Chapter 7: Nandini

# Chapter 7: Nandini

## The Sangeet

The sangeet rehearsal was a disaster in four acts.

Act One: the choreographer. Rhea Malhotra, twenty-three, Delhi-based, trained in "Bollywood contemporary fusion" (a genre that Nandini suspected had been invented by Instagram dance accounts and that did not exist in any formal pedagogy), arrived at the Narain Niwas Palace venue at 3 PM wearing athleisure that cost more than Nandini's monthly groceries and immediately declared the marble floor "too slippery for the lift sequence."

The marble floor. The marble floor that was the Narain Niwas Palace's defining feature. The marble floor that had been laid in 1928 by Italian craftsmen brought to Jaipur by the Maharaja of Kanota. The marble floor that could not be made less slippery without covering it, and covering it would defeat the purpose of booking a venue whose primary selling point was the marble floor.

"Can the boys wear rubber-soled shoes?" Nandini asked.

"Rubber-soled shoes with sherwanis?" Rhea's expression conveyed the specific horror of a person for whom aesthetic coherence was a moral principle. "The whole look is mojaris. Embroidered mojaris.

"Can we put grip tape on the mojaris?"

"Grip tape. On hand-embroidered Jodhpuri mojaris."

The conversation died. The conversation died because the conversation had reached the impasse where practical solutions collided with aesthetic standards and neither yielded, fundamental condition of — the impasseIndian wedding planning.

Act Two: the sound system. The DJ, Bunty, a man whose real name was Bhupender and whose DJ name was "DJ Bunty Beats" and whose business card featured a photograph of himself wearing sunglasses indoors; had set up his speakers at the far end of the hall, against the wall that contained the Narain Niwas Palace's prized collection of miniature paintings, the paintings depicting scenes from the life of Krishna that had been hanging on that wall since 1935 and that were vibrating visibly with every bass drop of the Bollywood remix that Bunty was testing.

"Bunty ji, the paintings."

"Kya hua, madam?"

"The bass is vibrating the paintings off the wall."

Bunty looked at the paintings. Bunty looked at his speakers. Bunty performed the calculation that DJs performed when asked to choose between sound quality and the preservation of ninety-year-old art. Sound quality won.

"Madam, if I reduce the bass, the dance numbers won't hit. The sangeet needs bass.

"If the bass knocks a painting off the wall, it's just a lawsuit."

Bunty turned the bass down. Bunty's expression suggested this was a personal tragedy comparable to the Partition.

Act Three: the groom's family's sangeet performance. The Agarwal side — the groom Harsh's family, the Marwari jewellers from Gopalji Ka Rasta, had prepared a choreographed dance number to "Gallan Goodiyaan" that involved twelve family members, a prop suitcase, and a sequence where the groom's father (Rajesh Agarwal, fifty-seven, a man whose physical relationship with dance was the relationship of a stranger to a foreign country) was supposed to slide across the marble floor on his knees.

The knee-slide did not work. The knee-slide, on the marble floor that was too slippery for the lift sequence but apparently not slippery enough for the knee-slide, resulted in Rajesh Agarwal remaining stationary on his knees, his momentum absorbed by the marble's surface, his expression transitioning from enthusiastic to confused to mildly pained in the span of three seconds.

"Papa, you have to push harder," said Harsh, who was watching from the side with the expression of a groom who had agreed to the family dance number under duress and was now watching his father's knees absorb the consequences.

"Beta, my knees are not what they used to be."

"Uncle, try going from a standing position," Rhea suggested. "Like a cricket slide. You know, like a fielder."

Rajesh Agarwal was not a fielder. Rajesh Agarwal was a jeweller whose primary physical activities were sitting in his Gopalji Ka Rasta showroom, walking to the showroom from his car (a distance of twelve feet), and occasionally lifting a velvet tray of gold necklaces (weight: approximately 2 kilograms). The cricket slide was not in his repertoire.

"Nandini ji," Harsh pulled her aside. His voice was the voice of a man who was twenty-nine and getting married in six days and who had discovered that the sangeet rehearsal was the specific hell that Indian weddings invented to test the groom's commitment. "Can we cut the knee-slide?"

"It's your family's choreography. You'll need to discuss with your parents."

"My mother choreographed this. She'll kill me."

"Then the knee-slide stays."

"Can we put a mat down? For the slide?"

"A mat on the marble floor."

"A small mat. A cushion. Something."

Nandini made a note: Row 912, Sangeet knee-slide cushion: investigate.

Act Four: the bride cried.

Not during the rehearsal. After. In the women's bathroom of the Narain Niwas Palace, sitting on the floor — the bathroom floor, which was also marble, which was less slippery than the hall floor due to the grout lines between the tiles, with her lehenga trial dupatta draped over her knees and her phone playing a voice note that Nandini could hear through the door.

The voice note was from the bride's best friend in Bangalore, and the voice note said, in the cheerful-devastating way that best friends communicated hard truths: "Prachi, I'm so sorry, but I can't make it. My boss moved the client presentation to Thursday. I tried to swap but he said no. I'll be there for the reception on Saturday, pakka promise."

Prachi Shekhawat: the bride, twenty-six, a woman who had been planning this wedding with the intensity of a military campaign and the emotional investment of a person who believed that the perfect wedding was the foundation of the perfect marriage; was crying because her best friend would miss the sangeet.

Nandini sat on the bathroom floor beside her. The floor was cold. The marble was cold because marble was always cold, even in Rajasthan, even in February, the cold: the stone's nature, the stone retaining the night's temperature long after the sun had warmed the air above it.

"Prachi, listen: "

"She was supposed to do the dance with me. The best friend dance.

"Can someone else step in? Your cousin? Meghna?"

"Meghna has two left feet and she knows it. The last time Meghna danced, she knocked over a lamp."

Nandini did not dispute this. Nandini had met Meghna at the mehndi planning session and had observed that Meghna's spatial awareness was, charitably, developing.

"Okay. What if we video-call her during the sangeet? Put her on the big screen. She dances in Bangalore, you dance here. Split-screen duet."

Prachi looked up. Her eyes were red, her nose was running, and her expression was the expression of a woman who was evaluating a creative solution through the filter of six days of wedding stress and the specific grief of her best friend's absence.

"That could work?"

"We'd need good Wi-Fi. And a screen. And Bunty to handle the audio sync."

"Bunty can barely handle the bass."

"I'll handle Bunty. You handle Isha. Tell her to wear something nice and find a white wall."

The crisis subsided. The crisis subsided because that was what crises did in wedding planning, they arrived with the force of a Rajasthani sandstorm, they demanded immediate attention, they consumed emotional energy, and they were solved by practical women sitting on cold marble floors in bathrooms, the solving; work that the spreadsheet could not capture, the work that was human and intuitive and could not be reduced to a row and a column and a "RESOLVED" in green.

---

The sandstone was gritty under her palm when she steadied herself against the bazaar wall.

Nandini left the venue at 9 PM. The drive back to the old city was twenty minutes in the Ola. The Ola: the transportation that replaced the autorickshaw after dark, the autorickshaw: the daytime vehicle and the Ola, which was the nighttime vehicle, the shift driven not by safety (the old city was safe, the old city had been safe for centuries, the old city's safety being the product of density, of windows that overlooked every lane, of neighbours who knew each other and whose knowing was the surveillance that no CCTV camera could match) but by fatigue. Nandini was too tired for an auto.

The Ola dropped her at Chandpole Gate. She walked through the gate: the gate that was one of seven gates in the old city wall, the gate that had been the entrance to the Rajput quarter since the city's founding, the gate that was now flanked by a juice stall and a mobile recharge shop and that carried the unmistakable beauty of a historical monument that the daily commerce of a living city had absorbed into its ordinary landscape.

The lane to the haveli was quiet. The lane at 9 PM was a different lane from the lane at 5:30 AM — the shops shuttered, the vegetable carts gone, the schoolchildren replaced by cats (the old city's cats being the nighttime's proprietors, the cats who emerged at dusk and reclaimed the lanes that the human commerce had occupied during the day).

As she walked, she passed the turn onto Kishanpole. She did not turn. The tapri was closed, Qureshi Chai closed at 7:30 PM, the closing time that Dada had established and that Farid maintained, the 7:30 being the time after which the old city's commercial lanes emptied and the remaining customers were the paan-wala's late-night regulars, not the chai-drinkers.

But she paused. She paused at the turn and looked down the lane toward where the tapri was, the tapri that was invisible in the dark, the darkness having swallowed the green board and the counter and the bench and the stall's entire physical presence. The tapri existed in the dark only as a memory, the memory of the chai and the ginger and the pour and the man behind the counter.

She was thinking about the paneer.

Not about the paneer itself — the Junaid dairy order was confirmed, the first batch scheduled for Tuesday, the logistics handled. She was thinking about the offer. The offer that Farid had made, the two-trips-to-Bassi offer, the offer that converted a chai-maker into a logistics partner, the offer that had no commercial justification (his commission was a joke about SHO Waseem's chai account) and that therefore had a different justification, a justification that lived in the space between the commercial and the personal.

The personal. The word that Nandini had been avoiding. The word that the old city's architecture and the family's expectations and the forty sentences and the twelve mornings conspired to make unavailable. The word that existed anyway, the way the tapri existed in the dark — invisible but present, present because the memory of it was present, the memory, the trace that presence left when the physical form was removed.

She reached the haveli. She climbed the stairs. She opened the jharokha room's door. The room was as she had left it. The desk, the laptop, the spreadsheet, the steel almirah. The room was the room of a woman who worked and the room did not contain evidence of anything else, the anything else: life that existed outside the work, the life that was mornings at the tapri and the pour and the ginger and the careful, precise, old-city-etiquette conversation with a man whose hands were stained with turmeric and whose vocabulary included "volatile" and whose green-signed tapri had been the neutral territory of the lane for fifty-five years.

She sat at the desk. She opened the laptop. She did not open the spreadsheet. She opened Instagram. She searched: @qureshichai.

The account. 4,700 followers. The daily photograph, the steel pot, the steam, the ginger threads, the amber chai in the morning light. The photographs were not professional. The photographs were taken on a cracked-screen Redmi. The photographs were good because the subject was good and because the photographer, the photographer had the eye.

She scrolled. The photographs went back three years, three years of daily chai, three years of mornings, three years of the same pot and the same counter and the same green board, the same-ness, which was consistency that the formula promised and that the photographs documented.

She did not follow the account. She did not follow because following was, following was the digital equivalent of the handshake that had not happened, the handshake across the counter, the handshake that would have been the touch and that the touch had not been and that the following would be, the following, the digital touch, the acknowledgment that said I am interested in your life beyond the fifteen minutes when I am at your counter.

She closed Instagram. She opened the spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet absorbed the entry. The spreadsheet absorbed everything, the crises and the solutions and the margins and the vendor changes and the bride's bathroom tears and the baraat route and the paneer catastrophe. The spreadsheet was the container, the container that held the chaos in its rows and columns.

But the spreadsheet could not contain what was happening at 5:30 AM on Kishanpole Bazaar. The spreadsheet had no row for that. The spreadsheet had no column for the ginger or the pour or the formula or the way the man behind the counter made the second chai without being asked.

Some things did not fit in spreadsheets.

Nandini closed the laptop. She went to bed. She did not sleep for forty minutes, the forty minutes being occupied by the thoughts: the thoughts about the tapri in the dark, the tapri that was invisible but present.

At 4:30 AM, her alarm went off. Another day. Another crisis. Another morning.

Another chai.