As her family started looking for a tenthouse and cook for the wedding feast and accumulating their scant jewelry, neighbors began inviting Dolly with her friends into their homes. It was a bridal shower of sorts that lasted days. The group of girls would be served an elaborate lunch, sometimes dinner too. Dolly would get a set of clothes, some cosmetics, sometimes just money in lieu of the clothes or cosmetics. The women of the house would paint her nails, colour her feet, tie flowers in her hair, make her wrap the new sari around, no matter how uneasy she was. The group of friends would have a gala time too, with plenty of food, some song and some dance.
Albeit the youngest, I was a member of Dolly's group of friends. We visited almost a dozen homes in the weeks preceding her wedding. Finally it was my family's turn to have her over for lunch. Incidentally my folks forgot and now it was too close to the wedding date and the bride to be was to stay indoors, not be about much. I was enraged, how could this be.
I pestered my folks to right the wrongs. And Dolly was invited. It was rather low key because not many could know about this. Although I was exasperated, there was so much preparation to be done, I was emotional too as I was to lose my friend forever. I went to the market with mother and picked out nail paint and hair clips and bindis and vermilion and lastly a crisp cotton sari and petticoat to go with.
At home, father cooked prawns in coconut milk and pilaf. The prawns were delightfully plump and they had someone climb the cononut tree in the backyard and throw down a few as I waited to catch them. An aunt scraped them down and squeezed the milk out. For desert there was gulabjamun. Dolly seemed to like it around our house though she hadn't been there much. I was elated to be giving her the send off she deserved. I gave her a bouquet of flowers I had plucked from our garden and tied together. She thanked me with tears and hugged me tight when she found out the crumpled notes I had saved from my pocket money and tied to the stem of the bouquet.
Years went by. I passed into teenage. Dolly kept visiting her maternal house from time to time. First pregnant, then with a baby, then with a toddler and pregnant again, then with three children. Time seemed to get clumsier. Her father passed away, then a few years later, her mother too, she kept visiting and staying. I rarely visited her though. I knew her when I was so little. I had grown up, things were different now.
But whenever I would cross her house I would wonder if she was visiting. If she would see me, she would come rushing out and I wouldn't know where to hide. Her face changed, it became rounder, her belly swelled from carrying so many children, her veins showed from under her skin, hair thinned, the glint in her eyes dwindled. I studied, got gaunter, had heartbreaks, never thought about marriage, fantasized about escaping from home. And then one day, I did. I never returned for good. I never met Dolly again. She lived and grew older in my mind only. Or probably froze at that very moment I had given her my home grown bouquet tied in the crumpled notes of my pocket money.