When I let myself in the house I found Mom loading the dishwasher and Dad watching TV. Dinner was obviously over. I could smell the lingering odors of spices and vegetables. I was happy to see Maneel and Mahesh were absent. I wasn’t in a mood for their ribbing tonight.
Mom looked up from the sink, her hands dripping. “You’re home.” Her eyes went to the clock on the wall. She was wondering why I was home so early. Not a good sign. “How was dinner?”
I noticed she was careful not to use the word date. I did have men friends who had no romantic ties to me whatsoever. Every so often I had a meal with one or more of them at a restaurant, and I’d made it clear to Mom that the social occasions were definitely not to be confused with dates. And if indeed they were dates, Mom and Dad didn’t seem to mind.
They knew I’d dated in college, and they had no problem with that—as long as I could assure them I was doing it responsibly, meaning no sex. The poor dears still harbored the illusion that I was a virgin.
I smiled at Mom. “Dinner was quite nice. I had dinner with a FOB.”
Mom put the last dish in the dishwasher and shut its door. “That’s a nasty term you young people use, Meena,” she chided. “It’s not nice to label people like that. Your father and I are immigrants, too.”
“But you guys came here more than thirty-five years ago. You’re officially BHLTs.”
“As in bacon, hot pepper, lettuce, and tomato?”
“Funny, Mom,” I said dryly. “In your case it stands for been here long time.”
Mom wiped the counter down, then dried her hands on the kitchen towel. “All that hard work for three and a half decades, and we’re reduced to the level of a sandwich.”
“Cheer up.” I gave her arm a friendly squeeze before heading for the staircase. “BLT is my favorite sandwich, especially with hot peppers.”
Seeing me going upstairs instead of joining Dad and her in the family room and perhaps noticing the large envelope held against my chest, she raised an eyebrow. “Brought work home?”
“Uh-huh. I’d better get to it before I go to bed.” I kept moving before it turned into more questions and I ended up lying.
In my room, I got changed into pajamas and brushed my teeth since it was only about two hours to bedtime. Then I sat at my desk to deal with the envelope. Prajay wasn’t kidding; there were dozens of messages. His ads had said he was a successful businessman. Most women went for that kind of bold, enterprising type of guy.
I started on the e-mails with the pictures attached. The respondents were so hilarious I was ready to roll on the floor. One was a woman who looked like something from a carnival freak show. She had wild hair and wilder eyes. She said she stood six feet and eight inches. And she wasn’t even Indian, let alone a Hindu. She was definitely not the one. To court her, even Prajay would have to wear elevator shoes.
I put her response through the little shredder I happened to have in my room. I had bought it when I was in college so my roommate wouldn’t get into my personal business. I hardly ever used it now, but tonight it would get a good workout.
Another was a female wrestler. At two hundred and ninety pounds, she was six-one. Dressed in a revealing, orangey-yellow wrestling outfit in the picture, she looked like a Halloween pumpkin. I wondered if she thought Prajay was the kind of guy who’d enjoy having a wrestler in his bed. Bedtime games could get a little rough with a woman like that. Ouch!
Several others came across as entirely hopeless cases, too. Most of them lived in India or England or even as far away as New Zealand and Hong Kong. Unfortunately the Internet allowed everyone in the world access to matchmaking sites. And there were lots of folks out there eager to have an opportunity to marry an American citizen and live in the U.S.
Every time I sent a reply to the shredder my sense of elation escalated. If Prajay couldn’t find a single woman worth his attention, maybe he’d be willing to look down his honker at me and discover that good things could indeed come in small packages.
I honestly couldn’t find a single viable candidate, but since I didn’t want Prajay to get suspicious, I managed to pick out two who looked somewhat promising. One was a North Indian Sikh woman who lived on the West Coast. She was six feet tall, an American citizen, and had a PhD in endocrinology. She even had a nice job as a research scientist at Stanford University. I was relieved to note that she looked rather plump.
The other female was five-eleven and worked as a nurse in West Virginia. Both women were plain looking. I sent a quick prayer of thanks. So far, so good.
Going into my computer, I quickly set up a simple database and labeled it “Search for Six-foot Siren.” That way I’d be able to keep all the candidates with strong potential in a single document and mail them to Prajay accordingly.
Now that I was officially his marriage consultant, I’d do a heck of job for him, dazzle him, even if it was likely to kill me, bit by tiny bit.
I wondered what the next day’s responses would bring. Let only the most unsuitable ones come to Prajay’s attention, God, I prayed.
Maybe I was going to pay dearly in my next life for wishing such negative things on someone, but I wasn’t really hurting anyone. I was only helping fate along—reshaping it, just a tiny bit.
Even Mom believed that destiny needed a nudge in the right direction once in a while.
Chapter 11
Fortunately my weekend was filled with socializing, so I didn’t have much time to brood. Rita and Anoop hosted their first party as Mr. and Mrs. Anoop Tandon at their townhouse on Saturday evening.
I offered to help with the preparations despite the food’s being mostly catered. I went to their place early in the afternoon, and Rita and I made some finger foods and appetizers.
The guests were our group of twenty or so close friends—all young adults of mixed ethnicities, professionals in one field or another.
It was nice to see my best friend glowing. I’d always known Rita would beat me to the altar. She wasn’t particularly ambitious in the career department. She’d started working for a large insurance company as an actuary after getting a degree in statistics from Boston College. She had no desire to go beyond that. Anoop was a bright and dynamic architect. He had enough ambition and drive for the both of them.
Rita and Anoop had met two years ago when their respective parents had introduced them. Rita knew instinctively from the start that he was the right guy for her. My aunt Shabari would have been proud of her for using the hooking and reeling technique with such finesse. Rita was no fool; she knew a good thing when she saw it. And Anoop was a really good guy.
Of course, Rita’s success story had my mom in raptures over how beautifully these semi-arranged relationships worked out. Then she’d thrown me that wistful-hopeful look which said: So why can’t you be a good Indian girl and settle down, too?
But I’d never considered myself a good Indian girl. I wasn’t bad, but neither was I a soft and malleable ball of putty that could be molded by my parents. Or anyone else. I was a modern woman with modern ideas. One of these days I’d find my own man. In my own way.
Rita and Anoop’s party was a brilliant success. To make a good thing better, Phil Chu and Denise Landowski announced their engagement during the evening, prompting an extra round of drinks after midnight for an impromptu toast to the engaged couple. I got a little teary-eyed to see two of my friends looking so happy.
Phil was Chinese and Denise was German-Polish, and it was great to see them now ready to tie the knot after dating for three years. Surprisingly, the families on both sides were okay with their romance.
The party broke up around two o’clock. I helped Rita and Anoop clean up and went home by three, then slept until noon.
On Sunday, since Mahesh had a rare day off, Maneel rented a couple of movies. We made a bowl of spicy masala popcorn and watched one of the movies in the afternoon. In the evening we ordered pizza and ate it while viewing the second movie. Dad built a fire in the fireplace, and it was lovely to s
tretch out on the carpet with a pillow under my head.
We lazed around, except for Mom. Her beeper went off halfway through the second movie, and she was called away on an emergency. One of her patients had gone into labor. But Sunday was one of those rare occasions when everyone in the family was in a mellow mood. We did little talking, and yet the strong sense of family hung in the air.
I liked weekends like these, when both my brothers were on their best behavior and my parents were generally agreeable to any of our plans. I preferred to think of them as family bonding days, when we turned into the Cleavers.
On Monday morning, Prajay and I worked out a system for him to hand over the daily responses to me without raising questions and eyebrows. Since I’d made it clear that it was a bad idea for the two of us to be seen in each other’s company, I figured we had to work on his bride quest discreetly. Since his responses came via e-mail, he simply forwarded all of them to my home computer.
Each evening, I reviewed them and decided which were to be printed. It was a very efficient method, using a minimal amount of paper. Weeding out the fluff wasn’t as simple as I’d presumed. But I was getting paid for this, so I didn’t complain.
Mom was now used to the idea of my working on some secret project that involved Rathnaya’s work for the federal government. I’d thrown that in for good measure since she’d noticed my paper shreds. She no longer considered it strange when I sat behind closed doors each night and worked on my computer. I suspected she’d given up on the notion that something deliciously clandestine was going on between Prajay and me.
Meanwhile Deepak started asking me about another date. This time he was talking about a movie, too. It was tempting, but I had work to do, so I turned down his invitation. My consulting work for Prajay paid well, and I couldn’t pass up that kind of money in favor of dinner and a movie.
Besides, I had a feeling Deepak was reading too much into our dinner the other day, and I didn’t want to lead him on. Indian men could be a little scary that way—one harmless little date and they started thinking in terms of holy matrimony and a lifelong commitment to sharing a bed and bathtub.
By Friday night I had added five more possibilities to my database: one professor of economics at a liberal arts college in the Midwest; one government official of mixed parentage (half Indian and half Caucasian); one fashion model (didn’t look like a model in her photograph); one doctor of internal medicine (she was only five-ten, but she was a medical doctor and therefore highly qualified); one electronics engineer working in the IT field.
This last one was my most feared applicant, because she was six-foot-one, thirty-three years old, slim, and attractive, an American citizen, and she was a Brahmin. Worse yet, she lived in Bethesda, Maryland—close to Washington, DC—practically next door to Prajay’s permanent home.
I had a feeling Prajay would fall in love with her in an instant. She was exactly the kind of woman he was looking for. She was my worst nightmare. I was tempted to quietly delete her message. But I had a conscience—and I’d always considered myself a fair player. Besides, I wasn’t even in the running. I never had been.
I fumed over the unfairness of it all. Why did I have to inherit my grandmother’s midget genes? How could one woman, like this engineer, have everything a man desired? When those two eventually met, which was likely to be very soon, they’d bond like iron and magnet. They had everything in common: their unusual height; their professions; their culture; even their geographical locations. I, on the other hand, was the exact opposite in every way that counted.
It looked like I was destined to end up with someone like Deepak. And I was as mad as a disturbed hornet at Prajay. Why was the man so obsessed with finding a tall woman? What was his problem, anyway? Maybe he was gay, despite his statement to the contrary.
This ridiculous quest for the perfect woman could be Prajay’s cover-up to keep his sexual orientation a secret. Gay men were not accepted well by the Indian community—in fact by most of the heterosexual population. Gayness would likely have an adverse effect on his business dealings, too. What stodgy military general would want to give a contract to a gay man?
Just as I was whipping myself into a furious froth over Prajay and his taste in women, my cell phone rang. It was past nine o’clock on a Friday night, and most of my friends would be out socializing. I should have been out with them, but I wasn’t in the mood. The number flashing on my phone was within my calling area. It had to be a wrong number, or someone trying to sell something.
I answered the phone with brusque impatience. “Who is this?”
“Is that how you greet all your customers?” the deep voice asked.
“Prajay?” I gave my pulse a second to settle. “Sorry, I thought you were a telemarketer.”
He chuckled. “Aren’t you on the Do Not Call list?”
“I am. That’s why it upset me that some idiot might’ve still managed to get past that.”
“I’m the idiot you shared your cell number with. I figured this was a safer number to call than your home number.”
“Definitely. My parents answer that phone most of the time.” I put on my enthusiastic employee tone. “So, what can I do for you, boss?”
“Are you busy tomorrow?”
I frowned at the floor. “Why? More consulting work?”
“Yes and no. Depends on what you’d consider consulting work.”
Both suspicion and intrigue scratched at my brain. “Um ... exactly what did you have in mind?”
“Have you been to Great Adventure lately?”
Was he talking about going out together to that wonderland of wild rides and childish delights located in Jackson? I had loved going there when I was a teenager. My friends and I used to get season tickets and hang out there in the summer. After reaching full drinking age we’d lost interest in such juvenile forms of entertainment. Bars, clubs, dancing, and travel held more appeal than roller coasters and cotton candy.
“You mean the Six Flags entertainment park?” I asked.
“That’s the one. How would you like to go there tomorrow?”
My heart leapt so abruptly that I almost forgot to breathe for a second. The idea of Prajay and I pressed together in the crowded seat of a roller coaster was enticing. Would he put his arm around me if I pretended to be scared? Was this a godsend or what? I couldn’t have dreamt this one up if I’d sat around for a week planning a grand seduction.
But something told me it wasn’t all that simple. “What’s the catch, Prajay? Are we researching something for a new project?”
“We’re not researching anything. But there’s a small catch.”
I let out a sigh. Should’ve known there was a fine-print clause in the contract. “I’m listening.”
“My brother and his wife are coming in tonight from New York to attend a friend’s wedding in Cherry Hill tomorrow. I was more or less thrust into the role of babysitter for their kids.”
“You have my sympathy.” I couldn’t picture him babysitting.
“I don’t know what to do with two kids, aged eight and four, so I thought Great Adventure would be a nice place to keep them occupied for a few hours.”
“I see.” I wondered why he was telling me all this.
“What do you think?”
“Brilliant thinking on your part, Uncle Prajay. But where do I fit in?”
“In the role of co-babysitter. Strictly on a consultant level, of course. I’ll pay you at the usual rate, Meena.”
“I could make the Guinness Book of World Records for highest paid babysitter in the universe.”
“Co-babysitter,” he prompted.
I didn’t know whether to feel gratified or insulted by his request. Did he think I was that valuable or that greedy? Insult won over gratification. “You really think I’m that materialistic, Prajay? You honestly believe I’ll take money from you to go to a park with you and your nephews?” My offended tone was not put on. I was honestly hurt by his offer of money.
/> At once his voice turned contrite. “I’m sorry, Meena. I was kidding, just like you were kidding when you asked if this was more consulting work.”
“Apology accepted.” He did sound genuinely repentant. “Tell me more about Great Adventure. I haven’t been there in years.”
“I haven’t set foot in that place in over two decades, not since my family moved from New Jersey to Massachusetts.”
“Then what made you pick Great Adventure?”
“Tomorrow’s weather forecast is for unseasonably warm temperatures, and some of the guys at the office tell me it now has new attractions for very young kids.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“So ... you want to go with us?”
I couldn’t help smiling as I recalled the photograph on Prajay’s desk, with the two young boys who looked like scaled-down copies of Prajay. Even when I had been in pain I’d thought they were quite adorable.
A trip to a kids’ theme park with those two naughty tykes sounded a bit scary. But it could have been Prajay and me with our two kids in tow, couldn’t it? I could even pretend it was so. How could I say no? “I’d be honored to play co-babysitter for your nephews,” I said finally.
“Great. And it’s one nephew and one niece. She’s the four-year-old.”
“The one who’s in the picture on your desk?” I remembered the round, chubby face. She was cute; she had the Nayak mouth.
He chuckled again, like a proud uncle, and the sound made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. “That’s the one. Her name is Riya, and her brother is Rahul.”
“Nice names. I hope they’re well behaved, or we could have problems at the park. Rambunctious doesn’t mix well with a crowded park and dangerous rides,” I cautioned.
“They’re good kids. My sister-in-law Nitya is a stickler for discipline. They know they can’t get too rowdy with their uncle Prajay.”
The Reluctant Matchmaker Page 10
