Destination Wedding

Sunday Night, 11 p.m.JFK Their Flight Is Delayed Due to Technical Reasons and Everyone Is Secretly Wishing Airlines Didn’t Announce That and Make All the Passengers Nervous“I cannot believe my mother is here with her boyfriend and I’m here alone,” Tina Das said to her best friend, Marianne Laing, in the British Airways business-class lounge at JFK. Tina, in the hope that she would be able to sleep through the first leg of the flight to Heathrow, had rimless glasses on instead of her usual contacts. She never needed much makeup thanks to her thick eyebrows, which had been a liability when she was younger but were very fashionable now and gave her face all the drama it needed. She was wearing black North Face sweatpants that cinched at the ankle, a gray, long-sleeved T-shirt, and black-and-white Adidas sneakers. It was hot in the lounge so her Guess fur vest was hanging off the chair behind her.A bowl full of nuts was on the table in between them. Tina picked up a handful while staring out of the window and tossed them all into her mouth and started chewing before she realized she had eaten several whole pistachios, with shells. The hard, cracked pieces pierced her mouth and she spat them out. A grumpy old man appeared out of nowhere with a broom and shook his head at her as he swept up the pistachio shells.“I didn’t know they had shells,” Tina said apologetically.The man said nothing but kept looking at her as he swept, his broom knocking her foot aside.“It isn’t my fault,” Tina said to him again but he didn’t respond.The man walked away and Tina turned to Marianne and said, “At the price of these tickets, the nuts really shouldn’t have shells.”Marianne was applying lip balm and laughing. She was so good at putting on makeup that it was hard to say whether or not she had any on, but the smattering of brown freckles across her nose was visible and, despite the fact that it was November, still had a velvety brownness they usually acquired over the summer because she had recently been to San Francisco for Tom’s college roommate’s wedding. Marianne was wearing similar sweatpants and a plain black long-sleeved T-shirt, and a red shawl was draped over the back of her chair.“We’re like world-weary businesswomen who travel internationally twice a month and are just so over it,” Marianne said. “I feel like I should be impatiently clacking away on a laptop but I have no work to do this week and I bet Tom’s fast asleep.”Marianne looked down at her phone and the itinerary that had been sent by the wedding planner.“It feels like we’re going to have a lot of free time,” Marianne said. “There aren’t that many events listed here. I thought Indian weddings had days and days of events.”“I think these days most people just pick and choose what parts they want to do. Shefali wanted to walk down the aisle in a white dress but my aunt put her foot down and said she could pick and choose what she wanted but she couldn’t change religions,” Tina said. “We’ll have time to explore the city, though.”Marianne nodded as she cracked open a pistachio and ate it and played with the shells in one hand.Their flight was two hours late so they were on glass number three of champagne and plate number two of mini sandwiches. Even on Tina’s decent income, these business-class tickets were prohibitively expensive. She had managed to book an economy flight using her own money and then used her miles to upgrade herself. Tina was the vice president of development for Pixl, a streaming network for which she sought video content, a term she hated but a job that paid her enough to live alone in a two-bedroom apartment overlooking McCarren Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her work was frustrating—ideas forever on the brink of becoming television shows but nothing concrete yet, nothing complete, nothing finished. Her enthusiasm for projects always waned as more people got involved and ideas gradually got altered and then shut down altogether.At Pixl, Tina was in charge of find