The Wedding Speech I Wrote for Both Sides
The bride and groom each hired me secretly; I toasted myself twice.
The groom paid me in cash, in a parking lot, like we were doing something illegal. Which, in a way, we were.
His name was Dev. He wanted a best man speech that would make his fiancée cry in the good way, and his actual best man, his older brother Nikhil, had the emotional range of a filing cabinet. Dev's plan was simple and slightly unhinged: I would write the speech, Nikhil would deliver it, and three hundred guests would go home believing Nikhil had a soul.
"How did you even find me?" I asked, counting the bills because he told me to count the bills.
"My cousin follows your poems. She said you won a monthly poetry contest with a piece about your father's hands. She cried at her desk. At work. In front of her manager."
That was my entire résumé. A woman crying at her desk.
I said yes because rent exists... but also because there is something irresistible about being handed someone's love story and told, quietly, make this sound like how it feels. Ghostwriting speeches is strange work. You become a translator for people who are fluent in feeling and illiterate in saying.
Dev and I met twice at a coffee shop near the railway station, and I took notes like a detective. How they met: a delayed train, a dying phone, her charger, his terrible opening line about voltage. Their first fight: his mother's biryani and her honest review of it, delivered at the table, to his mother.
The thing he had never told anyone: he still carried the receipt from their first coffee in his wallet. Laminated.
He laminated a receipt. It remains the most romantic act I have ever heard of involving office supplies.
I wrote the speech in three nights. I gave Nikhil short sentences he could not ruin. I built him a pause after the receipt line, wide enough to park a truck in. I wrote him a joke about his own stiffness so the room would forgive it before it became a problem. Then I trained him in a borrowed conference room, the two of us whispering toasts at a whiteboard like conspirators.
Two weeks later, a woman named Meera emailed me. Subject line: "Discreet writing help, wedding related."
I get maybe one wedding request a year. Two in one month felt like winning a small, weird lottery.
Then she mentioned the date.
Then the venue... then her fiancé, Dev, who must never, ever find out that his bride was outsourcing sentiment.
I sat alone in my kitchen and laughed until the neighbor's dog filed a complaint.
Here is where a better person would have confessed to one of them. I want to be honest about why I did not.
Partly it was money... partly it was curiosity, the same itch that makes you read the last page of someone's diary when the notebook falls open. But mostly it was this: I wanted to know what a marriage looked like from both sides of the aisle before the vows even happened. Writers are scavengers. We pretend otherwise, but hand us a locked room and we will find the window.
Meera's speech was technically for her sister Priya, the maid of honor, a woman so afraid of microphones she once mimed a birthday toast. Meera wanted words that would make Dev laugh first and cry second, in that order, because "if he cries first he gets a headache and then he's useless all night."
The interviews broke my heart in stereo.
Dev talked about Meera like a man describing weather he could not believe he got to live inside. Meera talked about Dev in evidence. "He learns things," she told me, stirring her tea like it owed her something. "I mentioned once, one single time, that perfectly matched socks feel smug. He now buys me deliberately mismatched pairs. Who does that? Who retains that?"
I had spent years circling love poems from a safe distance, writing about my own heart like it was a rumor I could neither confirm nor deny. And here were two people handing me the real thing in grocery bags, asking me to arrange it nicely.
Nobody hires a stranger to say what they feel. They hire a stranger because the feeling is too big to carry across the room alone.
The danger, of course, was fingerprints. Every writer has a rhythm, a favorite door they exit through. My first drafts of both speeches ended on the same image, the delayed train, because of course they did. It was the best material either of them gave me. I remembered an essay I loved about why safe poems lose, tore up the polite version of Priya's speech, and rebuilt it around the socks instead. Trains for the groom's side. Socks for the bride's. Church and state.
Meera insisted I attend the wedding, as insurance, in case Priya froze and someone needed to fake a fainting spell as a diversion. So I sat at table nine, between a retired dentist and a child eating candles' worth of frosting, holding two secrets like lit matches.
Nikhil went first. He stood, buttoned his jacket wrong, and delivered my sentences like a man defusing a bomb, which was exactly the energy I had written for. The stiffness joke landed. The pause after the receipt line held... one second, two, three, and then Meera made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob and the whole room went down with her. Dev looked at his brother like he had never met him. Nikhil looked briefly, wildly, in my direction, and I studied my napkin like scripture.
Glasses up. Toast one.
Then Priya. Poor, trembling Priya, who gripped the microphone like a railing on a ship. She got through the opening. She got the laugh, then the second laugh.
And when she reached the line about the socks, about how love is not a lightning strike but someone remembering the smallest thing you ever said, I watched Dev's face do something complicated. He leaned toward Meera. He whispered. She went pale... then he went pale... and then, unmistakably, both of them started laughing into their own shoulders while the room applauded around them.
Glasses up. Toast two.
I raised mine both times, quietly, from table nine. You are not supposed to toast your own writing at someone else's wedding, but I figure the rule has never been formally written down, and I am, if nothing else, the one they call when things need writing down.
A month later a postcard arrived from Greece. On the front, a white church against an unreasonable blue. On the back, two different handwritings taking turns:
"We compared notes on the flight." That was his.
"You know too much. Come to the first anniversary. Bring poems." That was hers.
They both signed it. Both sides, one card, no ghostwriter needed.
I keep it in my wallet, folded behind my own coffee receipts. Not laminated.
Yet.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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