“Are we expecting someone?” Arjun asks, not moving, because moving would require disturbing Oliver, and disturbing Oliver is a crime in this household that carries a minimum sentence of one full hour of guilt-induced belly rubs.
“No.”
“Then we are not answering.”
“Agreed.”
The doorbell rings again. Longer this time. More insistent. Oliver lifts his head. His ears rotate. He makes the low, investigative sound that means “someone is at the door and I have opinions about this.”
“It's probably a delivery,” I say.
“On a Sunday?”
“People deliver things on Sundays.”
“Suspicious people deliver things on Sundays.”
The doorbell rings a third time, and this time it is accompanied by a knock. Not a polite knock. A knock that communicates, through the medium of knuckles on wood, that the person on the other side of this door has not come all this way to be ignored by two men and a goldendoodle on a Sunday afternoon.
I extract myself from under Oliver, who protests with a groan of such theatrical displeasure that Arjun gives me a look that says “you have committed a crime and will be prosecuted.” I pad to the door in my socks. I open it.
A courier is standing in the hallway. He is holding a box. The box is large, flat, and heavy, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, and it has a shipping label that reads, in elegant copperplate handwriting that I recognize with an immediate full body alarm:Dr. Casey Welling & Dr. Arjun Kapoor. Handle with extreme care.
The return address is Rajasthan, India.
“Sign here,” the courier says. Then he pauses, looking slightly harried. “I'm sorry for the insistence, sir. The sender was very specific. I was not to leave this on a doorstep. I wasnot to leave it with a neighbour. I was to place it directly into the hands of Dr. Welling or Dr. Kapoor and obtain a signature, and I was told that if I failed to do so, the sender would, and I am quoting directly, 'contact the courier company's managing director personally, as she has his home number.' I’ve been ringing doorbells in this building for ten minutes. I’m very relieved you answered.”
I sign. I take the box. I close the door. I carry the box to the couch, where Arjun is watching me with a wary, hyper-alert expression as he instantly recognizes the handwriting on the package.
“That is my mother's handwriting,” he says.
“Yes.”
“On a box. That has been shipped from Rajasthan to Toronto.”
“Yes.”
“I am not opening that box.”
“You’re absolutely opening that box.”
“I am not. Whatever is in that box has been designed, curated, and strategically assembled to establish a control position over our wedding before we have made a single decision, and I refuse to engage with the opening salvo of a campaign I am not prepared to fight.”
“Arjun. Open the damn box.”
He opens the box.
Inside, nestled in tissue paper, is a binder.
It’s not a regular binder. It’s a leather-bound, gold-embossed, Kapoor-family-crest-stamped, two-hundred-page monument to maternal determination. It’s the wedding equivalent of a military operation manual, and it’s been produced with the kind of care, precision, and strategic forethought that would make a NATO logistics officer weep with admiration.
Arjun lifts it out. He opens the first page. His face does something that I will describe, for the sake of clinical accuracy, as the dawning recognition that an inescapable tsunami is approaching.
The binder contains: venue comparisons (twelve options, allin Toronto, each with floor plans, capacity charts, and a pros-and-cons analysis that reads like a dissertation), caterer shortlists (seven options, ranked by cuisine type, with Kavita's annotations in the margins suggesting that all seven are inadequate and that she’ll be cooking the biryani herself), fabric swatches (forty-three swatches, each labelled with a colour name that I am fairly certain Meera invented, including “twilight champagne,” “monsoon ivory,” and something called “subdued aristocratic rose” ), a hand-drawn seating chart that already accounts for family feuds and allergies and the specific directive that Sunita and Kavita must be seated at least three tables apart to prevent “the chutney incident of 2019” from recurring, and a detailed timeline targeting a late summer ceremony.
There’s also a handwritten note on the first page, in Meera's perfect copperplate:
Since you insist on doing this in Canada, I will ensure it is done properly. I arrive July 15th. Do ensure the guest room is prepared. Sincerely, Meera Kapoor.