The Suit He Bought for My Wedding
It hung ready in his cupboard; the wedding came, he didn't.
My father bought his wedding suit eleven months early, which would have been ridiculous if he had expected to be alive for the wedding.
We did not know that yet. Or rather, he knew... and we were still practising the word that the doctors kept saying, turning it over in our mouths like a stone. Stage four sounds like a level in a game until it is written on a file with your father's name on it.
Two weeks after the diagnosis, he took the bus to Karol Bagh, to the tailor he had used since before I was born, a shop the size of a lift with a signboard that said Suit Specialist in letters missing their paint. He came home with a receipt and an expression I can only describe as victorious.
“Charcoal grey,” he announced at dinner. “Half canvas. Two buttons. Your mother wanted blue but blue is for bank managers.”
My mother put down the dal spoon. “The wedding is in February,” she said. “It is March.”
“Good tailoring takes time,” he said, and ate his roti like a man who had settled something.
I was not even properly engaged yet. Arjun had met my parents twice; the families were still circling each other with sweets and careful compliments. But my father had watched the two of us laugh at the same wrong moment during a serious conversation about horoscopes, and apparently that was all the confirmation he needed.
He bought the suit before the ring existed.
I understand now what he was doing. He could not order more time from anyone, so he ordered a suit instead. Chemotherapy was a fight he had been drafted into. Charcoal grey, half canvas, two buttons: that was a fight he chose.
He bought the suit the way other men buy hope: fitted, paid in full, and one size ahead of the diagnosis.
The suit came home in June, in a plastic cover that smelled of new cloth and chalk. He tried it on in the bedroom and walked out into the corridor... thinner than the man who had been measured... and did a slow turn with his arms slightly lifted, the way brides do. My mother laughed and then went to the kitchen very fast. The suit went into his steel cupboard, on the good hanger, the wooden one, and the cover was zipped up like something being put to bed.
He fell in October, in the bathroom, and after that the hospital kept more of him than it returned.
He died on the fourth of November, early morning, while a nurse was changing his drip and my mother was downstairs buying tea in a paper cup she never drank.
The suit stayed in the cupboard.
Here is the part people argue about at weddings and funerals both: we did not postpone. The date was set, the hall paid for, and my mother, who had gone quiet in a way that frightened me more than crying, said only, “He bought the suit in March. You think he wanted a postponement?” Arjun's family agreed with a gentleness I will not forget.
So in February, ninety-four days after we carried my father out of the house, I got married in the same lane he had lived his whole life in.
Everyone tells you about the big absences. Nobody warns you about the small ones. The big absence was the ceremony itself, the moment meant for a father. The small ones were worse. Nobody stood at the gate counting the caterer's plates with suspicion. Nobody told the band they were playing too loudly and then, one drink later, requested three songs.
Nobody wore the charcoal grey suit.
We kept a chair for him. Front row, by the window of the hall, his photograph on the seat with a garland of fresh mogra, because he hated plastic flowers with a passion he otherwise reserved for slow bowlers. All evening the chair sat there in its rectangle of streetlight, and all evening people touched its backrest as they passed, casually, the way you touch a doorframe of a house you are leaving.
I did not cry during the ceremony.
I cried three weeks later... over a suit.
My mother had decided the cupboard needed to be cleaned, which was her word for a ritual none of us could name. His shirts went to the driver who had loved him. His watch went to my brother. And the suit, unworn, still zipped in its plastic sleep, was to go back to the tailor, who had asked if he could have it, and had said, in his lift-sized shop, “I stitched it. Let me keep what he could not wear.” That sentence alone should have warned me the day would go badly.
I was folding it into a bag when I did the thing you do with any suit, out of pure habit.
I checked the pockets.
Inner left, against where the heart would have been, there was a folded page from his diary, soft at the creases from being opened and refolded many times. In pencil, in his tilted government-office handwriting, was a speech. My father, who mocked all speeches at all weddings without exception, had drafted his own toast eleven months early, and revised it, you could see the rubbed-out ghosts of older sentences underneath.
It began: Do not worry, I will be brief, unlike the caterer's queue.
It ended: I have known this girl since she was four kilograms. Whatever she chooses, she chooses with her whole weight. Arjun, stand somewhere steady.
I sat down on the floor of my parents' bedroom with the suit across my knees like something sleeping, and I came apart quietly, the way old walls do... from the inside first.
For a long time I did not know where to put any of this. You cannot keep telling the story at dinners; people's faces do that soft collapsing thing and then you end up comforting them. A friend from college finally pushed me sideways into writing. I started with grief poems, all of them terrible, all of them necessary, and slowly some of them turned into love poems without asking my permission, because it turns out the two are the same water at different temperatures.
The first piece I ever let strangers read was about the pocket and the pencil and the caterer's queue, and I posted it on a community wall for poets at one in the morning with my eyes half shut, the way you post anything that matters. A woman I have never met commented that she had read it in her kitchen and then gone and checked the pockets of her late husband's coat. She found a bus ticket. She said it was enough.
The tailor has the suit now. He keeps it on a form near the window of his shop, not for sale, and he brushes the shoulders every morning, which I know because my brother checked, twice, pretending to pass by.
And I have the speech. It lives in my almirah, in the good silk pouch, and every anniversary I take it out and read it aloud to the window, to the empty chair we never got rid of, doing his voice badly on purpose so that I laugh instead of the other thing.
Do not worry, I will be brief.
He was... That is my only complaint. He was.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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