There’s a ritual to shaadi nights. The first part of it involves Jasbir in the bathroom for hours playing pop music too loud and using too much expensive water while Sujay knocks and leaves copious cups of tea at the door and runs an iron over Jasbir’s collars and cuffs and carefully removes the hairs of previous shaadis from Jasbir’s suit jacket. Sujay is Jasbir’s housemate in the government house at Acacia Bungalow Colony. He’s a character designer on the Awadh version of Town and Country, neighbour-and-rival Bharat’s all-conquering artificial intelligence generated soap opera. He works with the extras, designing new character skins and dropping them over raw code from Varanasi. Jahzay Productions is a new model company, meaning that Sujay seems to do most of his work from the verandah on his newfangled lighthoek device, his hands drawing pretty, invisible patterns on air. To office-bound Jasbir, with a ninety-minute commute on three modes of transport each way each day, it looks pretty close to nothing. Sujay is uncommunicative and hairy and neither shaves nor washes his too-long hair enough but his is a sensitive soul and he compensates for the luxury of being able to sit in the cool cool shade all day waving his hands by doing housework. He cleans, he tidies, he launders. He is a fabulous cook. He is so good that Jasbir does not need a maid, a saving much to be desired in pricey Acacia Bungalow Colony. This is a source of gossip to the other residents of Acacia Bungalow Colony. Most of the goings-on in Number 27 are the subject of gossip over the lawn sprinklers. Acacia Bungalow Colony is a professional, family gated community.
The second part of the ritual is the dressing. Like a syce preparing a Mughal lord for battle, Sujay dresses Jasbir. He fits the cufflinks and adjusts them to the proper angle. He adjusts the set of Jasbir’s collar just so. He examines Jasbir from every angle as if he is looking at one of his own freshly-fleshed characters. Brush off a little dandruff here, correct a desk-slumped posture there. Smell his breath and check teeth for lunch-time spinach and other dental crimes.
‘So what do you think of them then?’ Jasbir says.
‘They’re white,’ grunts Sujay.
The third part of the ritual is the briefing. While they wait for the phatphat, Sujay fills Jasbir in on upcoming plot-lines on Town and Country. It’s Jasbir’s major conversational ploy and advantage over his deadly rivals; soap-opera gossip. In his experience, what the women really want is gupshup from the meta-soap, the no-less-fictitious lives and loves and marriages and rows of the aeai actors that believe they are playing the roles in Town and Country. ‘Auh,’ Sujay will say. ‘Different department.’
There’s the tootle of phatphat horns. Curtains will twitch, there will be complaints about waking up children on a school night. But Jasbir is glimmed and glammed and shaadi-fit. And armed with soapi gupshup. How can he fail?
‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ Sujay says as he opens the door for the God of Love. ‘Your father left a message. He wants to see you.’
‘You’ve hired a what?’ Jasbir’s retort is smothered by the cheers of his brothers from the living room as a cricket ball rolls and skips over the boundary rope at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. His father bends closer, confidentially, across the tiny tin-topped kitchen table. Anant whisks the kettle off the boil so she can overhear. She is the slowest, most awkward maid in Delhi but to fire her would be to condemn an old woman to the streets. She lumbers around the Dayal kitchen like a buffalo, feigning disinterest.
‘A matchmaker. Not my idea, not my idea at all; it was hers.’ Jasbir’s father inclines his head toward the open living-room door. Beyond it, enthroned on her sofa amidst her non-eligible boys, Jasbir’s mother watches the test match on the smart-silk wallscreen Jasbir had bought her with his first civil service pay-check. When Jasbir left the tiny, ghee-stinky apartment on Nabi Karim Road for the distant graces of Acacia Bungalow Colony, Mrs Dayal delegated all negotiations with her wayward son to her husband. ‘She’s found this special matchmaker.’
‘Wait wait wait. Explain to me special.’
Jasbir’s father squirms. Anant is taking a long time to dry a tea-cup.
‘Well, you know in the old days people would maybe have gone to a hijra… Well, she’s updated it a bit, this being the twenty-first century and everything, so she’s, ah, found a nute.’
A clatter of a cup hitting a stainless-steel draining-board.
‘A nute?’ Jasbir hisses
‘He knows contracts. He knows deportment and proper etiquette. He knows what women want. I think he may have been one, once.’
Anant lets out an aie!, soft and involuntary as a fart.
‘I think the word you’re looking for is “yt”,’ Jasbir says. “And they’re not hijras the way you knew them. They’re not men become women or women become men. They’re neither.’
‘Nutes, neithers, hijras, yts, hes, shes; whatever; it’s not as if I even get to take tea with the parents let alone see an announcement in the shaadi section in the Times of Awadh.’ Mrs Dayal shouts over the burbling commentary to the second Awadh-China Test. Jasbir winces. Like papercuts, the criticisms of parents are the finest and the most painful.
Inside the Haryana Polo and Country Club the weather was raining men snowing men hailing men. Well-dressed men, moneyed men, charming men, groomed and glinted men, men with prospects all laid out in their marriage r’sum’s. Jasbir knew most of them by face. Some he knew by name, a few had passed beyond being rivals into becoming friends.
‘Teeth!’ A cry, a nod, a two-six-gun showbiz point from the bar. There leant Kishore, a casual lank of a man draped like a skein of silk against the Raj-era mahogany. ‘Where did you get those, badmash?’ He was an old university colleague of Jasbir’s, much given to high-profile activities like horse racing at the Delhi Jockey Club or skiing, where there was snow left on the Himalayas. Now he was In Finance and claimed to have been to five hundred shaadis and made a hundred proposals. But when they were on the hook, wriggling, he let them go. Oh, the tears, the threats, the phone calls from fuming fathers and boiling brothers. It’s the game, isn’t it? Kishore rolls on, ‘Here, have you heard? Tonight is Deependra’s night. Oh yes. An astrology aeai has predicted it. It’s all in the stars, and on your palmer.’
Deependra was a clenched wee man. Like Jasbir he was a civil servant, heading up a different glass-partitioned workcluster in the Ministry of Waters: Streams and Watercourses to Jasbir’s Ponds and Dams. For three shaadis now he had been nurturing a fantasy about a woman who exchanged palmer addresses with him. First it was a call, then a date. Now it’s a proposal.
‘Rahu is in the fourth house, Saturn in the seventh,’ Deependra said lugubriously. ‘Our eyes will meet, she will nod – just a nod. The next morning she will call me and that will be it, done, dusted. I’d ask you to be one of my groomsmen, but I’ve already promised them all to my brothers and cousins. It’s written. Trust me.’
It was a perpetual bafflement to Jasbir how a man wedded by day to robust fluid accounting by night stakes love and life on an off-the-shelf janampatri artificial intelligence.