“It’s very nice,” she said, nodding. The old two-storeyed house with long verandahs where she’d first been married, a family house converted and rented out for such occasions, had set like a sun, while this one had risen like a new sun which has no name, only an indefinable light, in its place. She couldn’t look at it properly. This past month, she couldn’t tell clearly if she was happy because she was at last getting married, or because she was getting married in the light of her imperfections, and others’; that imperfection, as much as accomplishment, would define them when bride and bridegroom finally met. This second time round, she’d discovered that to be happy was not so much a self-sufficient, spontaneous emotion, such as you might feel in relation to a dream or a secret, but a way of reacting to the rest of the world; that to be happy this time, she must curb the natural human instinct to look up at the sky, with its all-encompassing definition, and gaze towards the immediate ground and horizon, with its lack of shape, or abode, or clear ending.

He was talking about food. He said it would maybe be better if they didn’t have an elaborate dinner this time for guests at the reception in the five-star hotel in Calcutta; just some snacks and cocktails.

“You know, things like chicken tikka and kababs,” he said. He meant that the meal should be composed of small, disposable items that one could consume and move on, instead of those large repasts that arrested the passage of time and movement. To be left slightly hungry seemed appropriate to the occasion; and when he saw, in his mind’s eye, the singed wedges of the tikka, they seemed well suited for this purpose.