Chapter 21
One day until the wedding
Mehndi Laga Ke Rakhna” plays from a Bluetooth speaker and Simran hums along with the iconic song from DDLJ as she curls Kavitha’s hair.
They’re at the hotel in the second suite the family has rented for the weekend.
The sangeet is in a couple of hours, followed by the wedding ceremony tomorrow.
As she loops a lock of hair around the hot barrel, she stops and says, “Have you ever thought of how truly backwards some of the lyrics of our favorite songs are?”
“All. The. Time,” Kavitha says, fastening a necklace and looking at her reflection in the mirror. “Every song has the word ‘gori’ in it—like, I know it metaphorically means ‘beautiful’ but it literally means ‘fair girl,’ which is gross. Even this song has it! It’s terrible.”
“But so catchy.”
“Been stuck in my head for literal decades,” Kavitha agrees. Simran beams back at her; it feels like she and Kavitha are back to at least one part of their old selves. Maybe the rest will follow.
“I actually meant how all the songs are so gendered,” Simran says.
“It’s always a guy and a girl or a bride and groom.
What if you’re gay? What if you’re nonbinary?
What songs do you get to sing when you fall in love or get married?
” She shakes her head as she sections out another chunk of Kavi’s hair.
Her cousin has stopped looping rows of thin bangles onto her wrist and is looking at Simran through the mirror. “What made you think about that?”
Simran shrugs. “I’m a millennial who self-medicates with the nostalgia of our favorite movies and music from our youth to escape the terror of our current times.” She releases the curl from the iron and lays it down Kavi’s back carefully.
“I mean, same,” Kavitha says as she fidgets with the links on her gold and gemstone hand chain.
“What?” Simran asks.
Her cousin’s mouth is drawn in, like that time she spilled ketchup on Simran’s favorite white sweatshirt and tried to hide it. “Kavi, what is it?”
“Nothing,” she says.
“Okay, but you’re not acting like it’s nothing.”
“I haven’t said anything!” Kavi insists.
“Exactly! Unless you’re doing an uncanny impression of Ashok peripa, that’s weird,” Simran replies. Kavitha gives a half-hearted laugh but goes silent again.
There’s only one thing to do. Quietly, Simran hums. Then, still mostly to herself, she starts to sing.
Kavitha’s face falls and she pleads, “No …”
Simran raises her voice so it fills the room. And she is—as she has always been her whole life—completely off-key.
“Stop!” Kavitha says. She plugs a finger in one ear as Simran continues to sing and curl the other side of her head. “God gave you one mouth and two feet—that’s why you’re a dancer and not a singer!”
Simran gets louder.
“Okay!” Kavitha slaps her hands on her legs and Simran stops midbray.
“You want to know what’s up? Here it is.
” Shoulders back and neck straight, she meets Simran’s gaze in the mirror and says, “I’m gay.
” Simran goes still, absorbing her cousin’s words.
She’s surprised. She hadn’t considered it, figuring Kavitha didn’t date because she simply wasn’t into the mama’s boys or finance bros she’d met so far.
But now she gets that this was presumptuous and heteronormative, despite thinking she was neither of those things.
An odor fills the air. “Shit!” Simran cries, dropping the curling iron onto the floor.
“Did you just burn my hair?” Kavitha screeches. She relaxes when she sees Simran sucking on her injured finger. “Nope, mostly just your hand. We’re fine.”
Simran holds out her palms and takes a recentering breath. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to reply to what you said with ‘Shit.’ Can we rewind?”
“Sure! Akka, I’m gay.” Kavitha chuckles and says to herself, “The internet is right, it does get easier the more you say it.”
Simran spins Kavitha by the shoulders so they’re facing each other.
It matters deeply how she replies, perhaps more than any other words she’s ever spoken.
This is Kavitha, her favorite person in the world.
She’s already let her down so many times, missed so much in her life.
She has to get this right and searches for the words that simultaneously convey her support and love.
She takes a deep breath as she places a palm flat to her chest and replies, “I am honored and grateful that you shared your truth with me.”
Kavitha stares at her for a moment before her nose scrunches up. “Ick.” She spins around to face the mirror, talking to Simran through it. “That was truly the worst thing you’ve ever said to me. Chee chee chee.”
Simran rolls her eyes, the moment shifting into something looser as she finishes up by dousing Kavitha’s head in hair spray. “What did I say wrong?”
“Try not sounding like AI replying to a coming-out.” Kavitha sticks her tongue out, standing to get dressed.
Simran sticks hers out right back as she hands her cousin the top of her outfit. Kavitha pulls it over her head and Simran asks, “Am I the first person you’ve told?”
“No, Geeta and Rishi know,” her cousin says, head popping out of the neck before she shimmies the fabric down her torso.
Simran feels a pang, and Kavitha turns and pulls her hair over her shoulder so Simran can do up the back buttons.
She’s glad Kavi had someone to confide in, but she wishes it had been her.
If she had been here, or just stayed in touch, it would have been her. “Is that why your engagement was called off?” Simran broaches as she starts to dress. Kavitha walks behind her and does up each of the three ties that hold Simran’s open-backed top in place, cinching her like a corset.
“Yes. Ajay and I—there was no … physical compatibility there. That’s sort of when I realized,” Kavitha says.
She chuckles emptily as she pulls on the skirt of her outfit.
“Ajay knows, even though I never told him. He guessed. He was so great; he called off the engagement and took the responsibility for it.”
“So why’d the Pillais give you the death stare when we were at the store?” Simran asks.
Kavitha fixes her with a look. “Because I’m the girl who dared to not end up with their perfect son.”
“You could have just ended with ‘I’m the girl,’” Simran notes. “It must have been awful telling your mom you weren’t getting married.”
“Actually, it wasn’t.” Simran’s eyebrows shoot up into her hairline as Kavitha continues.
“I mean, after going on and on about the engagement ending, and of course, the trilingual conclusion: ‘Log kya kahenge?’ and ‘Yellarun enna solva?’ and ‘What will people say?’ But the minute she heard that Ajay’s parents were talking shit about me, she basically forced everyone into ostracizing them.
They’re not even invited to the wedding.
” Kavitha laughs as she hands Simran her dupatta.
“It’s the Veena Iyer dichotomy. She’ll ream you out at home for every little thing but she’ll fight anyone who isn’t family for you too. ”
“I wish I’d known all this was happening,” Simran says, gesturing to Kavitha. “I would have come back.”
“No, you wouldn’t have. You didn’t even come home after Appa’s surgery,” Kavitha says. Her tone is mild, though the words are anything but—and completely true.
Simran looks down. “I know. It’s not an excuse, but—”
“It was right around your parents’ death anniversary.
I remember,” Kavitha says quietly. “For weeks leading up to it, Amma was a mess. She was going to go up to Toronto to find you; I was going to go with her. Then Appa had the heart attack and all that had to take a back seat.” Simran swallows the lump that’s formed in her throat.
After a few moments of quiet, Kavitha is back to her lighter self.
“Besides, what was I supposed to say? ‘Hi, come home, I’m a lesbian.’”
Simran is grateful to her cousin for not pressing on that particular wound, for both of their sakes. “That might have worked, actually.”
She pulls on her skirt and triple-knots the ties as they move to the complicated business of adjusting their dupattas.
Kavitha has always been the better pleater of the two, and Simran the better pinner.
Her cousin’s fingers move like lightning back and forth over the material till she has a set of tightly folded pleats; she holds them out as Simran pins them securely.
She says, “I’ve wanted to tell you for a while. ”
Simran’s heart constricts. “You have?”
“At first, I thought maybe I never wanted to get married. But watching Geeta and Rishi get engaged, and now Leo and you …” Kavitha trails off.
They stand so Simran can start pinning the dupatta.
“I want big love. That Bollywood, singing-in-foreign-locations kind. I want someone who I run through airports for or who wants me enough to take part in nutty schemes or date in secret for years.”
Simran slides a safety pin into place near Kavitha’s shoulder. “I feel like the four of us might be setting a bad example for how to healthily pursue a relationship.”
“Obvi, Akka,” Kavitha says. “I just want someone who wants me enough to do it. I don’t actually want schemes and secrets.”
“Wait a minute,” Simran says, recalling something. “The other day, when we were all watching K3G, you were going on and on about Shah Rukh Khan with me. We agreed he’s still our dream man.”
Kavitha laughs. “He is. He is quite literally the only man for me. The difference is, maybe you like him and I like how much other women like him.”
Simran clears her throat. “Has there ever been anybody? A woman, I mean.”
Kavitha walks over to the desk and picks up her purse, fiddling with the clasp.
“Sort of. We were really young. She was my first kiss ever and … it really caught me by surprise. I didn’t know what to do with how I felt about another girl so I pretended it had never happened.
I decided it was just that one time. The few guys I went on dates with were disappointing, but I guess I figured maybe that’s what men are like. ”
“To be fair to you, that is what men are like. Most of them,” Simran says.
“But when Ajay and I got engaged, I was staring down the barrel of a future I realized I couldn’t take.”
“And no one since?”
“No!” Kavitha wails as she flops back onto the bed next to her. “Because of this first-Ajay-now-a-gay situation, I have never actually been on a date with a woman.”
“But it’s been six years since you and Ajay split.”
“Six years I’ve spent under Veena Iyer’s roof,” Kavitha reminds her.
“Fair enough,” Simran says, words garbled by the safety pins in her mouth.
She feels the weight of her absence. Kavitha needed her and she wasn’t there.
Maybe she could have come back sooner. Even once.
Simran allows the regret to settle fully into her—it feels like a square block in her gut, solid, immovable, the edges poking at her insides.
Resentment was so much easier to live with than this feeling.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come back all this time. ”
Kavitha hands her a second expertly pleated dupatta, this one Simran’s own, and they repeat the process. “You don’t need to keep saying it. You’re forgiven.”
Something wells inside of her. “I am?”
“Yes. You made a mistake. And then you kept making it. But you’re here now,” Kavitha says. She takes the remaining pins from Simran and places them on the dressing table. “People aren’t perfect. You love them despite that.”
Simran feels so full she might tip over into tears. She missed Kavitha so much all these years and the relief that now she doesn’t have to miss her anymore is overwhelming. She’s here, and even the days they fight are better than ones she was away.
“I really missed you,” she says.
Kavitha reaches over and squeezes her hand. “I missed you too. Don’t hug me, though.”
Simran laughs and it pushes away the weepy feeling. “As if. You were never a hugger.”
“It feels good to be seen.” They go back to getting ready, too aware that they’re on a schedule—Veena Iyer’s schedule.
“So are you going to tell Perima and Peripa?” Simran asks, fastening a heavy earring.
“I want to but I don’t know how,” Kavitha admits.
“I’m here for you. You tell me what you need and I’ll be there. Whenever, wherever,” Simran says solemnly.
“Thank you, Shakira,” Kavitha replies. “God, you’re bad at emotions,” she says, grinning.
Simran sits on the bed to do up the straps of her heeled sandals. “It’ll happen for you. I know it will.”
“I hate when people in relationships say that to single people. You don’t know that!”
“Maybe you’ll meet someone at the sangeet tonight!” Simran suggests. “Absolutely not,” Kavitha says, shaking her head. “We do not need to add any more complications to this wedding.”
“You’re right. But after the wedding, Operation DDLJ ends and Operation Kavitha Gets Her Girl begins,” Simran says.
“We’ll have to come up with a better name. But I’d like that,” Kavitha says. They nod at each other in the reflection of the full-length mirror in perfect sync, a new pact made.
Simran, almost a head taller than her cousin, is in a violet bandhani lengha.
The cropped full-sleeved blouse and skirt are marked with signature little white diamonds, finished with a mirrorwork border with a gold dupatta.
Kavitha is also in a lengha, but hers is tangerine with the same bright shade on her lips to match.
It brings out the rich tones of her skin to perfection.
Simran hip-checks her cousin. Giggling, Kavitha does it back as she says, “Damn, we look good.”
As they head out of the room, Kavitha says airily, “I think I’m ready to enter my ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ era.”
Simran scrunches her nose and snorts.
“It’s better than the opposite,” Kavitha says.
“What’s the opposite of ‘Live, Laugh, Love’?”
“‘Cry, Sigh, Die.’”