All she had to do was brush her fingers over her nose ring and clear her throat. How many years had it been since she first thought of this way of nudging him down the right path? And she did it now, almost imperceptibly, to indicate her excitement over the possibility of finding a groom for their daughter here, in the pages of a book at the Dhanpur Tehsil Post Office.
This was unusual, they knew. Finding grooms for their two older daughters had been harder and had required more favors, more travel, and more money than he could ever make again in his lifetime. More money than he could ever repay to the moneylenders.
The post office wasn’t the way he remembered it. It was still stuffy and dusty, and the walls were still stained with paan spittle. But now, someone had put a marigold garland on the postmaster’s big desk and thus, between 2 and 4 p.m. once a week, this room had been turned into an informal marriage bureau, and a handful of government logbooks had been converted into registers thick with profiles of potential brides and grooms in the taluka who would participate in the mass wedding.
The postal employee who offered this service in his after-hours was sitting there at his table, flipping pages at the rate of two minutes per profile. The people in line had two minutes to identify the groom or bride they were interested in, and then they could meet the parents. Bajirao had to struggle to use his wiry frame to create a few inches of space within which Gayatri, too, could stand with him in this long line.
He strained each muscle in his body to maintain his footing among the huddle of other parents. The room grew more crowded and the lines were moving slowly. The electricity had been gone for hours and the summer heat wrung sweat out of everyone in the room.
If breathing hadn’t been so hard, someone would have fainted from the stench of the farmers’ perspiration. The man with the register looked up slowly and his lips curled outward like a bow with an unseen arrow. Bajirao understood his mistake instantly.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
