They again walk past her, she invisible to them as she has always been.īut tonight the mannequin is not thinking of those brides. But the new brides are now too preoccupied in reassuring their friends-and perhaps even themselves-to hear more of her questions. She glimpses their proud, flustered faces, wishing she could ask them if all their dreams have truly been fulfilled. They do not recognize the mannequin but she remembers every one of them. Once the almost-brides become brides, they come to the shop again, accompanying their now almost-bride friends in the capacity of wise married women, dispensing advice about marriage and all its excess and varied baggage. Who was she getting married to then? Was there even a groom in the first place? She does not dwell much on the answer, though, focusing instead on the reality awaiting her once she wakes up: the sound of monsoon rain, wearing newly stitched and embroidered kurtas, and imploring the crowds to look at her again. But she will always wake up from those dreams, never having once seen her groom’s face. She will fall into a long, dark sleep, occasionally punctuated by dreams in which she is a real bride for once, wearing a fuschia-gold lehenga, standing on a pink-rose enveloped stage. Once the wedding season ends, the bridal lehengas will go into storage and the mannequin will hibernate for several months in a coffin-shaped space on the shop roof. But they are too busy weaving dreams to pay attention to a mannequin who wears a bridal dress just for show, let alone hear her questions. When they climb past her en route to the shop, she often yearns to ask the almost-brides why it is that they will choose to look like someone else on the most important day of their lives. They will bear so little resemblance to themselves in these made-up bride avatars that they themselves will struggle to recognize their faces when revisiting their wedding albums months later. These almost-brides themselves will be married in the coming months, posing alongside their grooms on elaborately decorated stages, their bodies weighed down with dresses, jewelry, mehndi, flowers, and the most onerous of them all: expectations of a happy marriage. They taste nothing, though, their minds still crazily vacillating between choices they have to make at that very moment: agree as always to what their mother wishes them to wear or already start pleasing their prospective mother-in-law? Should they don a traditional red or pick a more contemporary mint, similar to what their frenemy wore at their wedding a few months ago? The almost-brides have been in the shop the entire day, often running down to the street halfway through the shopping process to console their fraught minds with food. The mannequin’s thoughts drift to the shop upstairs, now a dormitory of slumbering bridal lehengas. It is only the almost-brides who have paid attention to her, or specifically, the armor of red satin and gold thread she wears-for they too soon will be needing it. She has been watching the people in the streets all morning, noticing each one walk past her and yet ultimately be oblivious of her presence, so deeply engrossed have they been in eating and photographing what they ate. The bride mannequin will remember the faces, though. Before the night ends, the hawkers will have served hundreds of customers but remember the faces of none. They register the crowd swimming past them merely as hands-hands which extend to accept their cooked offerings and, before vanishing, present crumpled wads of rupees. The street-food hawkers, enclosed in their altars of steam, fragrance, and chopped hills of tomatoes, ginger, onion and potatoes, are hard at worship. A bitter cold seeps into the night, although only a few people in the streets of the old city seem to feel it.
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