A Nepali khidmutgar banged a staff on the hardwood dance-floor of the exclusive Haryana Polo and Country Club. The Eligible Boys straightened their collars, adjusted the hang of their jackets, aligned their cufflinks. This side of the mahogany double doors to the garden they were friends and colleagues. Beyond it they were rivals.
‘Gentlemen, valued clients of the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency, please welcome, honour and cherish the Begum Rezzak and her Lovely Girls!’
Two attendants slid open the folding windows onto the polo ground. There waited the lovely girls in their saris and jewels and gold and henna (for the Lovely Girl Agency is a most traditional and respectable agency). Jasbir checked his schedule – five minutes per client, maybe less, never more. He took a deep breath and unleashed his thousand-rupee smile. It was time to find a wife.
‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re muttering about in there,’ Mrs Dayal calls over the mantra commentary of Harsha Bhogle. ‘I’ve had the talk. The nute will arrange the thing for much less than you are wasting on all those shaadi agencies and databases and nonsense. No, nute will make the match that is it stick stop stay.’ There is a spatter of applause from the Test Match.
‘I tell you your problem: a girl sees two men sharing a house together, she gets ideas about them,’ Dadaji whispers. Anant finally sets down two cups of tea and rolls her eyes. ‘She’s had the talk. Yt’ll start making the match. There’s nothing to be done about it. There are worse things.’
The women may think what they want, but Sujay has it right, Jasbir thinks. Best never to buy into the game at all.
Another cheer, another boundary. Haresh and Sohan jeer at the Chinese devils. Think you can buy it in and beat the world, well, the Awadhi boys are here to tell you it takes years, decades, centuries upon centuries to master the way of cricket. And there’s too much milk in the tea.
A dream wind like the hot gusts that forerun the monsoon sends a spray of pixels through the cool white spacious rooms of 27 Acacia Avenue Bungalows. Jasbir ducks and laughs as they blow around him. He expects them to be cold and sharp as wind-whipped powder snow but they are only digits, patterns of electrical charge swept through his visual cortex by the clever little device hooked behind his right ear. They chime as they swirl past, like glissandis of silver sitar notes. Shaking his head in wonder, Jasbir slips the lighthoek from behind his ear. The vision evaporates.
‘Very clever, very pretty but I think I’ll wait until the price comes down.’
‘It’s, um, not the ’hoek,’ Sujay mutters. ‘You know, well, the matchmaker your mother hired. Well, I thought, maybe you don’t need someone arranging you a marriage.’ Some days Sujay’s inability to talk to the point exasperates Jasbir. Those days tend to come after another fruitless and expensive shaadi night and the threat of a matchmaker but particularly after Deependra of the non-white teeth announces he has a date. With the girl. The one written in the fourth house of Rahu by his pocket astrology aeai. ‘Well, you see I thought, with the right help you could arrange it yourself.’ Some days, debate with Sujay is pointless. He follows his own calendar. ‘You, ah, need to put the ’hoek back on again.’
Silver notes spray through Jasbir’s inner ears as the little curl of smart plastic seeks out the sweet spot in his skull. Pixel birds swoop and swarm like starlings on a winter evening. It is inordinately pretty. Then Jasbir gasps aloud as the motes of light and sound sparklingly coalesce into a dapper man in an old-fashioned high-collar sherwani and wrinkle-bottom pyjamas. His shoes are polished to mirror-brightness. The dapper man bows.
‘Good morning, sir. I am Ram Tarun Das, Master of Grooming, Grace and Gentlemanliness.’
‘What is this doing in my house?’ Jasbir unhooks the device beaming data into his brain.
‘Er, please don’t do that,’ Sujay says. ‘It’s not aeai etiquette.’
Jasbir slips the device back on and there he is, that charming man.
‘I have been designed with the express purpose of helping you marry a suitable girl,’ says Ram Tarun Das.
‘Designed?’
‘I, ah, made him for you,’ says Sujay. ‘I thought that if anyone knows about relationships and marriages, it’s soap stars.’
‘A soap star. You’ve made me a, a marriage life-coach out of a soap star?’
‘Not a soap star exactly, more a conflation of a number of subsystems from the central character register,’ Sujay says. ‘Sorry Ram.’
‘Do you usually do that?’
‘Do what?’
‘Apologise to aeais.’
‘They have feelings too.’
Jasbir rolls his eyes. ‘I’m being taught husbandcraft by a mash-up. ’
‘Ah, that is out of order. Now you apologise.’
‘Now then, sir, if I am to rescue you from a marriage forged in hell, we had better start with manners,’ says Ram Tarun Das. ‘Manners maketh the man. It is the bedrock of all relationships because true manners come from what he is, not what he does. Do not argue with me, women see this at once. Respect for all things, sir, is the key to etiquette. Maybe I only imagine I feel as you feel, but that does not make my feelings any less real to me. So this once, I accept your apology as read. Now, we’ll begin. We have so much to do before tonight’s shaadi.’
Why, Jasbir thinks, why can I never get my shoes like that?
The lazy crescent moon lolls low above the out-flarings of Tughluk’s thousand stacks; a cradle to rock an infant nation. Around its rippling reflection in the infinity pool bob mango-leaf diyas. No polo grounds and country clubs for Begum Jaitly. This is 2045, not 1945. Modern style for a modern nation, that is philosophy of the Jaitly Shaadi Agency. But gossip and want are eternal and in the mood lighting of the penthouse the men are blacker-than-black shadows against greater Delhi’s galaxy of lights and traffic.
‘Eyebrows!’ Kishore greets Jasbir with TV-host pistol-fingers two-shot bam bam. ‘No seriously, what did you do to them?’ Then his own eyes widen as he scans down from the eyebrows to the total product. His mouth opens, just a crack, but wide enough for Jasbir to savour an inner fist-clench of triumph.
He’d felt self-conscious taking Ram Tarun Das to the mall. He had no difficulty accepting that the figure in its stubbornly atavistic costume was invisible to everyone but him (though he did marvel at how the aeai avoided colliding with any other shopper in the thronged Centrestage Mall). He did feel stupid talking to thin air.
‘What is this delicacy?’ Ram Tarun Das said in Jasbir’s inner ear. ‘People talk to thin air on the cellphone all the time. Now this suit, sir.’
It was bright, it was brocade, it was a fashionable retro cut that Jasbir would have gone naked rather than worn.
‘It’s very… bold.’
‘It’s very you. Try it. Buy it. You will seem confident and stylish without being flashy. Women cannot bear flashy.’
The robot cutters and stitchers were at work even as Jasbir completed the card transaction. It was expensive. Not as expensive as all the shaadi memberships, he consoled himself. And something to top it off. But Ram Tarun Das manifested himself right in the jeweller’s window over the display.
‘Never jewellery on a man. One small brooch at the shirt collar to hold it together, that is permissible. Do you want the lovely girls to think you are a Mumbai pimp? No, sir, you do not. No to jewels. Yes to shoes. Come.’
He had paraded his finery before a slightly embarrassed Sujay.
‘You look, er, good. Very dashing. Yes.’
Ram Tarun Das, leaning on his cane and peering intensely, said, ‘You move like a buffalo. Ugh, sir. Here is what I prescribe for you. Tango lessons. Passion and discipline. Latin fire, yet the strictest of tempos. Do not argue, it is the tango for you. There is nothing like it for deportment.’