They were seated at the singles’ table. Of course they were. Because Sanya’s cousin Megha, despite being a brilliant surgeon, had the matchmaking subtlety of a sledgehammer and had decided that putting all the unmarried guests together was “fun” rather than “mortifying.”
There were eight of them, arranged around a table near the bar in the grand ballroom of a heritage hotel in Udaipur. The room was magnificent in the way that old Rajasthan knows how to be — carved sandstone arches, mirrored walls that multiplied the candlelight into infinity, and silk drapes in deep crimson that caught the breeze from the lake-facing windows. Seven of them made awkward small talk about their jobs and how they knew the bride. The eighth — the man directly across from Sanya — looked at her from behind his whiskey glass and said, “Shall we make a drinking game out of how many times someone asks us when we are getting married?”
His name was Arjun. He was the groom’s college friend, a journalist who covered conflict zones and looked like he had been doing it long enough to earn the slight weathering around his eyes that made them more interesting rather than tired. He was dressed impeccably — tailored navy sherwani, no tie, top button undone to reveal the brown column of his throat — and he had the particular charm of someone who could talk to anyone about anything and make it feel like the most important conversation in the room.
“Rules?” Sanya asked, already reaching for her champagne flute.
“One sip for ‘you are next.’ Two sips for ‘I know someone perfect for you.’ Finish the glass if anyone mentions your biological clock.”
“That is a dangerous game at an Indian wedding.”
“I am a dangerous man at an Indian wedding.”
They drank to the first auntie who asked (“Beta, you are next, no?”). They drank to the second — a family friend who cornered Sanya near the appetizer table and spent four minutes describing her nephew who worked “in computers.” By the third — delivered by the groom’s mother herself, with a pointed look at them both — they were sharing a conspiratorial grin that the rest of the table envied. The champagne was excellent, Sanya noted, which was fortunate given the rate they were consuming it.
The reception was beautiful in the way that expensive Indian weddings are: overwhelming, fragrant, loud, and emotionally exhausting. Jasmine garlands hung from every surface, their heavy sweetness mixing with the smoke from the tandoor station and the perfume of two hundred guests. The dhol players had the energy of men being paid by the beat. By eleven, the older guests had retired, the dance floor was controlled by the bride’s friends performing choreography they had rehearsed for weeks, and Sanya’s feet were staging a revolt against her heels.
“Walk with me?” Arjun appeared beside her as she stood at the edge of the garden, holding her shoes in one hand and her champagne in the other. The grass was cool and damp beneath her bare feet, and the relief was so intense it was almost sensual. “The hotel has a rooftop terrace. It is quiet.”
“You have done reconnaissance?”
“I am a journalist. I always know the exits.”
The terrace overlooked the lake, the water dark and still beneath a sky absurd with stars — the kind of sky that only exists in Rajasthan, where the air is dry enough to see everything the universe has been hiding. The music from the reception drifted up like a memory — present but distant, stripped of its bass, leaving only melody. They leaned against the stone railing, their shoulders almost touching, and talked in the easy way of people who have already passed through small talk and arrived at something real.
He told her about a piece he had written from a refugee camp on the Syrian border — the children who drew pictures of houses they had never lived in, the woman who gave him her last cup of tea because “guests are sacred, even in a war.” His voice changed when he spoke about it, dropping to something quieter, more careful, as if the words themselves were fragile. She told him about leaving corporate law to start a legal aid nonprofit and how terrifying and right it had felt — the morning she cleaned out her office at the firm, carrying a box of personal items past her corner window with its view of the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, and feeling lighter with every step.
They talked about loneliness and purpose and the particular absurdity of being surrounded by people celebrating commitment while navigating the open ocean of singlehood. He told her he had been engaged once, briefly, to a woman who wanted him to stop traveling to dangerous places, and that the engagement ended when he realized he would rather be alone and whole than partnered and diminished. She told him she had not been in a relationship in two years and had stopped apologizing for it approximately six months ago.
“You are not what I expected from the singles’ table,” she said, turning to face him. The stone railing was warm against the small of her back, still holding the day’s heat.
“What did you expect?”
“Someone who would show me photos of his car.”
He laughed — loud and genuine, the kind of laugh that made his whole face transform and echoed off the stone walls of the terrace — and in the silence that followed, the air between them changed. She felt it the way you feel a temperature shift: suddenly, unmistakably, everywhere. The night breeze carried the scent of jasmine from the garden below and the faint mineral smell of the lake, and the stars were doing that thing they do in Rajasthan where they feel close enough to touch.
He stepped closer. She did not step back. His hand found hers on the railing, and the contact — palm against palm, fingers interlacing, his skin warm and slightly rough — felt more intimate than any first touch had a right to. His thumb traced a slow circle on the back of her hand, and the small gesture sent a current through her that the champagne could not explain.
“Sanya,” he said, and the way he said it made her name sound like something worth keeping.
“Arjun,” she said back, because his name deserved the same treatment.
She kissed him. Because the stars were absurd and the champagne was good and his hand in hers felt like the only honest thing at a party built on performance. He kissed her back with a certainty that suggested he had been planning to do the same thing in approximately three more seconds. His free hand rose to her face, cupping her jaw, and she tasted whiskey and champagne and the particular sweetness of a man who tells the truth for a living.
His room was on the third floor. They took the service staircase because the elevator required passing through the lobby where the bride’s relatives were still socializing and the risk of auntie interception was unacceptably high. In the stairwell, between the second and third floors, he pressed her against the wall — the stone cool through the silk of her lehenga — and kissed her neck, his mouth hot and deliberate against her pulse point, and she made a sound that echoed off the stone in a way that should have been embarrassing but was instead the most erotic thing she had heard all year.
“If you keep doing that,” she whispered, her fingers gripping the front of his sherwani, “we are not going to make it to the room.”
“Would that be a problem?”
“The groom’s uncle takes this staircase. I saw him earlier.”
They made it to the room. It was beautiful — vaulted ceilings with painted frescoes, a four-poster bed with white cotton sheets that glowed in the lamplight, a window overlooking the lake where the reflection of the hotel shimmered like a second building made of light. Neither of them noticed the architecture for more than three seconds.
He unzipped her lehenga with careful hands — a journalist’s hands, she thought, hands that recorded the world with precision and sensitivity. The silk pooled around her feet with a whisper, and the way he looked at her made her feel like the most important story he had ever covered. She pulled his sherwani over his head, ran her palms across the warm brown terrain of his chest, felt the scar on his ribcage from a piece of shrapnel in Aleppo that he wore without complaint.
They fell onto the bed in a tangle of silk and skin and three hours of accumulated tension. He kissed her collarbone, the valley between her breasts, the curve of her stomach, each kiss landing like a sentence in a story he was writing about her body. She arched into him, her hands in his hair, directing and surrendering in alternating waves, discovering that the chemistry they had built over champagne and conversation translated into something even more fluent in the horizontal.
He was unhurried despite the urgency. His mouth explored her body with a journalist’s curiosity — thorough, attentive, pursuing every detail, refusing to settle for the obvious when there were subtleties to uncover. She gasped when his mouth found the inside of her thigh, gripped the headboard when his tongue found its subject, and said his name in a way that made it sound like breaking news. The music from the reception floated up through the window, a distant dhol beat that their bodies found and followed without trying.
When they came together, it was with the synchronicity of people who had no right to be this compatible on a first encounter. She wrapped around him — legs, arms, breath — and he held her close, and they moved in the amber glow of the bedside lamp while outside the window, Udaipur sparkled and the lake held the reflection of a thousand lights. The pleasure built between them like a story reaching its climax — inevitable, mounting, the kind of ending that the whole narrative had been building toward — and when it broke, it broke over both of them simultaneously, her cry and his groan merging into a single sound that the vaulted ceiling held and returned to them like an echo.
Afterward, they lay in the massive bed, her head on his chest, his fingers drawing idle patterns on her shoulder while their breathing settled and the night sounds of Udaipur — distant traffic, the lap of the lake, the last tired beats of the reception dhol — filtered through the window.
“Megha is going to be insufferable,” Sanya said.
“Why?”
“Because she seated us across from each other on purpose. She will take credit for this until the end of time.”
Arjun considered this, his fingers pausing on her shoulder. “Then we should give her something worth taking credit for.”
Sanya lifted her head and looked at him, her hair falling across his chest. “Are you asking me on a date? We are literally still in bed.”
“I am a journalist. I believe in following up on a good story.” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Besides, I have a feeling this one has more chapters.”
She kissed him — slowly, thoroughly, the kind of kiss that is both a thank-you and a promise — and settled back against his chest. Below them, the wedding was ending, the last guests drifting through the garden toward their rooms. Above them, the Rajasthani stars were indifferent and magnificent. And between them, something that had started at the singles’ table with a drinking game was beginning to look like it might deserve a table of its own.
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