The living room had been arranged for exactly this.
Thirty-seven people.
The caterers had left the last of the mithai on the center table — the kaju katli stacked in silver boxes, the gulab jamun still warm in their syrup — and the families had settled into the , comfortable configuration of people who had accomplished something and were prepared to sit in the accomplishment for several hours.
The television was on.
A wedding channel. Perpetually running ceremony footage from someone else's celebration, the background hum of shehnai music providing the ambient warmth that silence would have been inadequate to provide.
Preet's mother was talking to Suresh's mother.
The two women — seated on adjacent sofa cushions with the careful, mutually assessing ease of families who had decided to become family six weeks ago and were now in the implementation phase — were discussing the embroidery on Preet's blouse.
