The Red Lehenga

THE RED LEHENGA

by Tanya Aydelott

The Red Lehenga can be found in Tales & Feathers Issue 1.

When I saw Leila in her green and gold lehenga, I cried. I didn’t know any better; I was six and knew only that my sister was beautiful, and I was losing her. Leila gave me one of her gold bangles to wear and let me walk with her into the reception room. Her groom wore a gold and maroon sherwani, the folds of his turban knife-crisp. When we finally waved them off in their decorated limousine, my tears blurred everything into a mosaic of bright colours. I don’t remember if she waved back.

Leila and her husband moved to Canada and she had one boy, then two, then three. My mother told me I should be ready to raise sons, too. “This is what you do, Asha,” she told me one night, rubbing oil into my scalp and plaiting my hair into a thick braid. “Marry a rich man and leave this country. Go with him wherever he will take you, and raise sons that will make him proud.”

“What about love, Ama?”

She straightened the towel on my shoulders, careful to keep the oil from my clothes. “Love is a luxury. Don’t draw money from an account you don’t own.” 

She did not talk about my father, not then.

•••

As I grew older, my mother paraded men before me: a neighbour’s son, in his final year of dental school; her friend’s cousin, who had a career in the Emirates; another neighbour’s son, who was guaranteed a management role in his father’s business when he earned his MBA; her childhood friend’s nephew, kind and unambitious, a man someone else could easily love one day. I smiled at them all and politely declined. I had my own dreams to pursue.

“My daughter wants to marry a djinn!” my mother would say when she shut the door behind another suitor. I laughed at first, but her voice grew more and more brittle as the years went on. Until finally, she didn’t say it at all.

A few months after I turned twenty-eight, I came home from university and found my mother unpacking an unfamiliar suitcase. She drew out a mound of gold jewelry, two pairs of slippers, and an elaborately embroidered red lehenga. Peacocks danced along the skirt’s hemline and slender trees wound their branches across the choli’s bodice. Sparrows flirted at the shoulders, peeping out from the trees’ topmost leaves. The sleeves were decorated with tiny mirrors.

“It’s beautiful,” I told her, fingering the gorgeous work.

“Your father left this as your bridal gift, before—” she cut herself off.

We didn’t talk often about my father. My memories of him were hazy, abrupt; Leila never spoke his name. He had disappeared when I was a child and, while some people claimed he had run off with the wife of a local nabob, I preferred to think of my mother as a tragic widow. It meant he could never come back. It meant we were free of him. 

“Your husband is coming for you,” she said. “Your father arranged it.”

“What?” I yelped. “Why wasn’t I told?”

She wouldn’t meet my eyes. Her face turned from mine, she muttered, “Why couldn’t you have married one of those nice boys I introduced you to?” 

I eyed the pile of gleaming jewelry and tried to think past the sting of her words. There were bangles, rings, earrings, two different chokers studded with rubies and pearls, and a variety of anklets. Gold chains curled under these pieces, but my eye was drawn to the maang tikka—the piece of jewelry that would be anchored in my hair, so that the medallion could hang on my forehead and draw eyes to my face. A bride wore her maang tikka for the first time on her wedding day and then put it away to wear at important events. If the family funds grew short, it could be sold. Ama had shown me hers once, lifting it out of a silk-padded jeweler’s box, but I’d never seen her wear it. That box disappeared when I entered university.

I reached out for the maang tikka, and my mother slapped my hand.

“None of this is yours until you marry,” she scolded. “And then it becomes your husband’s.”

I swallowed. “I thought my jewelry was mine—that it was my protection, just in case. You told Leila to keep her gold safe. You told her to open a bank account in her name only.”

“Leila chose wisely, but that’s no excuse for being careless. Anything could happen.”

My sister, I remembered, had married for love. 

“This is the last of your father’s debts,” my mother said. Her voice was tired, empty. I thought of all the nights we’d slept curled around each other, our breaths visible in the night air. The hours I spent studying so I could earn placement in a top university. The economizing my mother had practiced so that I could reach for dreams I couldn’t yet afford. 

“When?” My voice was an unsteady whisper.

She wouldn’t meet my gaze. “Your husband comes to meet you tonight.”

•••

My groom came at midnight, when the nightjars had settled into their nests and quieted their songs. I was wearing the red lehenga with the gold slippers. My palms were dotted with mehndi, my fingertips rust-coloured with the dye. My mother had slipped jewelry onto my wrists, and ankles, and neck, leaving only the maang tikka for me to affix myself.

I don’t know what I expected. Perhaps I imagined a groom like Leila’s, close-shaven and with a kind smile. Or maybe a stooped older gentleman with deep bags under his eyes and a smoker’s cough. The man who stepped into our home was taller than Leila’s husband, with shoulders that nearly didn’t fit through the doorway. His hands were larger than my head. He looked first at my mother, then at me, and squinted as if he was trying to see me more clearly.

“She’s tiny,” he said.

“She’s human,” my mother answered.

And then I smelled the air that had come in with him—sulphurous and heavy in the way that humid summer breezes seem to bear real weight.  

“Djinn,” I breathed.

“Bride,” he answered.

In the weak light of the entryway, my mother’s face looked unfamiliar. “It was your father’s bargain,” my mother said. Her hands tightened into fists. “Our daughters could marry for love, marry for wealth, or marry a djinn.”

“Your father owed the djinns a favor,” my bridegroom said. His voice rumbled like an echo caught in an underground cavern. “And a promise to a djinn must be followed to the letter.”

“But djinns aren’t real,” I said, flushing. The maang tikka swung on my forehead. I felt sweaty and unsure.

The djinn laughed at me.

I was suddenly angry, and my anger sought clarity. “What were the exact terms of the promise?”

My mother’s voice shook. “Your father promised that if his last unwed daughter had not married for love or for wealth by the third full moon of her twenty-eighth year, she would be presented as a bride to the djinn who came to the door.”

“And you couldn’t tell me?” The coldness of my tone chilled even me.

My mother shook her head. “No—that was a part of the bargain—and I couldn’t encourage you towards a specific husband, either.” She closed her eyes. 

“And you let him make this bargain? You let him risk forfeiting me like this?”

“It was done without me,” my mother whispered. “I hoped… Leila found her husband. I hoped you would, too.”

My father had barely known me before he disappeared. In the tales I’d overheard at family gatherings, he came across as charming and witty, if a little careless with the people who loved him. But this bargain with the djinns felt vindictive, petty; it didn’t sound like the clever man from the stories.

I turned my attention to the djinn. He towered over us in his simple kurta worn over straight-leg pants with shoes that shone in the dim hallway light. He wasn’t dressed like a bridegroom; he didn’t match my beautiful clothes.

“What happens next?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

My mother’s eyes, dark like those of a peacock, met mine. I thought of my sister, radiant in her bridal outfit. I remembered the stories my mother had told of her own courtship and of her marigold-scented wedding, of the laughter and music she had always assured me would be part of my story. And I thought, too, of the brittleness her voice had taken on as the years ticked closer and closer to this moment.

The djinn stepped forward eagerly.

I stepped back. “Would you not agree I look like a bride?” I asked.

He looked me over. I pulled my shoulders back so he could see the sparrows on the neckline of my choli. 

“You look perfect,” he said in his underground voice.

“But do I look like a bride?”

Again, he laughed. “Do you think if I say no, that I will let you go? No, I am not such a fool. You look like a bride; therefore, you are a bride. My bride.”

“The promise,” I said, “was that, if I was not already married by the third full moon of my twenty-eighth year, I’d be presented as a bride to the djinn who came to our door.”

“Yes,” the djinn rumbled. 

“And so I have been,” I said, meeting my mother’s eyes, even as I spoke to the djinn. “You have acknowledged me as a bride.” 

Ama came to stand beside me. “Nowhere did my husband promise to actually give my daughter to a djinn.” She tightened her hand around mine, grinding gold rings into my fingers. “That was not the promise made.”

“And a promise to a djinn must be followed to the letter,” I reminded him.

Before us, the djinn seemed to swell. The air around him hissed and sparked, and a furious shout hit the room like a clap of thunder. Paintings dropped from the walls. A potted plant tipped over, dirt spewing across the hall. My mother pressed my head tightly to her chest. 

When the noise ended and the room steadied, we turned to the djinn. Anger stamped his face. “You’re right,” he growled at us. “The bargain has been fulfilled. I cannot go against the terms of the promise, but this will not be forgotten—not by me, and not by you.”

He stormed out of our house. 

My mother and I stared at each other. My heart was furious inside me, my breath still shuddering. I didn’t know where to look, what to do.

“Did we—did that work?” I finally asked.

“Clever,” my mother said, which wasn’t an answer at all. “You are so much your father’s daughter.” 

I gave her a look, then started to pull at the bangles and earrings she had adorned me with. Ama unhooked the maang tikka from my hair.

“Asha,” she gasped.

At her cry, I lifted my arm to peer into the mirrors embroidered into my sleeve. 

There on my forehead, embossed in my skin, was the maang tikka’s medallion.

I rubbed my fingers across the design. My forehead prickled, but the interlocking curlicues stayed. This was a small price for the freedom to make my own choices.

“Come, Ama,” I said, taking my mother’s shaking hands. “Help me out of these clothes. Tomorrow we can decide how to tell the story of the time we out-bargained a djinn.”