So you will get married. You will have an elegant wedding on a white January morning. The cold Delhi air will flap a wedding fire. People will eat hot cubes of sautéed tofu and smile and congratulate you. Old school friends will slap you on the arm and make jokes that you don’t find funny anymore. College friends from the Upper East Side will look around interestedly, take anthropological stock. An ancient priest will tie an ancient knot. He will pull it tight, provide insurance to the union being formed. She will place her henna-adorned, gold-encrusted hands in yours. Her bangles will clink together. It will be the only sound, because it has gone quiet. The moment is here. It is about to happen. Everyone is waiting. The clinking will make you love her a little, in that moment, when she is bequeathing herself to you for life. It will remind you that she is a woman; the feminine tinkle will make you feel like a man. And then, the timeless, ageless chanting will begin. There will be vows. Promises. The merging of great families. A bond.

Maybe (and it could be that this is just me projecting hope) there will be a lightning instant of doubt as your hand, encasing hers, pours samagri into the fire. A short, quick fraction of a second where you feel an unexpected twinge that you can’t quite explain. That will be me, my dearest; it will be me, somewhere, maybe even in the crowd—because you might invite me; we are friends, somewhat, after all—shattering inside a death knell.

But the samagri will be in the fire. It will be done. That will be that.

And your world will go on as it always has, never once aware of the wake of destruction those vows wrought on a girl who has loved you since she was seventeen, since she heard your voice on a fat old Nokia cell phone (that she never threw away; it had held your voice).

But I will have loved you. Know that. While you uncover her and she discovers you, while your mouth is on her wrist, moving up her arm and—no, no more. While that is happening, I will be trying to burn away every trace of you. I will drink something and smoke something and love someone. I will, I will try. But I will still have loved you. And somewhere in the atmosphere, some layer where the frequencies of our feelings are stored, there will be this: the memories of a voice making a seventeen-year-old head swim, of lazy eyes and admissions you didn’t quite know you made. Of unbeknownst comfort given, and a racing pulse. Of the fiercest love I have ever felt, the strongest net you’ll ever cast.

The Book Launch

December 2013