Sins

Bhopal, November 1980

The Bride – Riya

The marquee smelled of marigolds.

That is the first thing I remember. Not the chanting of the priest, not the heat of the fire, not even the weight of the dupatta pressing down on my head like a second skin. The flowers. A thousand orange marigolds strung on thick cotton threads, hanging from every pole, their scent so thick I could taste it on my tongue.

I sat on the low wooden ‘peeth’, my hands folded in my lap, my fingers pressing into each other so hard that the gold bangles bit into my wrists. My ‘lehenga’ heavy, red, embroidered with real silver thread that my mother had mortgaged her earrings for pooled around my ankles like a small river of silk. Every time I breathed, the fabric rustled. Every time I moved, the tiny bells sewn into my hem jingled.

I was a walking music box. A doll dressed for sacrifice.

“Don’t cry,” I told myself, though no one could see my face beneath the veil. “If you cry, the kajal will run. Mother said the groom must see you beautiful.”

But I did not know the groom.

That was the custom. A bride’s face was revealed only after the ‘saat phere’, when the groom lifted her dupatta in the privacy of the ‘suhaagraat’ chamber. Until then, I was not a woman. I was a promise. A name. A pair of hands that had briefly touched a stranger’s during the ‘jai mala’.

That touch his fingers, warm and thick and slightly sweaty was the only proof I had that Vikram Singh Rathore existed.

My father had shown me the telegram. Alliance approved. Landowner, Calcutta. Respected Rathore family. Proposal for your daughter Riya. My mother had wept with joy. My aunts had gathered to discuss dowry. My younger sisters had looked at me with envy, not knowing that I felt nothing but a hollow dread where my heart should be.

“What if he is cruel?” I had whispered to my mother the night before the wedding.

She had slapped my cheek lightly, like a reprimand to a child. “Do not speak such things. A husband is a husband. You serve him. You obey him. You give him children. That is your duty.”

“And if he hurts me?”

“Then you endure. That is also your duty.”

I had not asked again.

Now, sitting on the seat, surrounded by the murmur of a hundred guests I could not see through the veil, I felt the weight of her words pressing down on me heavier than the dupatta. My duty. My body, no longer my own.

The priest chanted in Sanskrit, his voice rising and falling like the Mukri River behind the tent. I recognized some of the words “dharma,” “artha,” “kama” but they floated past me like leaves on water. I was not listening. I was waiting.

“He will come soon,”

I thought. “He will take my hand. He will walk me around the fire. And then tonight, on the train, he will lift my veil and see my face for the first time. And I will see his.”

Would he be handsome?

Would he be kind?

Would his hands be gentle when he touched me?

I had no answers. Only questions. Only fear.

The conch blew. Someone shouted, “The groom approaches!”

I straightened my spine. I pressed my sweaty palms flat against my thighs. And I waited.

Kabir Person POV

I stand at the edge of the pandal, your arms crossed over your chest, my shadow long and sharp in the flickering torchlight.

I am thirty-two years old. Also, the elder son. The responsible one. The man who held the Rathore family together after our father’s heart attack three years ago, when my mother could not stop crying and my younger brother was too busy drinking and whoring to care. I signed the papers. I paid the debts. And sat at the head of the table while the creditors shouted, and did not flinch.

Everyone leans on Kabir. His mother leans for decisions. Vikram leans for money. The servants lean for orders. Even the dogs in the courtyard seem to look at him first before eating. I am being the head of family still Vikram is the one who gets away with everything every time and I let him because he is my baby brother.

No one ever asks what you want.

He has accepted this. For thirty-two years, he had accepted this. he told yourself that duty is its own reward, that loneliness is the price of power, that one day, when the family is secure, he will find a woman who sees him and not just the Rathore name.

But tonight, something changes.

She walks in at seven o’clock.

He does not see her face her dupatta is draped low, hiding everything from the crown of her head to the curve of her chin. But the veil is ‘gota’ work: tiny mirrors sewn into translucent silk. And as she passes within three feet of him the torchlight catches her profile for a single heartbeat.

A high forehead. A straight nose. A mouth that looks soft, unsuspecting, untouched. Her eyes are cast down shy, demure, nervous. Her hands are clasped so tightly that her knuckles are white beneath her henna-stained palms.

She is beautiful. She is terrified. She is your brother’s bride.

And he feels something he had never felt before.

It starts in your chest a tightness, a heat, a hunger that has no name. It spreads down spine, curls into your belly, settles low and heavy between thighs. The throat dries. The fingers curl into fists at the sides. Your jaw locks so hard that your teeth ache.

“Mine,” a voice whispers in the back of his mind. “She should be mine.”

He does not recognize the voice. It sounds like him, but darker. Older. More honest.

He watches the entire ceremony from the shadows.

He watches Vikram go through the motions bored, distracted, checking the silver pocket watch that Father gave him. He watches the priest chant, the fire leap, the bride circles the flames like a moth too pure to burn. He watches her small; trembling hands lift the ‘jai mala’ to Vikram’s neck. He watches Vikram’s lips curl into a smile that does not reach his eyes.

“He does not want her,” He thinks. “Not really. He wants her property. Her father’s land. The tea estates in Assam that will him more money and also unlock his share of the ancestral wealth with this marriage and also heir come from this marriage.”

Kabir knows this because he knows Vikram. He had always known Vikram. Kabir changed his diapers when he was an infant. Kabir covered for him when he came home drunk at sixteen. Kabir paid off the father of the servant girl he got pregnant when he was twenty-one. Kabir has spent your entire life cleaning up his messes, and he has never once said thank you.

And now he is getting married. Not for love. Not for companionship. For property. Just to have a pleasure of one night. Just for fresh Body.

“He will use her,” Kabir realize.

“He will take her body until he gets what he wants. Then he will discard her. Lock her in the mansion. Visit her once a year to produce an heir. And she will wither, like all the other women he has touched.”

The thought should fill Kabir with outrage on her behalf. It does not. It fills Kabir with a different fire a territorial, primal heat that scares you with its intensity.

“He does not want her, But I do. He will waste her; I will worship her. He plans to take her body for business; I will take her body for pleasure.”

Kabir do not know how. Kabir do not know when. But as Kabir stand there, watching the bride’s dupatta flutter in the night breeze, a plan begins to form in the darkest corner of your mind.

“She will be mine. One way or another.”

"I have always let Vikram get what he wanted because he is my baby brother, but this time I will not let him have her, I will make sure she mine, because if before this marriage If only I had seen her, I would have asked her hand for myself, but let's not get into that now."

End of Chapter 1

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