The list that was never yours to begin with
It started at forty. Forty people, you said, close family, your oldest friends, maybe a handful of colleagues. You said it clearly, more than once. You said it the way you say things you actually mean, not the way you say things you're willing to negotiate. And then your mother said, "But what about Meena Aunty's side?" And your father said the neighbours had attended his brother's daughter's wedding and it would look bad. And your future mother-in-law said nothing, but her silence had a shape to it. Within three weeks, forty became ninety. By the time the caterer was booked, it was two hundred and twenty. On the day itself, you stood at the entrance of a banquet hall in a lehenga you love, watching four hundred people file in, and you felt something that wasn't quite happiness and wasn't quite grief. It was closer to the feeling of watching a version of your own life happen to someone else.
