8. Farzana got married the month I graduated from college in Bangalore and returned to Hyderabad. Just a few weeks earlier, I had been offered a job as a language trainer at an American outsource center. The money on offer was exciting, but my mother had been disappointed. She wanted something bigger for me, more in line with her ideals. “Journalism,” she had said. “Or teaching. Academia.” “I don’t want to end up like you,” I had replied, and it was true, but I regretted saying it. I tried talking it through with Farzana the morning she called me at my hostel with news of her impending marriage to Dr. Aziz Murtaza, O.D., but she seemed distant. It was the tone of most of our phone conversations around then. I told myself it was because we had spent too much time in different cities. But there was more to it than that.
“There must be at least one interesting boy at your college hostel!” she would say, nudging my shoulder. “Come on, tell me all about it!”
“Don’t be silly, Farzi,” I replied, flustered, heat rising to my face. “That’s not what college is for.”
“Bela, you’re so useless. I can’t stop imagining the things I would do with that kind of freedom.”
She would lie back on the lawn and close her eyes, perhaps contemplating a life lived freely among young men, uninterrupted by her family. As for me, I just sat there with my heels pressed into the damp grass, unable to bring myself to look at her.
Everything had seemed the same that summer. Yet nothing had.
When we were children, I saw myself mirrored in Farzana. We were the same height for a while; we wore similar clothes. I even insisted that my mother braid my hair the way Farzana’s mother braided hers. The similarity faded as we grew up: Farzana’s body embraced adolescence with the passion of a long-waiting lover while mine did so hesitantly, the way one embraces the aunt who shows up at a family dinner smelling of armpit musk. Yet the full extent of our difference only impressed itself upon me that summer after my first year away at college. Farzana’s eyes, the shape of Persian almonds, were now defined by thick, black lashes. Her lips were pink like guava flesh. Her limbs had an unexpected grace about them, having inherited her mother’s slowness but not her heft. I was still a wide-hipped girl with a flat chest and red bumps trailing across the breadth of my forehead. My mother insisted this was normal, but it seemed unfair that Farzana’s beauty had stolen right past this station. She had gone from being a sweet little girl to a woman of perfect shape, perfect tone and texture, perfect balance between soft and hard. It was impossible to take in.
On subsequent visits home, I came prepared with piles of books: Major Romantic Poets, Subaltern Theatre, Introduction to Feminist Criticism. “Tough syllabus, Farzi,” I would shout to her from my window as she waited by our gate. “What can I say? I’d love to watch a movie with you. But I have to stay ahead with my studies, you know?” Watching her face fall in disappointment was strangely delicious. When I was back at the hostel I started avoiding her calls, just so when she finally reached me I could hear her scream, “Where have you been, Bela? I missed you!” into the phone. I felt entitled to the desperation in her voice, as though it restored equilibrium to the world.
Eventually Farzana grew tired of my game. She had less and less to say to me. Our friendship labored forward on stilted banter and forced laughter until, on the day of her wedding, I found myself relegated to the outer edges of a large crowd of guests.
I should have been the one dressing her up, arranging her grandmother’s diamonds around her swanlike neck and weaving strings of jasmine into her chestnut hair. Wasn’t that the plan? We would have giggled all along, taking an illicit peek at the groom through the curtains and making jokes about the size of his nose. Instead, I was standing in a corner of the zenana, feeling out of place among Farzana’s sylphlike cousins dressed in chiffon shararas, my mother’s brocade saree stiff around my waist like wrapping paper on an oddly shaped gift. I tried catching Farzana’s eye when she emerged, but an entourage of older women gathered around her, teary-eyed at the bride’s impending departure from the country. Farzana’s mother was standing right next to her and when she glanced my way, I lost all nerve to walk up to the wedding party. I watched the ceremony from afar, standing beside a group of girls jostling one another to get a better look at Dr. Aziz Murtaza, O.D. “Farzi’s such a lucky girl, yaar,” one of them squealed, palm flat on heaving bosom. “Just look at how handsome he is!”
Farzana sat cross-legged in the ceremonial pavilion, facing the diaphanous sheet held between her and Doctor. She was wearing a sage-green ghagra with a zardozi-encrusted bird motif, her slender body bearing the weight of her jewelry with surprising finesse. Handsome is the very least the man ought to be, I thought. Because Farzana looked like a queen.
Later, in a line of acquaintances and distant relatives, I waited my turn to congratulate her. She leapt at me with a hug and for a moment, our intimacy returned. Anything I wanted to say might have been permissible right then. Hey, Farzi, what a big nose your groom has. Hey, Farzi, are you sure he’s going to be dedicated enough to you? Hey, Farzi, you should just tell him you won’t go to London with him, you know? But then the women waiting behind me started to shuffle and I knew I had to hurry. I had only begun to congratulate her before someone pulled her the other way, shouting over the crowd that the photographer was ready.
“We’ll go for burgers before I leave for England,” she said to me as she walked toward her husband, tall and lean in his white sherwani.
“Yes, of course,” I replied.
We both knew that no such thing would happen. Yet in that instant before we turned our backs on each other, we pretended otherwise.