Free Of Marriageable Age by Sharon Maas

. She was playing the part of a person playing a part, and right now she'd forgotten her lines and all Gan's prompting was in vain.
    She looked at him, pleading with her eyes for him to stop, and said simply, 'What shall I do?'
    She could see the word 'murder' forming on Gan's grinning lips, but then he must have caught the expression of liquid agony in her eyes because he stopped, regarded her in a moment of rare silence and said, 'I don't know, Saroj. Can't you just, well, flatly refuse?'
    She gave him a look which was supposed to be withering, but it's hard to be withering when despair is nipping at your heels.
    She reached into Ganesh's bag and took out the lime crush and an opener, then removed the crown with a click. But she didn't drink. The bottle still in her hand, she glanced at the window facing Waterloo Street, at the spectacular panorama of Georgetown's treetops, glittering roofs, sky, frayed clouds drifting by, and in the distance a glimpse of the Atlantic.
    'As a last resort I could jump from here.'
    'You never said that, Saroj, and I don't want to ever hear it again.'
    'But if I don't do something, Gan, it'll all happen the way it did with Indrani. This whole Ghosh business will just keep rolling on, gathering momentum, and one fine day I'll wake up and I'll be Mrs Keedernat Ghosh.'
    'Look, Saroj, just take it easy. Indrani's sixteen; you'll be sixteen too before this gets really serious. Plenty of time. What I don't understand is why Baba chose someone like that. I mean, a girl like you, good looks, respectable family, money, brains — you've got everything going for you. Why didn't he aim higher? Why didn't he nab a Luckhoo, for instance?'
    The Luckhoo family was Georgetown's most prominent Indian law clan. Now they really had everything: Oxbridge educations, judgeships, knighthoods, and a couple of boys of marriageable age.
    'Well, that's quite obvious. D'you think any of those Luckhoo boys would even dream of having their brides chosen for them? I mean, for goodness' sake, where are we living, in some Bengali village or what? And as for you . . . you wouldn't be so flippant about the whole thing if you didn't have some trump up your sleeve about this Narain girl. What're you going to do about it? Seriously, now?'
    'It's easier for me. I'm going to go to university in England and that'll solve a few problems. All I have to do is never come back. They'll get over it. One good thing about these long-term engagements is that they give you long-term time for evading them. I'll just disappear from the scene — poof!'
    'Maybe this Keedernat boy will go away to study too, and never come back!'
    But Ganesh shook his head. He leaned against one of the windows and stretched out his long, lean, jeans-enclosed legs.
    'No such luck, Saroj. Baba'd have chosen an older fellow for you in that case, someone who's already in England and coming back in a couple of years. Like he did for Indrani. This Ghosh boy'll sit a few O-Levels next year, pass two or three, and then go straight into his daddy's business selling dry goods and saris. They'll let him work a couple of years, and then he'll marry you when he's eighteen and you're sixteen.'
    He dipped his hand into his bag and took out two samosas, threw one to her, and crunched his teeth into the other one. An expression of pure delight slipped over his face. 'Mmm . . . How Ma gets them to taste this way I'll never find out. I've tried and tried but mine just aren't the same.'
    Saroj felt a tweak of irritation at Ganesh. He was so shallow! How could he speak of Saroj marrying the Ghosh boy in one sentence, and in the next of Ma's samosas?
    Ganesh adored cooking, and there was nothing Ma could cook that he couldn't, but he still hadn't figured out that certain something, the magic ingredient which made Ma's dishes exquisite works of art, and his, by its lack, just tasty food. Ma knew all the secrets of cooking. She knew which foods were sattvic , raising your mind to great