In Paradise
Lucinda Dhavan
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2025 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Fiction
Gina looks down from the ramparts and wonders if twilight might be the time when the "enchanting" atmosphere everybody talks about will finally show up. Dusky blue over the plain, village lights coming on below, the walls of the fort lit with a glow as of torches, golden. Green parrots flying in to roost.
A little travel ad-like, but more promising than the flatness of midday.
She's supposed to be catching the meaningful moments of this two-day extravaganza, since Anju is sure the videographer supplied by the palace hotel won't know what's important and close to the heart. Only a friend like Gina would know that—Gina, who turned every office retreat, every girls' night out back in Portland into snippets worth sharing and five-minute shorts so well put together that they lingered forever in everyone's digital memory.
Anju trusted her, but so far Gina has nothing to show. Everything she shot as they checked in that afternoon was maximum ordinary: confused guests milling around the stone-paved courtyard, welcome garlands wilting on hot necks after the long drive from Delhi, dust powdered over heaps of luggage. Tension erupted at one point, opaquely. Gina didn't understand the language. When Anju explained that the man with the bad comb-over had been yelling about being allotted a small room in a turret, Gina said, "And he's entitled to make everyone squirm?"
Anju's mother had then, in her eternally placating way, asked if Gina would mind taking the turret room instead of the one she'd been given—right next to the family suite on the ground floor. Anju had looked annoyed but told her friend it would probably be best.
"Prem Uncle is sensitive," she'd said; apparently he ran a small grocery shop and was always thinking he was being disrespected by his more successful relatives.
So Gina had gone up into the turret and flopped on a hard sofa for a couple of hours, taking random pictures of parrots and chipmunks outside her window and wondering why people bothered with extended families. She hardly knew the one aunt she'd been told she had, and if she got married—at present, an unlikely event—it would, ideally, be quick and easy and end in drinks and a good dinner with a few friends.
Anju's wedding would go on the whole weekend. One sub-event after the other. Breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, cocktails, dinner—all with folk dancers and magicians in the background. Virgin cocktails, Anju's mother had explained, as no liquor was served by the hotel. Anju's father had added a discreet invitation to the family suite for any guests who wanted to "restore their tissues" with the real thing.
He was fond of these classic expressions.
Mehendi ceremony was the event between tea and cocktails, after they'd settled in that day. Women bustling around the garden, laughing in bunches as designs were piped onto their hands in henna, like dark icing on bumpy cakes. Only Gina couldn't get it done. She needed her hands on the camcorder and didn't want smears of wet paste all over everything, leaving orange stains. Why bother? She had real tattoos on her wrists: a vivid blue bird on one—a regrettable high school-era impulse—and a bracelet of Celtic knots on the other—a symbol that outlived a relationship. Carrot-colored paisleys wouldn't go with either.
Tired of taking repetitious shots of filigreed hands, she'd climbed up to look over the wall and lost herself temporarily in the possibilities of twilight and her habitual mild anomie.
Meanwhile, the celebrations are marching on. Swarming staff are setting up a dance floor on the terrace. It's a smooth operation, like shifting scenes in a play they've staged a thousand times. The guests are coming out again after a costume change. Silks, jewels—even the men a little stiff, posing, modeling brocade jackets. Gina feels underdressed, though she's wearing the embroidered tunic Anju bought her in Delhi. It has some glitter.
"Oh, there you are," Anju's mother finds her. "Her mehendi's almost finished now. You must get this!"
Anju is still sitting on a decorated swing, hands spread immobile on a drop cloth over her yellow outfit—the least elaborate of the three she'd bought for the various events, the cheapest. A woman is busy making tiny repairs to the damp henna designs that wind around Anju's dangling feet and ankles like lace boots.
She's been sitting that way for a couple of hours already; her feet must have twitched a bit.
Gina asks: "When can you move?"
"It has to be completely dry," Anju says, still, somehow, smiling and upbeat. "Maybe on my hands—"
Gina gives an exploratory poke.
"Careful, don't spoil it."
"There's a crust," Gina says, "But underneath—"
"And I'm dying of thirst," Anju says, but with a wry smile, as if that's all part of a game.
"I'll get you a Pepsi," says the little girl who's been hanging on the flower-wrapped chains of the swing; she's the bride's biggest fan.
"Just water," Anju calls out as the child skips away.
Gina records the moment the girl tugs the coat of a passing waiter. He bows slightly so that she can grab a bottle out of the basket he carries. After some negotiation, the man hands over a straw, as well. Nice, the tired face reacting to the girl's smiles.
Obviously, the child knows how these things go. She inserts straw in bottle and comes back to hold it to Anju's lips so she can drink without disturbing the artwork on her hands. Nice, the pretty faces, bride and girl, so close together.
"Thank you, thank you," Anju says, as she sucks in more, and the girl giggles.
"Don't drink too much," a passing Auntie advises Anju. "What if you have to go to the loo?"
Eye roll from Anju. "I'm serious," Auntie persists.
"Think of the bother! All that work gone to waste! You need to leave it just like this only. The longer the mehendi stays on, the darker the color will be, and the darker the color, the more your husband will love you," Auntie gives a titter with this. Weddings bring out titters and giggles. "That's what they say."
Gina wonders what Auntie would say if she knew Anju and Kevin have been living together ever since law school. This information has not been shared with the older and more conventional members of the family.
"Kevin already loves her," Gina decides it's safe to say.
Auntie says you never know until after the wedding how long that will last, and giggles her way off among her contemporaries.
"Now that she's mentioned the toilet," Anju is saying, "It will be all I can think of."
Gina's phone buzzes against her thigh, startling her. She's told everyone to call only in case of emergency this weekend.
Still more ominous—it's not work, it's her sister.
Gina walks a few steps away.
"You won't believe who just called," Nicole says, hyperventilating.
"But it must be some ungodly hour over—"
"Our father!" Nicole says, which plunges them both into silence, and has Gina putting several more paces between herself and all the cheerful chatter.
This father Nicole speaks of is not a regular part of their lives. They were both in elementary school when the divorce happened. Since then, they have only seen him when wife number three had a freakish desire to manufacture a family out of whatever parts she could assemble. They'd spent a few holidays with this unfamiliar set of parental units in Scottsdale when they were in high school—which had suited their real Mom, busy with her own futile entanglements at that period in her life. Number Three's efforts fizzled out gradually, and exchanges slipped back to occasional emails and checks in greeting cards. Their father never phoned, he texted, even when Number Three died of cancer, which they hadn't known she had, it came as a group text. He forwarded a link to the funeral home's obituary, and it mentioned a son Gina had never even seen.
It bothered Gina, sometimes, that so much had gone on with her father, off in his own world, without her. On those distant visits, she thought she'd felt a bond—more with him than her mother, for sure. But then he wasn't around, and she got busy.
"Why? Why would he call?" Gina asks, expecting really bad news.
Nicole is going on in that fast, breathy way, "He might try you next. I think he tried me first because he figured one more kid in the house wouldn't make any difference, I could deal with it. I'm used to cleaning up messes—"
"What? What are you—"
"The kid. Emilio. He wants me to take him in."
Is he dying? Gina thinks this, but can't say it.
And then she thinks of her sister: Nicole with two boys and a toddling girl always doing crazy things. She'll be with one and the others will get into something just outside her field of vision, jump off a pile of furniture and need to go to the ER or spill chocolate sauce all over the kitchen. Nicole always has some fresh disaster to report and often goes on to say Noah is checked out, he never helps, and Mom lives so close, but do you think she'll ever do anything but plop them in front of the TV and give them too many cookies?
Occasionally, she says how much she loves them. On social media, mostly.
"Dad says for a 'few' weeks," Nicole goes on, "but I can see how that will go. He had a heart thing, while he was at the gym. He'll never admit he's too old for that."
"A heart attack, you mean?"
"Sort of, I guess. But he didn't sound sick. He says they want to operate, right away. He'll have to be in the hospital and then rehab or something. He sounded weird and all emotional, said he has no one to help and the kid is so withdrawn he has no friends, and his teacher took him home or something, but he has to make better arrangements."
"So maybe it is only temporary—"
"Forget it! How am I supposed to handle a thirteen-year-old for however long? Nobody can manage kids that age! And I just started working again, two-three days a week, from home, just got the day care for Mia set up, and I'm supposed to supervise this kid's distance education? Give him some 'direction'?"
"So you said no."
There was the smallest pause before Nicole replied: "Of course I did. And I told him you were out of the country, I didn't know when you'd get back. I just hope he doesn't bug you. I mean, the whole thing's so impractical! He's not thinking. Kid's better off in place, in his own school. They can get somebody there, for a price. A nanny. A housekeeper or something. He's got enough money, don't you think? Even though they moved to Tempe... I don't get it why he doesn't have somebody at least part-time anyway. He's not exactly domestic...
"Anyway, thought I should warn you. Turn your phone off. Nothing you can do. He'll just have to figure it out."
In the world where Gina is standing, a sound system comes to life with a screech and a growl that shakes the ground beneath her feet.
"Is that the wedding?" Nicole asks.
"Part of it."
"Well, I won't keep you. Just be smart about this, sister. Don't get carried away with that bleeding heart of yours. Turn off your phone."
Gina is suspended for a moment in the nowhere land of wanting to say something to someone who is no longer at the other end of the connection, of feeling the presence of people who are in no way there. She stares at her phone. Pulls up her father's number, the one sent when his address changed. The one that's two years old, come to think of it. And nothing since.
HEY, HEAR YOU'RE IN THE HOSPITAL...She writes and leaves it there on the screen. She'll think about this. Maybe he's in surgery now, anyway. She'll wait. Late night here will be daytime there. Let's not do anything impulsive.
A thin tune wavers through the hazy evening air, and her surroundings come into focus again. Folk music, maybe? But the guests are paying no attention, mingling loudly.
"What's she singing about?" Gina asks Anju, who's still on her swing, immobile, while one of the beautiful cousins is pressing a cotton ball soaked in oil over the henna designs with careful precision.
"I don't know," Anju shrugs. "I don't understand the words. Village-y dialect."
The cousin has the most remarkable long hair and universal sixteen-year-old bloom, all wrapped in pink and gold.
"Traditional wedding songs," the cousin says. "But we'll get to the good stuff soon. We've been practicing for weeks!"
"God," Anju says. "I don't know if I can sit here much longer. I really need to pee." She gives a little shudder. "And it's getting cold."
Gina had not noticed, with emotion flushing through her after the phone call, but now that the sun's gone, it's chilly.
The little girl says: "I'll get you a shawl. Our room—"
But Anju's father has appeared. He's a tall man with silver hair. Retired army officer who works in a bank now. A father from central casting.
"You've been sitting there for ages," he says. "Isn't it time for you to go have a cup of tea at least? Let's get you inside."
"But my mehendi," Anju's voice wavers, "It'll get ruined."
"Hands up," he says, and then he has the cousin and the little girl managing the voluminous long skirt while he swings Anju into his arms, saying, "You weigh a bit more than the last time I did this," and walking off with her to laughter and a smattering of applause.
Gina almost doesn't catch the moment. Her vision blurs.
In the pause after they leave, she thinks she should just call her father. Pre-emptive phone. If he's not on an operating table. In recovery. Unconscious...No, it would be weirdly early there. She should wait.
She doesn't know what she's supposed to be doing. What is there so special about a group of singers, singing, and an audience not particularly listening, though they applaud sporadically? What is there to remember in this?
The area around the dance floor is now thick with people. Kevin's parents are led to a sofa off to one side. She films their politely surprised and curious looks around, their fixed smiles. Kevin's roommate from college, Dan or Sam or Ned or some monosyllabic name like that, she can't remember, comes over to ask her if she knows what's going on.
He's interesting-looking, she's noticed that before. Interested-looking, too. He stares at people, one by one, as though he intends to memorize their faces. He's looking at her like that.
"I don't know for sure. Traditional wedding songs of some kind."
A couple of professional folk dancers take to the floor. No one follows.
"Are we supposed to dance?" Josh—his name is Josh—asks; she shrugs.
He has a crooked smile. He puts an arm out behind her when a waiter almost backs into her as the crowd jostles aside to let Anju come through.
The bride is dressed in another outfit, rust-colored and slightly clashing with the tracery on her hands which has turned a deep maroon, almost black. The folk musicians pack up and disappear as the younger set takes charge.
The band master turns disc jockey and one tune after the other comes blasting out of the sound system while various groupings of cousins and friends hip sync to Hindi film songs. Some of them have the thrusts and shoulder shakes and flirting eyes down perfectly.
Josh, still beside her, says things softly, just to her, such as "and I thought Indians were prudish" when a pretty pre-teen does a little writhing on the floor along with other moves. Gina gives a smile.
These set pieces done, the elders start getting pulled onto the floor. The Master of Ceremonies calls out not names, but relationships—Masi, maternal aunt, Dadi, paternal grandmother—Gina recognizes the terms from the briefing Anju gave her. She translates for Josh. People plead that they can't, they're too old or stiff, but they're pulled out of their chairs and thrust a hip or wiggle an arm, before giving up with much laughter. One very old aunt stands fast, mid-floor, her enormous eyes following every move of her gracefully waving hands.
The hands. They look like they should mean something. Gina stares again at the video but still cannot understand. Does that represent a bird? An opening flower?
Josh says: "She must have been really something when she was younger."
The stars are out; Gina pans over the Milky Way she's never seen so clearly. The desert chill intensifies, and the elders start drifting toward the dining room. The music turns Western, and couples take to the floor. Kevin and Anju love to dance to their idiosyncratic playlist of favorites. "Footloose" comes on and Josh pulls Gina into the warm press of bodies. His breath smells a little boozy this close. He must have made it to the un-virgin cocktails room. She gives in and moves, at least it helps her keep warm; the fancy tunic is heavy with beads, but thin. People are watching them, she can tell. Why not? They're good. They keep at it until "Memories" comes on and she says she can't possibly dance to slow and sentimental, and Josh says yeah, and they move to the side. He gives her his jacket.
Kevin and Anju lead the way into the big room where the buffet is laid out and the older guests are still lingering over emptied plates and steaming cups.
Anju's father gives a short speech, thanking everyone for sharing their joy and telling them all to rest up for the big ceremony tomorrow. The staff passes out hot water bottles in little knit overcoats at the door, and Josh stays beside her. He says he doesn't know if he'll be able to find his way back to his room, this place is such a maze. She says she's not sure they're on the right way to her turret, either. They laugh a little, backtracking and starting out again and bumping bodies on the narrow stair that winds up, until by her doorway his knee is between her legs and she is mainly glad for the heat and the unthinking common sense of it.
It's strange in the morning, of course, when she can sense Josh slipping out from under the thick quilt, as though not wanting to disturb her. As if she really could sleep through his hopping around on the cold floor looking for shoes and clothes. With goose bumps, his arms look a little like plucked chicken wings. He lives in New York. He doesn't get out in the sun much.
She doesn't move, unsure how he'd react.
Alone again, she checks her phone. There is a message, but from her mother, with her mother's typical attitude: SO NICKY CALLED YOU. I TOLD HER TO LEAVE YOU IN PEACE. HE WON'T HAVE THE NERVE TO MAKE SUCH A HUGE ASK. YOU DON'T OWE HIM ANYTHING. HE KNOWS IT. WHERE WOULD A KID EVEN STAY IN THAT PLACE OF YOURS? IT'S UP TO HIM TO MAKE ARRANGEMENTS. HIS RESPONSIBILITY. DON'T GET SUCKED IN.
How can she be sucked in, when he's said nothing to her.
When did he ever have anything to say to her? Unless you count when she'd asked him for money for law school and he'd said he wished he could but...
He's got his own problems, she'd thought then. He's moved on, left us...
Nothing Anju had told her about this place had mentioned cold. Woolens. Wintery nights that linger until the sun is high. The stone passages are freezing, the walls breathing out chill. In theory, in a grand place like this, you're supposed to be imagining royal women flitting ahead of you, their silks and jewels flashing, or princes wearing ropes of pearls and outsized swords clanking along. Gina thinks only of all the winter clothes she didn't pack.
She can't seem to get warm in the shadowed garden, or the corridor that ends in a huge, mossy reservoir. She hasn't seen this before. It's a little like the stuff of nightmares, deep and steep-walled.
It is also a waste of time. Anju's message had said to come immediately for a quick discussion of the day's priorities.
She goes back and takes another turn, and there's the swimming pool, the stairway with the pink walls, the garden with a little fountain that's right in front of the family suite. She knocks. No answer. Anju's latest appears on her phone: TOO LATE. SOME THING WITH THE PRIEST NOW. JUST FAMILY. SEE YOU WHEN YOU GET BACK.
Get back? Right. There was an outing for all the guests. Sightseeing. She's late.
She approaches the gathering point at reception cautiously, hoping Josh won't be there. She doesn't want to face the awkwardness of wondering whether he thinks she's following him or snubbing him or anything in between.
"Has everyone gone?" she asks the familiar Auntie who is one of the few people scattered around the lobby.
"Most people wanted to shop, but we're just going to the step well," Auntie says. "That is really worth seeing. Come with us."
With no clear idea what a "step well" might be, Gina slips into the car that's waiting for Auntie and her attached Uncle just as a van pulls up, and Josh steps out, carrying shopping bags, locked in conversation with a gorgeous cousin. She thinks of waving, but he's busy, holding out a gentlemanly hand to help the cousin step down.
The town they go through is disappointing, slapdash and unplanned. Dust everywhere. Beyond it there is equally nothing to see in the flat landscape. Scrubby bushes. Rocks.
They stop in the middle of nowhere. But when they get out and go around a low wall, the earth opens at their feet. An inverted tower has been dug into the ground, a huge rectangle of space yawns, ringed with arched corridors and ledges. Gina pauses at the top of the stone steps that go down and down and down.
"Seven stories," Uncle is saying and Auntie correcting, "No nine, the book said. Can you see water?"
Gina can see nothing but worn stone stairs plunging into dimness. She starts going down as Auntie calls out, "Be careful. It's so steep! Makes me dizzy!"
Gina is curious, though. Such an odd sensation with birds wheeling in the sky above. Green parrots are lined up on the ledges, flying out and in. And pigeons. Cooing and chittering in the cold breath coming up from inside Mother Earth.
She wonders why Earth is Mother, and what does that make sky? Father? Appropriately nebulous.
She goes down, the uncle gamely climbing down crab-wise beside her. The stairs become taller, more treacherous, and when she turns to look, the way back up is scary. Uncle stops to catch his breath. She goes farther and takes some pictures, and notices her phone has no reception down there. She begins to sweat as she climbs toward the sunlight again.
As she shows her pictures to Auntie and a few others who have crowded around—another load of guests and a few gawky village kids—a wind whips dust into a faint whirling column that moves across the plain behind them.
The small dust devil jerks and bends behind the demanding band of urchins, and she thinks: thirteen-year-old boy, would that be a sullen, impossible thing?
Back at the hotel, she takes a shower, now that the air has warmed a little. There's a message from Anju: BETTER GO HAVE LUNCH WITH EVERYONE. COME HERE AFTER?
She'd rather not have lunch with the others, but she missed breakfast, and she may get too busy later. She rushes through the buffet and finds a small pavilion in which to sit in the sun and eat, until another full-bodied, long-haired cousin and her heavily handsome husband come and make strained conversation, as though they are interested in Gina, this person who will be in their lives for no longer than a party weekend.
"You were in college with Anju?" the woman asks, while hunky husband tries to catch a passing waiter's eye.
"Law school," Gina says. "We were all in Law together."
"But that was in California, wasn't it?" cousin tosses her hair back as she asks.
"Yes. Then she went to Portland to be near Kevin, and I noticed there was a good job there..." And wanted to be away from Nicole, actually, and Mom, but not too far...
"So you're all in the same office?"
The woman is eating idli that's swimming in soupy dal, carrying dripping spoons to her mouth with such delicacy that her white shirt doesn't catch a single spot. A sweater's arms are tied around her shoulders; she has sunglasses as a headband. The bejewelled dancer of the night before turned yuppie.
"Anju and I were. Kevin's at another firm. And I changed jobs last year."
The husband asks his wife if she wants something; he's going back to the buffet since he can't catch a waiter. He does not ask Gina. The cousin lets down her shades in the mild sunlight and asks no more.
Gina could have talked about that big change, the slow-burning disgust with corporate clients, going off to a nonprofit to coordinate legal aid. All the jokes her colleagues made.
What would this couple think?
Anju had understood. She does pro bono work herself sometimes. She thinks she needs the paycheck though, too much depends on it, a house and home, a future, a family.
BRING YOUR OUTFIT, Anju texts. YOU CAN CHANGE HERE. THE HAIR AND MAKEUP WOMAN WILL DO YOURS TOO.
Gina has less trouble finding the suite this time. Anju opens the door. Her eyes are red.
"I guess you should get some shots while they're dressing me up," Anju sniffs. "People always have pictures of the transformation, don't they?" And then she loses it a little; she sobs.
"What's wrong?" Gina asks.
Anju collapses onto a love seat and presses her hands to her face as though to force the feelings back in.
"I can't be doing this," she moans. "I'll look terrible."
Gina sits beside her, wondering if Kevin, who can be self-absorbed at times, has said something unforgivable, or one of those cousins has made a snide remark, or Kevin just looks incredibly odd here, or, all of a sudden, his parents scare her.
"It's just," Anju tries to say, then has to try again: "It just hit me that after tomorrow we'll be gone, and I don't know when I'll see them all again. It won't be the same, ever."
Gina's arms encircle her friend and pull her close.
"Of course you'll see everyone," she says, "They'll visit, you'll visit, just like before...This is wedding day nerves. Everybody gets emotional. I thought my sister was going to turn around and run, she was all over the place."
Not exactly true, Nicole had been wild that Dad had come, dressed in wrinkled linen. He had nothing to do but sit in an inconspicuous chair, Nicole did not need anyone to give her away, but she hated the complications his simple presence generated.
"It's just," Anju sniffs. "Just that these last few days have been so..." She looks heavenward, in search of a word.
"So insane?" Gina suggests. Back in Delhi, she'd been staying at a neighbor's place, but every time she set foot in Anju's world, she'd been carried off shopping and meeting people and eating, eating, eating. A sea of people, moving in waves.
"I'd forgotten how much I missed them," Anju says, sobbing again.
Gina wonders as she looks out over Anju's head and smells some potent incense scent caught in her thick hair—is this what the thought of parting from your family should make you feel? Is this normal?
A key rattles in the lock and Anju's mother comes in, her hair done in the most impressive, immobile bun, wrapped in flowers, her face subtly perfected.
She says something Gina can't understand and comes over to lift Anju off the couch and wipe her eyes with the edge of her sari. A large woman follows, with assistant and equipment. With a quick sniff, Anju is drawn away.
Gina takes pictures of the now-laughing bride and her sister-in-law, her cousins, and the little girl who helps disentangle the gold-edged scarf from the fifteen-pound skirt.
Gina changes into the Max Mara gown she'd borrowed from Nicole. Anju's mother hunts through her store and finds a shawl with just the right plum shade in the embroidery. It is soft and wonderfully warm. The large woman brightens Gina's face and does uncomfortable things to her hair, and with much last-minute rushing around the suite for pins and fallen flowers and repairs of smudged eyes, the whole group proceeds across a courtyard, and slowly, majestically down a stone staircase, down the amphitheater rows of guests who turn to admire and sigh and smile. Some look a little teary-eyed.
Kevin is waiting below, and so is the hotel photographer who comes up a few steps and then walks down backward, catching the group's grand descent. As they pause for the moment when garlands are exchanged, several other guests pop up with phones, photographing. Gina is part of the party now, she can't be taking pictures, she's holding Anju's arm in one hand, managing the valuable old shawl with her other.
A priest says things, tells them where to sit, tells them to switch off their phones, and Gina realizes her phone was left in the room. It isn't on her. Someone could be calling now. It's getting toward morning in America. A call could come. She won't be answering. What will he think?
The sun is setting with an unearthly rose gold glow behind the couple as they stand under the stone canopy. The Auntie nearest her whispers damply in Gina's ear, "It's so beautiful, isn't it? This place is just like paradise."
Only a streak of red remains on the horizon when bride and groom get up, their scarves tied together, and everyone throws rose petals and shreds of marigold flowers and blessings. Smiling. Crying.
As Gina sinks her hands into the basket of petals, lifts, tosses huge handfuls, she thinks she will run now, back to the room. Say she has to get her camera. Get her phone. Call him.
It's only a phone call. She can do that much.
