“Oh, we’re fine!” he said, his English accent impeccable. “Maybe you could bring me a few cookies.” The cookies were pale star-shaped squiggles, or chocolate-dark circles. They had brought a list of invitees with them.

“This is Bodo Jethu,” she said, pointing at the name, “A. Sarkar,” on the top of a piece of paper. “You’ll see him during the ashirbaad at Calcutta.” Withdrawing her finger and looking at a name, she said, “That’s my only mama.” He stared at the name she was looking at.

Six years ago, these very people, six years younger, had blessed her at the ashirbaad ceremony before her first marriage. Now they would have to be summoned again, like figures brought to life a second time from a wooden panel where they’d been frozen, resurrected from their armchairs, or old-age homes, or holiday resorts, or wherever they happened to be. The embarrassment, the fatigue, of blessing a niece, or a grandniece, or a daughter, a second time! Some of them had developed a few aches and pains, inexorably, since the first time; though all of them were still there. Now they’d be brought back like soldiers that had been disbanded and were caught loitering happily and absently.

But the list of invitees, this time round, was to be a more makeshift affair. It had the air of an impressionistic personal reminiscence; it had been composed, without much advice from elders, haltingly, from memory. “Might as well put him there” and “Don’t you have anyone else on your father’s side of the family?” were the expressions of collaboration and trade heard being made across the coffee cups, smudged with marks from their lips, on the table. Last time, the list of invitees in both cases had been all-encompassing; almost all the people who populated their lives on a long-term basis had come. This time, only a handful were to come; some people had been left out mysteriously, for no good reason; others were the most essential, the kind of people they’d have chosen to take with them to a nuclear-free zone, in case of a war, if they were offered the choice.