Recap: After consuming oodles of the signature Dessert a la Charulata made by Lata on the occasion of her birthday, and mulled wine brewed by the unlikely Hem, Aaduri and Lata talk about lovers — old and older — late into the night.

The days leading up to Molly’s sangeet felt hectic and endless all at once. But, of course, there was going to be a sangeet. That’s the way things were done now, even if you came from one of those 150-year-old houses in Bagbazar. It was fine.

The days were sunlit; the skies an exquisite cerulean. Calcuttans were basking in the mellow weather, dreaming of nolen gur — the diehards never had it round the year even though a few shops did sell the sweets even in the peak of summer, but waited for the right season — and everyone was arguing considerably less at street corners or in buses.

At Ghosh Mansion, a choreographer had been pounding the inner courtyard every afternoon, trying, under Dayanara’s bitter gaze, to coax the bride’s relatives into some manner of Bollywood synchronicity. There was still a spot of pointless wrangling happening about venues, though Lata thought the Ghoshes had left their battles for too late if victory had indeed been a genuine object of desire.

The wedding and the reception, scheduled one after the other on the same evening, were going to be at The Oberoi Grand. The bride and groom had mostly paid for it themselves and, consequently, brooked no discussion.

An ashirbad-cum-engagement ceremony was going to precede the wedding by two days, in the old naach ghar at Ghosh Mansion. According to Boro Jethu, the family gods were likely annoyed that the wedding had been summarily outsourced to a hotel. As it is, ‘Poush maash’ had been avoided by a whisker.

Kaku’s response on the subjects of household deities and their opinions — he would not dream of disagreeing with Molly — had been cruel but accurate: Not one of the weddings conducted in the last two decades, under the benign eyes of the family gods, had been particularly successful. So, maybe, it was alright to go with the times and be happy with the ashirbad-cum-engagement. Manjulika and Nimki had both taken great offence to Kaku’s statement — though Lata reminded them of its inherent truth — and were now threatening to boycott the wedding.

The Jaiswals, meanwhile, had won the bid to hosting the sangeet, along with dinner, the day after the ashirbad-cum-engagement. Boro Jethu, after conducting intensive research into Marwari wedding rituals on the Internet, tried to offer his input or muddy the waters, depending on how one looked at it. If the Jaiswals wanted, they could host a post-wedding Vadhu Pravesh party, but why claim the sangeet? Shouldn’t that be at Ghosh Mansion?

“Jethumoni, let’s get this straight right now,” Molly told him on FaceTime. “AJ is not Marwari. His family is from Uttar Pradesh. Why don’t you forget all this and tell me what kind of Bailey’s I should get you from the duty-free?”

*

After Molly’s arrival, Ghosh Mansion was engulfed in an unseasonal Puja fever. Or what, thought Lata, as strings of lights were hauled up one by one under Boro Jethu’s loud supervision and fish fillets and sweets were ordered in larger and larger numbers, she remembered of her girlhood Pujas: A sense of waiting in the pit of one’s stomach, intense peer pressure about clothes, and a vague panic that in the heady days which would follow, something momentous might turn her life upside down altogether (or the worse fear that something momentous might not.)

Lata accompanied Molly on shopping expeditions — though the clothes Molly would wear at the different ceremonies had already been sourced from a global supply chain — Benarasis from Benaras, shipped to a Bangladeshi-Nigerian designer in Queens, who ordered the rest of the fabric online from Turkey and had the outfits delivered to Calcutta. For herself and Ma, Lata bought saris from her favourite boutique in Hindustan Park: soft pinks, crushed oranges, dull golds and pista greens. Nimki chose a turquoise Kanjeevaram for herself from College Street market, no South Calcutta frippery for her, thank you very much. Lata also visited her mother’s ophthalmologist, Aaduri’s dentist, got her hair done, found a masseuse online. One day, Manjulika took leave from school and mother and daughter went to their bank locker in Hati Bagan and brought home a small selection of family jewellery, wrapped in red mulmul and lit with memories.

Lata had always felt considerable affection for this youngest cousin, who still looked like a miniature version of herself despite the pageboy haircut she now sported. This time round, though, Lata and Molly quickly found their roles reversed. Molly affected the acute certainty of the young. All of life lay in front of her, full of enormous possibilities; paradoxically, this made her worldly wise and emotionally savvy.

Lata set aside her management consultant hat, the richness of her many accomplishments and experiences, the depth added to her laugh by her so many failures, and allowed herself to become an ingenue again, often lectured to by Molly, and invariably laughing fondly as Molly’s dark eyes flashed and her hair shimmered with all that newly-acquired knowledge.

Molly had eventually drawn Lata into the dark web of wedding conspiracies: AJ’s mother knows this but can’t know that, my mother knows that but cannot-for-the-life-of-me know this, neither of our mothers know we live together in Berlin, so you have to make sure the German contingent does not slip up. The days passed in a heady blur.

Then, four days before the sangeet, after a protracted meltdown involving AJ’s mother, Boro Jethu, the designated fish-monger (whose orders were cancelled since the ashirbad-cum-engagement had to be declared vegetarian in honour of the groom’s 92-year-old great grandfather who was coming all the way from Rae Bareilly) and one of the Germans who’d found a single hair in her soup, Molly called Lata in a panic.

“Didibhai, we are appointing two liaison officers. You from the Ghosh side and AJ’s cousin to represent the Jaiswals. Will you go and meet her once please? So that a basic level of communication is established between the families and the messages are from one sensible sister to another? Please? Everything will fall apart otherwise. Purohitmoshai has been insulting their panditji it appears. Boro Jethu is behaving extremely weirdly. And the cousin is really nice. She’s from your college, I think.”

“It’s fine, Mollykins,” Lata rolled her eyes, “I think I can deal with people from other colleges too.”

*

That afternoon, Lata messaged the cousin and the two of them fixed to meet up in a cafe off Park Street which apparently made great cinnamon buns. “I know you’re visiting for a few days and I would have come to GM myself,” the cousin had written, “I love its courtyards. But I’m having some trouble at work. Damage control type. So if it’s okay with you, I’d rather meet in the CBD? I might have to run in an hour. But the cafe is lovely.”

Lata reached early and found a table in the corner. The place was fussy and cute like an English tearoom. She thought she’d deal with her overflowing inbox in the meantime. Suddenly, a fly was buzzing at her nose and as she looked up, she felt something in her eye.

Oh dear, her eyes stung.

Crap.

Lata rubbed her eyes vigorously, the sting became worse, and as her eyes watered stupidly and she scrabbled around in her bag for something that might help — but what? — there was a sudden darkening by her side.

“Charulata Ghosh.” A voice, fervently familiar in its timbre if unfamiliar in gravitas, stated. “It appears you still need this.”

A monogrammed kerchief was handed to her, with a brief bow.

“Ronny Banerjee,” said Lata, looking up and not seeing anything as her eyes were now leaking preposterously. “I never should have worn these dumb contacts. I think one of them is out. Can you spot it?”

And so it came to be that when Bobby Bansal, having parked her car and surreptitiously checked her emails, entered the cafe and breathed in the warm cinnamon scent, she saw her boss, Ronny, and Molly’s cousin, Lata — who she vaguely recognised from Facebook — craning at the table with its glass top, their heads bent forward, an intimacy suddenly framing them in a strange youthful shot.

Bobby paused in the distance.

(To be continued)

This is Chapter 16 of The Romantics of College Street, a serial novel by Devapriya Roy for t2oS. Find her on Instagram @roydevapriya or email her at ` theromanticsofcollegestreet@gmail.com`

Chapter 15: