Free The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

unmarried sister who has overstayed her welcome at her parents’ house? Has she become unwanted because they have not been able to marry her off? This time the tears oblige, although only for a short while: it is a momentary light drizzle rather than a downpour and, instead of feeling relieved, something coils and loops and knots and reknots inside her.

    In the time she would come to remember as her two years of blazing brightly, Chhaya had received, on average, one marriage proposal a month. Much later, after the steady parade of suitors had fallen from ten a year to eight, then to four, and finally to one every two or three years, as the clock had ticked on and time had raced and rushed, it was openly said that being a graduate, having a BA degree, had harmed Chhaya’s chances of finding a husband. She did not know if it was in defiant retaliation or for consolation that she embarked on an MA after the flow of suitors had thinned to a trickle with all the volume of a newborn’s piss. Priyo had announced that he would not marry until someone was found for his sister first. That resolve, it transpired, had clearly not been set in stone, although, to be fair to him, he got married only when Chhaya had reached the age beyond which the issue became irreversible. Next, it was the turn of her younger brother, Bhola, to make a similarly rash promise. He had reneged the year his sister hit the point of no return: thirty.
    It had all started off with not insufficient promise. Chhaya was the only daughter of the wealthy Ghosh family, so the dowry and attendant gifts such as jewellery, consumer durables, kitchenware and clothes would have been very attractive; she was reading for a degree (at the initial stages this had been a positive thing, something to be proud, even boastful, of); she had ‘Spoken English’. More importantly, she had the right sun-sign with the right planets in alignment – Pisces with Venus ascendant in the fifth house of Jupiter – to make an auspicious bride.
    But the dizzying, whirling, magical roulette of matches, so rich and teasing with possibilities, had proved to be a slippery wheel. The laws of probability, while seeming so amenable to providing not one but a whole suite of matches, seemed disobliging when it came to achieving that one crucial hit of success and had somehow always tricked and wrong-footed her so that she remained outside the circle of the favoured. Some element in the whole set of required or desirable qualities had either not been satisfied or had been lacking. If the family of one prospective groom approved of everything and the marriage deal seemed almost closed, suddenly the question ‘And do you cook?’, or the demand that she would be forbidden to work once she was married, would have the effect of a ghost entering the room, chilling everyone to silence, ushering in the instant end of that particular match.
    On a couple of occasions some incongruence during the matching of Chhaya’s horoscope with the suitor’s, discovered at quite an advanced stage of the matchmaking process, had finished off things. Charubala had raged, ‘Why did they not bother to find out earlier? Why did they get our hopes up, leading us on this merry dance? Low people, I say, low, common people! Good thing that our daughter didn’t go to the home of such lowlives.’
    In moments of tremulous, private introspection a shadow of an admission flitted through her mind that it was not such a good thing after all, that on the balance of things it was better to have a daughter married than to carp about such hair-splitting on the part of the suitors’ families. It also struck her that circumstances had so tumbled over to their opposite that they were now the party with the suit, they were the real and true suitors, not the steadily diminishing stream of men who came to see Chhaya.
    The family was forced to set their sights lower once they realised that the high noon of matchmaking had inexorably passed.