Twenty Minutes, Three Mirrors

The three mirrors show her to herself simultaneously — left profile, right profile, full front — and this is the fact she keeps returning to. Not what she is doing. That she can watch herself doing it from every angle at once.

The fitting room is small, as these rooms in old havelis always are: a raised wooden platform, a single hook on the wall where the garment bag still hangs, afternoon light coming through a latticed window that turns the air amber and geometric. Outside, down the corridor and through two closed doors, the wedding preparations continue without her. She can hear it as texture rather than sound — the low drone of a shehnai being tuned, a woman's voice giving instructions about flowers, the occasional percussion of something being moved across stone. None of it requires her. She is supposed to be checking the fall of the skirt.

The lehenga is extraordinary. She had known this abstractly, from photographs, but wearing it is different — it has its own gravity. The silk skirt falls from her waist in a perfect circle, seven kilograms of fabric and zari embroidery that keeps her hips anchored to the platform as though she has grown roots. The blouse fits exactly, the seven hooks at her back fastened by the tailor's assistant before the woman was dismissed. The dupatta is pinned at her left shoulder with a pearl pin, the fabric cascading down her front in a river of ivory and gold.

She has been here twenty minutes.

The rabbit — from her vanity bag, a decision made quickly while the tailor's assistant had her back turned — sits inside her with a stillness that is almost meditative. She has not turned it on. This is the part she is studying: what it is to stand in three mirrors wearing seven kilograms of ceremonial silk with something inside her that has not yet moved. The weight of the skirt presses the base of it incrementally upward each time she breathes out. She discovered this in the first five minutes and has been breathing carefully since.

In the front mirror, her face is composed. She looks like a woman checking whether a skirt falls correctly. This is the thing she finds most interesting — that composed face, that scientist's neutrality, while below the architecture of the lehenga her body is doing something entirely private.

She exhales — longer than she means to, a breath that leaves before she has finished deciding to release it — and feels the skirt settle, and feels the settling of the skirt translate downward through the base, and watches the front mirror for what her face does.

Her eyes hold. Her jaw stays soft. Only her left hand moves, rising to rest against the embroidered hem at her hip, fingers pressing into the stiff zari as though testing a seam.

The right mirror shows her the back of the blouse. The seven hooks, neat and closed.

She thinks: one.

Her right hand is still at her side, not touching anything. The platform beneath her feet is cold through the thin fabric of her shoes — old stone, this haveli, cold even in winter sun — and she is aware of that cold traveling up through her soles while the heat beneath the skirt has no place to go.

She is not going to turn it on yet.

She is still in the moment before that. She is documenting the moment before that, which the three mirrors are holding open for her from every angle at once.