All That Glitters.

          As I make my way towards the stage, through the labyrinth of guests and servers, I am interrupted by a young woman with a tray of drinks strapped to her chest. There are dozens of them in the hall, dressed in little golden frocks, serving gold-speckled tequila and inviting the men to lick the salt off their necks and wrists with an alacrity for which they are definitely not being adequately compensated.

“Have a drink!” She says to me, leaning forward to demonstrate her wares.

“No, thank you,” I respond, “I am in a bit of a hurry.”

“Come on!” She says, holding a shot glass of tequila to my lips, “Your friend just got married!”

As I poise to turn her down, an arm launches itself in front of my face, grabbing her wrist and forcing her hands to another set of lips. A drunk man, undoubtedly one of the relatives of my friend, slurs at her to give him attention instead. She offers her salt-glazed neck and he slurps at it like my goddaughter does to soup. I mutter an apology to her before heading off, mostly for his behaviour but also, the societal conditions that enable her job to be a job. I feel like I am constantly issuing apologies that no one asked for but I cannot help it. It’s a man’s world and we’re all just decorative pawns in it, but now we have the liberation to claim we rub salt on our necks to accentuate our sexualities for us. How wonderful. I hasten my traversal of the ballroom and finally arrive at the stage where my friend and her new husband are seated on a pale beige couch, thanking the people who come up to hand them envelopes full of cash and the kind of marital advice that does better on posters than in marriage. She looks so beautiful, even though she is laden in ostentatious gold jewellery from head to toe, layer-after-layer of necklaces until the gold around her neck just blends seamlessly into the golden bodice of her outfit. If Midas came to an Indian wedding, there wouldn't be anything left for him to turn to gold. What a waste of a good curse. I climb up onto the stage and congratulate the pair of them before moving to her side. 

"How are you doing?" I ask her, taking her hand in mine, "I am sorry I couldn't make it to the wedding." 

"It is okay," she says, looking at me, her jaw clenched so tight, the words barely make it out of her mouth, "I knew you wouldn't come. At least you came to the reception." 

"Are you alright?" I ask her, "You seem, fatigued."

"I am so tired, my head hurts, I have a fever, I just want to go home," she says, squeezing my hand, "Also my shoe is biting my right foot, can you fix it?" 

I smile and get down on the ground, lifting the seven-tonne skirt she is wearing, to fix her shoe. As I get up, I catch a glimpse of her father, staring at me as if attempting to locate from where the noisome odour he picked up is coming, and realising it is me. 

"Your dad is staring at me," I tell her, patting her shoulder, "I think I should leave now." 

"You can stay," she says, but she doesn't mean it. 

"Nah, he definitely doesn't want me here," I say, bending down and kissing the top of her head, "Congratulations Rhea. Call me when this implodes."

She giggles and rolls her eyes. 

As I head off the stage, I run into her father, I nod my head and mouth my felicitations at him while making my way towards the nearest exit. He stares after me, I can feel his gaze boring holes into the back of my head, I turn around and wave. He averts his gaze.

It has been six years since I last saw him, standing in my parents' driveway, warning me to stay away from his daughter lest he be compelled to break my legs. It was a few days after she had gotten home from the psychiatric ward of the state hospital after attempting to take her life. She had jumped off the terrace, breaking her arm and ankle, her brother had found her and taken her to the hospital, I had rushed over there to find her bandaged, drugged and awaiting surgery. Her parents were out of town, they were always out of town, and she spent most nights at my home. On occasion, she stayed at her place, and oftentimes, I found myself sneaking over there in the middle of the night, to help abate the panic attacks that afflicted every waking moment of her life. It had been that way ever since her family had moved to our loud little town and she had joined our school. I frequently found her at parties, hiding away in closets and kitchens, breathing deeply to calm herself while her jaw clattered unceasingly, as if it had a mind of its own. I ran into her in her states of distress with such regularity, we struck up a friendship; one based almost entirely on the fact that I knew something about her that she had so deftly kept from everyone else. 

As far as everyone else was concerned, she was magnificent, perfect and popular. She had an infectious laugh, expensive handbags, a thin waist, coloured hair, and she was from the big city, which in secondary school translates to a girl who is out of everyone's league. On the other hand, I was the angry, outspoken nerd who wore too much black, and had friends only because the nice girls needed someone to buy them their cigarettes and emergency contraception. No one quite grasped why we were friends and for a while, I didn't understand it either. Then one night, after a party, we came back to my place and bolstered by the liquid courage of cheap inebriants, she kissed me. She grabbed the back of my head and pulled me to her with the kind of force I couldn't fathom resided within her dainty wrists. I was surprised and perturbed, I asked her to stop and reconsider, but she was so adamant and I was so easily compelled by her body, that we slept together. In the morning, as we got ready for school, she came to find me in my dressing room. 

"Listen, you cannot tell anyone about this," she said to me, "I mean, we can be together, I want to be with you, but if anyone finds out I will die, my family will kill me." 

I agreed and understood. I wanted to be with her as well, and while I was as "out" as one can be in a conservative town in urban India, she was not in a position to claim her identity.

 
"Anyway, I am not really gay, you know," she continued, "I mean, not like you, I just love..you." 

In the court of falling for straight girls, I am a recidivist, but she was my first offence, I did not know what any of that meant. I just knew that I wasn't anticipating having a girlfriend until I moved to the city the following year and the most beautiful girl in my school was telling me she was into me. In secret, we started dating. She used to say that we are so lucky to be women, because women can have the type of relationships where even if they spent several nights together, no one would suspect there was something sexual between them. I didn't really see that as fortunate but I agreed with her, because I wanted her to keep loving me. I loved her so much, I relished the opportunities to hold her even when she was shaking from the grief of an empty apartment and being raised by parents in absentia. Sometimes after we had sex, she wouldn't speak to me for a few hours, and when she did speak to me again, she would focus on convincing me that she wasn't gay, she just didn't see me as a woman. I had more of a masculine energy, evidently, and she would rather reassign my gender identity than accept her sexual orientation. 

Over the months, the state of her mental health continued to deteriorate. Her family wanted her to marry as soon as she finished secondary school and she wanted to get a job and be free. I couldn't understand how there could be such disparity between us. How could we have lived next door to each other but existed in completely different societies altogether? I was raised in a household that pushed financial independence and liberation, and she was raised in one that believed nineteen was too old for a girl to still be unmarried. We went to the same fancy private school, we took exams on the same feminist literature, attended the same events but we had lunch in dining rooms that belonged in different generations. At the time, I didn't know my repeated questions about why she couldn't just leave were coming from a misguided place, the cost of emancipation is different for each one of us and emancipation is the price for female liberty in this country. I didn't have the words to explain that to her, I didn't have the skills to save her. No matter how often my mother's friends told me that I was an "old soul", I was a seventeen-year-old girl, without a clue as to how to manage suicidal ideation in another teenaged girl. 

That much was clear when I got the call informing me that she had jumped off her terrace. After I saw her in the hospital, I waited for her parents and called mine. We thought we lived like unsupervised renegades, but we were just kids playing with the volatile toys of life, not knowing the first thing to do when one of them blew up in our hands. Over the next couple of days she was discharged to a psychiatric facility, the first night she was there, I stayed with her, she held my hand with both her hands, squeezing it so tight, it went numb in a matter of minutes.

"Please don't leave me and go," she kept muttering to me, whenever her jaw stopped shaking long enough to get out a few words. 

The next morning, her parents asked me to leave. They said the doctors had recommended that she be only around family. It is insidious how much legal precedence family is afforded in situations, when there does not even exist enough legal precedent to hold family responsible for the continuous abuse of daughters. Families have the power to rape the most powerful part of humanity, the will to strive for freedom, and once it is broken, a light goes off in the eyes of the person. Look around you, look inside the eyes of people, and you will see, some of us have been murdered by the vicissitudes of society, our families acting as the hitmen hired by the cabal of Indian culture. 

I left. 

I did not hear from her or her parents for days, my mother called them, but got no response either. I didn't see anyone, or get any news, until her father stood in my driveway, explaining to my mother that I had turned his daughter into a lesbian and that is why she had attempted to take her life. My mother asked him, quite politely, to leave. He did eventually, but not before threatening me, and accusing me of deigning to be less than heterosexual, as if my sexual orientation was enough evidence of turpitude for everyone else to be let off the hook on this matter. I was the smoking gun and they put their daughter's blood on my hands. I said nothing in my defense, I didn't know I needed a defense. I stepped out of her life. We didn't speak anymore, not at school nor at parties. Everyone in our social circle seemed to know they had to keep us apart and they participated in that segregation with eudaemonic enthusiasm, as if they realised the power of being agents of social conformity and the capacity of acceptance by society to make one believe their life had value. Within a day of graduating from school, I left for college, determined to leave all of it behind, as if it never happened. I didn't hear from her again, not until earlier this year when she called to tell me she was getting married.

 
"Will you come?" She asked me over the phone, "I want you to come." 

"I don't think your parents will like that," I told her. 

She was twenty-three at the time, and while I did not know what she had done to hold her parents off for all those years, I was glad she had done it. 

"It doesn't matter if they don't like it," she said, "I should have stood up for you all those years ago but..you know." 

"I know," I told her, "I don't hold it against you. Tell me what you have been up to?" 

She had managed to convince her parents to let her go to college and get a job that she had promised to leave as soon as she got married. She told me about the man she was marrying, he was the son of businessmen, from a wealthy family that liked to keep its women at home, because the family ornaments must be protected. I didn't ask if she loved him, I didn't have to. We made plans to see each other instead. 

"You know, you could throw me that bachelorette party you always said you would," she suggested. 

"You want that?" I asked, realising that the love I felt for my first offence had never left me. 

"I just want to have all kinds of wild fun for one night before I get married," she said. 

And that is when I realised, it was me, I was the wild fun she wanted to have. By this time in my life I have woken up in the beds of vodka-bisexuals enough times to become a little jaded on the matter, but straight-presenting girls who refuse to acknowledge my existence have become an addiction to me, a mistake I know I will make many, many times over. I invited her to come home. For a few hours, lost in the soft sea of her skin and the gentle force of her need, I felt like I was seventeen again but I have the lucidity of life experience. I finally understood our lives in a way that I hadn't when we were young and broken. I understood why it had to be that way. After, we sat on my bed, in my tiny apartment where I was determined to make it on my own, sharing a cigarette. 

"I don't love him, you know," she said, taking the cigarette from my hand, "I can't say that to anyone but I really don't love him." 

"I know," I told her. 

"I wish I could run away," she said, "My family would never speak to me again but you know, I have a job now..." 

We convince women that financial independence will be enough to secure freedom, and it does go a long way, but the truth is there are so many strings holding up the marionettes of modern India, that cutting one string doesn't free them, only makes them dance in a way that is less acceptable to the audience. 

"Is that what you want?" I asked her. 

"I do," she said, "But my parents, you know, they have spent so much money and I have no support at all, who will help me?" 

"I can help you Rhea," I said, "But I won't take the blame for you, I hope you understand that." 

She laughed and changed the subject. She left before the sun came up and I woke up in my bed alone. I told her I wouldn't be able to attend her wedding and I didn't, but she begged me to come to the reception so I did. As I walk out of the hall, I feel like an alien in this world. When I was young, my conviction in my beliefs was enough for me to force inclusion even if it wasn't real and everyone was just waiting for me to grow out of this phase, but now, I am a grown woman and I do not fit their narrative and so I am not welcome. In this world made of gold, sleaze and festivity, I am a dark blotch. I feel a great sense of relief as I walk out of the doors, like I have left death behind. Outside I notice the girl in the golden frock, standing against a car and smoking a cigarette. I walk up to her.  

"You are done with your shift?" I ask her.
"Yeah but I cannot get a cab," she says, "You're leaving so soon?" 

"Yeah this isn't the place for me," I tell her, lighting a cigarette for myself, "You want to come with me?" 

"Sure," she says. 

I put my arm around her and guide her to my car. I don't know what she expects from me, but if there is enough vodka in her, I'm sure she will tell me, and in the morning when she puts on her golden dress and leaves, I will come just a little bit closer to accepting the truth. The world of diurnal love is not for me. I reach over and hold her hand, squeezing it between my fingers. She squeezes back. I lean over and kiss her, guiding her hand to the back of my head, pushing my head into it so as to recreate some lost fragment of my youth. I close my eyes and I can see her. Rhea. In all her bridal finery. In the lips of the girl in my car, I sing her an elegy. I realise there was a point at which I stopped trying to save Rhea, and started to mourn her instead.

And now she is gone. 

All that glitters is the afterlife in which I have left her behind, laden in gilded shackles and fatigued from the strain of her ornamentation.