My sister-in-law gushed. I wasn’t ready to make a decision, yet — I had plans to meet the designers behind Falguni Shane Peacock in Mumbai, India’s fashion capital, and wanted to browse shops there — but it was reassuring to know that there existed an option in Delhi that happened to be on sale for half the price. Hungry, we rode the mall escalators up to Set’z, a white-tableclothed place with an incongruous hodgepodge of cuisine, ordered pepperoni pizza, Sichuan chicken and sticky toffee pudding and toasted our find with a bottle of Fratelli chenin blanc, a relative steal at 1,500 rupees, or about $22. The wedding diet would start back home.
Food and drink tided us over when shopping got tedious, as it did in Jaipur, the city of pink-walled palaces and ancient forts that serves as the capital of the northern, desert-draped state of Rajasthan. Six of us attended a reunion of my mother-in-law’s family there and shopped, unsuccessfully, for my fiancé. After six hours of tramping through stores, tired and parched, we gave ourselves over to flimsy plastic stools in the parking lot of a Pizza Hut, where a crowd milled about a chai stand. Served in conical tumblers, rife with cinnamon and cardamom, the tea felt like a hug for the insides and restored us to the degree that we were able to make a decision about bridesmaids outfits, which my sister-in-law gamely modeled at the multilevel Indian clothing superstore Pratap Sons. (What we didn’t realize until later: once tailored, the off-the-shoulder blouses prevented my bridesmaids from raising their arms above their heads. Freedom of movement trumps photos; they all changed after the ceremony.)
My fiancé would find his wedding outfit back in Delhi, thanks to reconnaissance trips his parents conducted while he and I went on a three-night jaunt to Mumbai, where I bought a blush pink Falguni Shane Peacock bridal lehenga that outshone the one from the mall. We returned to a more crowded Delhi than the one we left. Two weeks into our trip, my cousin-in-law, his parents and his girlfriend arrived, which meant there were now 11 people sharing a three-bedroom apartment. The teakettle in the kitchen started whistling at 5:30 each morning; showers ran cold after the first three. Family breakfasts of samosas, masala scrambled eggs and many, many cups of coffee got us to laugh about whatever funny thing had happened the day before — like me telling an Uber driver, “no habla Hindi.”
There remained the matter of the invitations, whose production my fiancé and father-in-law insisted we check on in person. “We can’t just have them email us a proof?” I asked, dreading a trip back to Old Delhi. But in addition to invitation savants, that ancient part of the city also contained the Chandni Chowk district, where I could find an outfit for our sangeet — the night of music and dancing that precedes a Hindu wedding — similar to those at the fancy mall but for a lot less.
