Hindi a cappella group. The aisle: a facet of the wedding that, during the planning phases, my mother had deemed American nonsense, but that caused her to beam as she, in her emerald-green sari, clutched my father’s arm. For a moment, all the eyes of Hammond Creek were upon her. Her long earlobes sagged from the burden of her jewels.