Two months later, she and he took separate intercontinental flights to Calcutta. They arrived at the small shed of an international airport with the air of those who’d arrived on a necessary business trip; she was carrying her laptop with her; neither had anything to declare, as they walked, on different afternoons, nonchalantly past the incurious customs officials in the way one might walk down the marriage aisle were all the guests on either side asleep. During the ashirbaad ceremony in her father’s flat near Dum Dum, everyone was a degree less solemn than you might have expected them to be; they’d blessed her once before, but they had enough blessings in store to bless her again, with the same untidy shower of grain and grass; there was an element of playacting, as they were not adhering to the plan of the ritual, but imitating what they’d done a few years ago. But there were also unsettling moments of discovery; some of the faces—those of the bridegroom’s family—were new, while others were the same. This collision, this bumping into each other, of strangeness and familiarity in the small flat, made the experience something like rereading a well-known story and finding that some of the characters in it had changed while others had remained who they were. Later they all relaxed, like actors after the performance, unmindful of their attire and a slight air of dishevellment. There was a gap of silence, in which Arpita existed momentarily as if it were her new home. She remembered how everything had been precisely laid out and premeditated during the last wedding; how she’d hardly had to move of her own volition, but had been carried down, as the ceremony pre-ordains, from her small room in the rented house, down the steps, precariously, in the arms of her male cousins towards the fire, and from there to walk blindly behind her husband seven times. She now saw that house as one she’d never visit again, but which she’d sleepwalked through, without the aid of her hands and feet, half afloat, as if she were handicapped but had been somehow given the power to move through its spaces in a supra-normal way. She said:

“Ranga dadu, it’s good to see you looking so well! You’re positively pink!”

“It’s the rum that keeps him so healthy,” someone else said. After two weeks, she was looking at the photographs, and she said: “So many photos! I didn’t realise someone was sneaking around taking so many photos! Who was the photographer?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Proudly, he added, “I wasn’t there.” Naturally, he couldn’t be present at his wife-to-be’s ashirbaad ceremony.