One Good Friend Deserves Another

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T
here you are.” Kelly burst through the door. “Come on, Dhara. We have to get you out of here.”

With a ringing of bangles, Dhara Pitalia turned to face one of her oldest and dearest friends. Kelly stopped before her, weaving on heels much higher than the little redhead was used to wearing. Her face, reflected in the dozens of mirrors in the vanity room, was tight with concern.

Dhara bowed her head, feeling the slow sinking of her hopes. She supposed she deserved being ambushed in the hotel bathroom like this. She’d just assumed that Kelly would have the good sense not to pin her down today. Not while two hundred and thirty-one members of the Pitalia and Bohara clans celebrated her engagement in the banquet room down the hall.

“I meant to tell you earlier, Kelly.” Dhara plucked at the folds of her sari. “I really did.”

“Oh, God.” Kelly clutched Dhara’s hand, crushing a stack of rings. “We couldn’t believe it when we got the invite. We thought it was a joke. Then Wendy called the hotel and found out it
wasn’t
.”

“His name,” Dhara said softly, “is Sudesh Bohara.”

“I know. I read the placard in the hotel lobby just like everyone else.” Kelly let go of Dhara’s hand and wobbled on her heels to the door. “We can’t believe you’re being forced into marriage.”

Dhara flinched and swayed back against the countertop. She understood Kelly’s concern, she really did. Wendy, Kelly, and Marta were part of that other world, the American world, the one she’d had one foot firmly planted in her whole life. This was why she’d dodged their emails, texts, and phone calls all week. To explain to them the painful route her heart had taken to get her here—wrapped in a silk sari, draped in gold jewelry, and about to perform an ancient Hindu engagement ceremony—would take more than a few minutes locked in a hotel bathroom.

“Sudesh,” Dhara said, his name strange on her lips, “is the son of one of my father’s business associates.”

“I know. I spoke to your cousin Ravi. He told me you met him only last week.”

Dhara had met Sudesh ten days ago. She’d been seated on a couch in a pink sari in the lobby of this very hotel. She’d watched him discreetly while their parents worked out the details of the arrangement.

She tried to gauge the kind of man he was by the way he folded his hands.

“I want to hear the whole barbaric story, in gritty detail, over a rum and coke,” Kelly said. “But first, we have to get you out of here.”

“But it’s almost time for the Ganesh
pooja.
”

“It’s all planned. Marta is keeping an eye on the hallway so we don’t attract any attention.” Kelly squinted out the crack of the door. “She says it’s clear.”

“After the
pooja
will be the exchange of rings.”

“Then we better move fast. Wendy is already waiting in front of the hotel with the car running.”

“If I leave before the ring ceremony, my parents will be publicly humiliated.”

Kelly crossed the room in three quick steps. She stood so close that Dhara could smell cardamom and cloves on her breath.

“You know I adore your parents. You know I would never do anything to hurt them. But better they be humiliated now, than you spend the rest of your life sleeping with someone you don’t love.”

Dhara squeezed the counter until the edge bit into her palms. This was sweet, really it was. Her three best friends in the world, so concerned about her, had made arrangements to sweep her past hundreds of relatives into Wendy’s Benz. Once there, Dhara supposed Wendy would deliver her to Kelly’s nubby couch, where they would hide her from an army of Pitalias until she came to her senses and put a stop to the marriage whose future date would soon be determined by an Indian astrologer.

“Kelly,” she said, her voice shaky. “Tell Wendy to park the car and come back to the party.”

“Is there somewhere else you’d rather go?”

“Back to the hall, where all of my aunts are practicing their dance moves.”

“Wendy said you’d resist.” Kelly swiveled on a heel and began to pace. “She said this was a foolish idea. She said you’re too attached to your family to play the runaway bride. But I remember that weekend, Dhara. I remember what you promised yourself.”

Dhara’s will withered. “That weekend” was such a defining moment in their friendship that all of them referred to it by no other name. It had been senior year, and the four of them had huddled together in their shared apartment—reeling from their own individual crises—resolutely making rules to forever protect their broken hearts.

Today, she broke Rule Number One.

Dhara took a deep breath and then gripped Kelly’s arms to try to calm her. “I’ve warned you about the masala chai. How many cups have you had?”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“I am, because I know you don’t want to hear what I have to say.” She leaned in close enough for the jewel of her
maang tikka
to brush Kelly’s forehead. “I’m not being forced into this. I’m marrying Sudesh Bohara willingly.”

In the silence that followed, Dhara could hear the muffled sounds of her own engagement party drifting in from the hall—the Hindi chattering of her aunts and the shouts of her cousins as the DJ played the theme song of the latest Bollywood movie. Beyond that door lay the force of Indian custom, three thousand years of ancestral tradition. Inside this room, she faced the force of one determined Vassar girl.

“I don’t understand.” Kelly’s face paled under her freckles. “Did you fall for him? Head over heels? So quickly?”

Dhara mustered a smile. Dear, romantic Kelly. While Dhara was in medical school, Kelly had teased her for not even noticing the fine young doctors Dhara spent her days with. Kelly knew better than anyone that she just wasn’t the type to be swept off her feet. But Dhara supposed any explanation would make more sense than the idea that she might put her whole romantic future into the hands of her religious, tradition-bound parents.

“You swore you’d never let your parents choose your husband,” Kelly said. “We were sitting in the Shakespeare Garden. You’d just dragged me to see that Karan Johar movie about the same thing. And now, all of a sudden…” Kelly’s throat worked as she struggled to understand. “Admit it. This looks like some crazy kind of rebound.”

Under eighteen feet of pleated sari, Dhara tensed. She dug her fingernails into Kelly’s upper arms, willing her not to bring this up. “It’s not a rebound. We’ve been apart for over a year.”

“A year is nothing. If you include the decade you two knew each other as friends, then you were together practically forever.”

Air hitched in Dhara’s chest. Little thick bubbles of it, clogging the bronchi, making it impossible to inhale.

“I just can’t come up with any other reason you’d do this. It must have something to do with Cole.”

And at the sound of his name, Dhara’s heart did a painful little roll. The cardiologist in her noted the arrhythmia, probably caused by a premature ventricular contraction overriding the sinoatrial node and compensated by a powerful subsequent contraction.

But the woman in her felt something different: a rushing ache, a yawning sense of loss.

Kelly said, “It’s all right, Dhara. We all know you still love him.”

Kelly caught the flash of pain in her friend’s kohl-rimmed eyes and found the proof she’d been searching for. Dhara was making the mistake of a lifetime. If there was one fundamental truth in the world, it was that Dhara Pitalia and Cole Jackson were truly, madly, deeply in love. When two people are in love, nothing should stand between them and happily ever after.

Kelly needed to believe that. With a fresh shiver of nerves, she thought of the hotel key card hidden deep in her purse. She needed to believe in a perfect world, today more than ever.

“Kelly, Kelly, you are so very sweet,” Dhara murmured. “You’re my fierce protector, come to save me.”

“One word, and we’re out that door.”

Kelly didn’t like the look on Dhara’s face. Her friend was smiling. The trail of tiny jewels arching above her brows glittered in the fluorescent lights. But her friend’s eyes were dry, and the expression in them apologetic.

“You must think I’ve gone utterly mad.” Dhara lifted a length of coral chiffon, shot through with gold thread. “Here I am, dressed up like a village bride.”

“Stop. I’ve seen you in saris before.” Kelly had spent a good number of college vacations with the Pitalia clan, when she didn’t have enough money for a bus ride back to Massachusetts. She’d attended family events dressed up in Dhara’s saris, playfully sporting a
bindi
though she was an unmarried woman. “You look as glamorous as Vasundhara Das in
Monsoon Wedding
. As glamorous as you looked at our senior formal.”

Kelly knew the memory would hit its mark. She suppressed a stab of guilt. It was her job to make Dhara see sense by any means. That’s what friends did for each other. That’s what they’d promised, ever since that weekend.

“Oh, Kelly, I know you believe that Cole and I belong together. A year and a half ago, I was so blind with love that I would have agreed with you.”

“Then don’t let your parents get in the way of your happiness.”

“It’s not about my parents. It hasn’t been for a long time.” Dhara worried her hands in the folds of her sari. “Think about it. When I finally brought Cole home to my family, I was thirty-five years old.”

“Practically dead.”

“You know that’s ancient
for an unmarried woman in my family. You know my sisters all married before me. I could have brought home a Punjabi Sikh from Kashmir, and my parents would have showered him with flower petals. By the time I worked up the courage to introduce Cole, they welcomed him.”

Kelly shook her head. That piece of information never did fit in. For so many years, Dhara had resisted Cole precisely because she was afraid that her family would not accept a laid-back, Ultimate-Frisbee-playing boy from Oregon as a potential husband.

“If that were true,” Kelly murmured, “we’d be celebrating your engagement to Cole right now.”

“It’s not that simple. Life is never that simple.”

“It can be.” Kelly thought of the key card again. “It
must
be. One phone call to Cole and you know he’ll come. He’ll sweep you right away from here. It’ll be like the ending of that Mani Ratnam movie—”

“Kelly.” Dhara ran a finger across her brow, wincing as if she had a headache. “Cole asked me to marry him last year.”

Kelly started.

“I should have told you. I should have told
all
of you.” Her chest rose and fell on a sigh. “I didn’t, for a lot of really good reasons. But mostly because when he asked me to marry him, I said no.”

Kelly stood numb, the words bouncing off her, as incomprehensible as the Hindi growing louder from the other side of the door. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. She felt like she’d been caught by the crosscurrents at the Isle of Shoals in Gloucester Bay—a stretch of dangerous water her father never taught her how to navigate. She leaned forward, full of questions. But Dhara held up the flat of her palm, her bracelets jangling.

“I have to go now. They’re looking for me.”

Kelly recognized the voice of Dhara’s mother, rising in alarm in the hallway.

“Be happy for me, Kelly.” Dhara touched her arm. “Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

“Are you all right, Kelly?”

Kelly glanced up. In the mirror she watched Wendy Wainwright poke her head around the door and then sweep into the vanity room. Kelly suddenly realized that she hadn’t moved from this spot since she’d heard the jingle of Dhara’s ankle bells fade down the hall.

“Dhara’s gone, Wendy.” Kelly bent over the sink so she could dodge Wendy’s eyes. “Somebody should go after her. We can’t let her walk out on an intervention.”

“Yes, we can. This was a very bad, very ill-timed idea.” Wendy twisted Kelly’s hair in one hand and lifted it off the back of her neck. “Promise me you won’t pull this in September at my wedding.”

“Why would I? You love your fiancé. You guys have been together so long it’s like you’re already married.”

“Still. The extent to which you guys are willing to meddle makes me nervous.”