Lost

(Inspired by a prompt from StoryADay.org to write a story based on a photograph. I didn't have an actual photo on hand, so I drew on memory of the hundreds of photos taken on my wedding day.)

We asked the photographers we hired to photograph our wedding not to do formal poses. We wanted casual images of everything and everyone who was attending. We told them to shoot digital images and not to worry about photoshop. We just wanted the photographs. We would create our own album based on everything they shot later.

            As a result, we have hundreds of photographs. Of an afternoon brunch at a neighborhood bistro where Jim used to work. Of the havan in the Minnehaha State Park where a hastily purchased bottle of Wesson oil provided a substitute for missing ghee. Of the sangeet, the evening reception, and of course the wedding itself.

            I am not sure what happened to all of the photographs. Jim created a slide show and posted them to a website. Later, that site became my professional calling card, and the wedding photos went somewhere else.

            The wedding took place on October 8, a Saturday. It was sunny and slightly crisp. I was quite warm because I was wearing a crinoline slip under the heavily embroidered fuchsia colored Indian lengha that my fashion designer friend Preety had had tailored for me, but Jim, clad in silk pants and a lightweight aloha shirt, was shivering. I remember that many of the photos showed him covered in a soft grey-brown Pashmina wool shawl that moments before the ceremony my mother draped over his shoulders.

            I had dressed at the park, sliding the slip and lengha over a set of sweats and then letting the sweats drop to my feet. The wedding dress and jewelry all had been made in India, and were stashed in a brown vinyl suitcase. As I dressed, I placed the sweats, my wallet, cell phone, and a rental car keys in the suitcase. My friend Kat from Hawai‘i, who was my bridesmaid, put the suitcase in the car she and her husband had rented.

            I was dressed entirely in red, except for a Swedish veil that Jim’s mother had given me after I had asked her if there was something from her family’s tradition that could be added to my dress. Jim’s mother loved the dress, and years later, told me that she loved the surprise that her friends had exhibited when they saw her future daughter-in-law getting married not in white (a color of death for many Hindus) but in red (a harlot’s color for many conservative Christians).

            Friends began to arrive: Two cousins from my sister Nisha’s husband’s side of the family; old friends from The Seattle Times; and even some friends whom I had known from Northwestern. I had not seen some of them since I had graduated college twenty years earlier. It touched me that they cared enough to attend.

            The ceremony went quickly, and I felt smoothly. During the singing of a Ganesh mantra, I averted my head away from the family members gathered on stage and caught sight of my former boyfriend-turned-friend. He bobbed his head and grinned as he caught my eye, humming in tune with the mantra, reminding me that this was my wedding, not my sister-in-law's.

            After the ceremony, everyone wanted to hug me, and every time I was hugged one of the photographers snapped a camera. Friends of the Carlsons, friends from Muncie, old friends who had befriended my parents when they first emigrated from India had come for the ceremony. And old friends of mine and of Jim's from all over the country. Regardless of who we were and what are backgrounds had been, we did as Jim had predicted. We stood together for twenty minutes, mingled and mixed into a singular community. Years later, Jim's sister would tell me that the ceremony was freaky, and that the two faiths -- Hinduism and Christianity -- did not belong together and should have been kept apart. The last words that I uttered to her as she closed her door in my face was that I hoped that they could.

            We made our way eventually to the falls. My mother had felt it would be auspicious for me to put my foot in the cool stream, to do a sort of ritualistic cleansing in my first act as a married woman. I loved water and the idea of a ritual and a cleansing, so I was happy to oblige.

            As I approached the stream bank, my foot unaccustomed to the heeled sandals I was wearing slipped. It landed in slippery mud and ice cold water. Jim's first act as a married man was to wipe the mud off my shoe and my heel.

            After a series of pictures, we went back to the parking lot to find our car. And we discovered that the car was locked, and that the keys were in the suitcase that Kat had put in her rental car. Only Kat was not there. She was nursing an infant and the baby had needed to be fed. Forgetting the suitcase in the trunk, she and her husband had left.

And so as was the case with my parents upon their arrival to America so many years earlier, this phase of my life began also with a suitcase that was lost.