The tango, the manicures, the pedicures, the briefings in popular culture and Delhi gossip (‘Soap opera insults both the intelligence and imagination, I should know, sir’), the conversational ploys, the body language games of when to turn so, when to make or break eye-contact, when to dare the lightest, engaging touch. Sujay mooched around the house, even more lumbering and lost than usual, as Jasbir chatted with air and practised Latin turns and drops with invisible partners. Last of all, on the morning of the Jaitly shaadi.
‘Eyebrows sir. You will never get a bride with brows like a hairy sadhu. There is a girl not five kilometres from here, she has a moped service. I’ve ordered her, she will be here within ten minutes.’
As ever, Kishore won’t let Jasbir wedge an answer in, but rattles on, ‘So, Deependra then?’
Jasbir has noticed that Deependra is not occupying his customary place in Kishore’s shadows; in fact he does not seem to be anywhere in this penthouse.
‘Third date,’ Kishore says, then mouths it again silently for emphasis. ‘That janampatri aeai must be doing something right. You know, wouldn’t it be funny if someone took her off him? Just as a joke, you know?’
Kishore chews his bottom lip. Jasbir knows the gesture of old. Then bells chime, lights dim and a wind from nowhere sends the butter-flames flickering and the little diyas flocking across the infinity pool. The walls have opened, the women enter the room.
She stands by the glass wall looking down into the cube of light that is the car park. She clutches her cocktail between her hands as if in prayer or concern. It is a new cocktail designed for the international cricket test, served in an egg-shaped goblet made from a new spin-glass that will always self-right, no matter how it is set down or dropped. A Test of Dragons is the name of the cocktail. Good Awadhi whisky over a gilded syrup with a six-hit of Chinese Kao Liang liqueur. A tiny red gel dragon dissolves like a sunset.
‘Now, sir,’ whispers Ram Tarun Das standing at Jasbir’s shoulder. ‘Faint heart, as they say.’
Jasbir’s mouth is dry. A secondary application Sujay pasted onto the Ram Tarun Das aeai tells him his precise heart rate, respiration, temperature and the degree of sweat in his palm. He’s surprised he’s still alive.
You’ve got the entry lines, you’ve got the exit lines and the stuff in the middle Ram Tarun Das will provide.
He follows her glance down into the car park. A moment’s pause, a slight inclination of his body towards hers. That is the line.
So, are you a Tata, a Mercedes, a Li Fan or a Lexus? Ram Tarun Das whispers in Jasbir’s skull. He casually repeats the line. He has been rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed in how to make it sound natural. He’s as good as any newsreader, better than those few human actors left on television.
She turns to him, lips parted a fraction in surprise.
‘I beg your pardon?’
She will say this, Ram Tarun Das hints. Again, offer the line.
‘Are you a Tata, a Mercedes, a Li Fan or a Lexus?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just pick one. Whatever you feel, that’s the right answer.’
A pause, a purse of the lips. Jasbir subtly links his hands behind his back, the better to hide the sweat.
‘Lexus,’ she says. Shulka, her name is Shulka. She is a twenty-two-year-old marketing graduate from Delhi U working in men’s fashion, a Mathur – only a couple of caste steps away from Jasbir’s folk. The Demographic Crisis has done more to shake up the tiers of varna and jati than a century of the slow drip of democracy. And she has answered his question.
‘Now, that’s very interesting,’ says Jasbir.
She turns, plucked crescent-moon eyebrows arched. Behind Jasbir, Ram Tarun Das whispers, Now, the fetch.
‘Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai?’
A small frown now. Lord Vishnu, she is beautiful.
‘I was born in Delhi…’
‘That’s not what I mean.’
The frown becomes a nano-smile of recognition.
‘Mumbai then. Yes, Mumbai definitely. Kolkata’s hot and dirty and nasty. And Chennai – no, I’m definitely Mumbai.’
Jasbir does the sucked-in-lip nod of concentration Ram Tarun Das made him practise in front of the mirror.
‘Red, green, yellow, blue?’
‘Red.’ No hesitation.
‘Cat, dog, bird, monkey?’
She cocks her head to one side. Jasbir notices that she, too, is wearing a ’hoek. Tech girl. The cocktail bot is on its rounds, doing industrial magic with the self-righting glasses and its little spider-fingers.
‘Bird… no.’ A sly smile. ‘No no no. Monkey.’
He is going to die he is going to die.
‘But what does it mean?’
Jasbir holds up a finger.
‘One more. Ved Prakash, Begum Vora, Dr Chatterji, Ritu Parvaaz.’
She laughs. She laughs like bells from the hem of a wedding skirt. She laughs like the stars of a Himalaya night.
What do you think you’re doing? Ram Tarun Das hisses. He flips through Jasbir’s perceptions to appear behind Shulka, hands thrown up in despair. With a gesture he encompasses the horizon wreathed in gas flares. Look, tonight the sky burns for you, sir, and you would talk about soap opera! The script, stick to the script! Improvisation is death. Jasbir almost tells his matchmaker, Away djinn, away. He repeats the question.
‘I’m not really a Town and Country fan,’ Shulka says. ‘My sister now, she knows every last detail about every last one of the characters and that’s before she gets started on the actors. It’s one of those things I suppose you can be ludicrously well informed about without ever watching. So if you had to press me, I would have to say Ritu. So what does it all mean, Mr Dayal?’
His heart turns over in his chest. Ram Tarun Das eyes him coldly. The finesse: make it. Do it just as I instructed you. Otherwise your money and my bandwidth are thrown to the wild wind.
The cocktail bot dances in to perform its cybernetic circus. A flip of Shulka’s glass and it comes down spinning, glinting, on the precise needle-point of its forefinger. Like magic, if you know nothing about gyros and spin-glasses. But that moment of prestidigitation is cover enough for Jasbir to make the ordained move. By the time she looks up, cocktail refilled, he is half a room away.
He wants to apologise as he sees her eyes widen. He needs to apologise as her gaze searches the room for him. Then her eyes catch his. It is across a crowded room just like the song that Sujay mumbles around the house when he thinks Jasbir can’t hear. Sujay loves that song. It is the most romantic, heart-felt, innocent song he has ever heard. Big awkward Sujay has always been a sucker for veteran Hollywood musicals. South Pacific, Carousel, Moulin Rouge, he watches them on the big screen in the living room, singing shamelessly along and getting moist-eyed at the impossible loves. Across a crowded room, Shulka frowns. Of course. It’s in the script.
But what does it mean? she mouths. And, as Ram Tarun Das has directed, he shouts back, ‘Call me and I’ll tell you.’ Then he turns on his heel and walks away. And that, he knows without any prompt from Ram Tarun Das, is the finesse.
The apartment is grossly over-heated and smells of singeing cooking ghee but the nute is swaddled in a crocheted shawl, hunched as if against a persistent hard wind. Plastic tea-cups stand on the low brass table, Jasbir’s mother’s conspicuously untouched. Jasbir sits on the sofa with his father on his right and his mother on his left, as if between arresting policemen. Nahin the nute mutters and shivers and rubs yts fingers.