At thirty two, Krishna Mohan had already lost the war with his own scalp. The hair had retreated from his forehead in a slow, undignified rout, leaving behind a shining half-moon of skin that caught the tube light in his Warangal drawing room and threw it back at the ceiling like a small accusation. At five foot three, he seemed to have been poured into the world a little short of the mark, and then fitted with square, smudged spectacles as an afterthought. His belly arrived in any room a beat before he did. His eyelids hung at half-mast, giving him the perpetual look of a man recovering from a long lunch. His skin was the deep brown of a well-roasted groundnut.

None of this troubled him. He was, after all, an SA. School Assistant, Social Studies, ZPHS, Haripuram. Permanent. Pensionable under NPS. Pay scale revised every five years by a benevolent Pay Revision Commission. In the matrimonial bazaar of small town Telangana, this, he believed, was a currency that bought anything.

What it was meant to buy hung on the wall above the agarbatti stand.

The calendar was from Kanchi Silks sari shop that had closed in 2003, but Krishna had preserved it the way other men preserve grandfathers’ photographs. Madhuri Dixit in a parrot-green ghagra, mid-laugh, one hand at her waist, the other thrown up towards a sky the calendar artist had painted the colour of a Pochampally border. The corners had curled like dried tamarind skin. A brown ring of leaked water haloed her left elbow. The wall behind her head wore a permanent grey crown of agarbatti soot. She had been smiling down on one hundred bridal viewings, and she had outlasted every single one of them.

“Like that Madhuri there,” Krishna would say, jerking his thumb at the calendar while the prospective bride’s father sat on the edge of the sofa, gingerly holding his teacup. Like that Madhuri. He said it without apology, the way a man at a vegetable market specifies the size of a bottle gourd he wants. Later, when he actually sat for the ‘bridal viewing’ in those faraway living rooms with their own curling film posters and faded gods on the walls, the mothers would glance at his belly, then at their daughters. The fathers would remember his Madhuri worship and study the floor tiles. The daughters, if they were brave, would study him back, and he would mistake their stares for interest.

Back then, in school, in college, no girl had ever looked at me twice, he would often muse. If they looked at all, it was to ask for a pen or a notebook, never for me. Later, in the staff rooms of the various schools where I worked since I was twenty three, the women teachers spoke to me with the same careful, courteous distance they used for the lab attendant or the peon—politely, correctly, never, even by mistake, flirtatiously. Out of that long, low ache, I made a decision—I would marry only a beautiful woman, someone far, far beyond any of those classmates or colleagues. My wife would be my trophy, my validation. Her face would be the neat, wordless reply to every slight I had swallowed all my life—no, more than a reply, a quiet revenge on them all.

One hundred matches—some he rejected, some the bride’s side.

His mother, Devaki, kept count on the back of an old bank passbook. Twenty gates of tally marks, four strokes and a diagonal, and the diagonal of the twentieth gate had been drawn the morning the matchmaker Peri Anantam came with the photograph of Sarojini.

~*~

“Saar,” said Anantam, sliding the photograph across the teakwood table with two fingers, the way one slides a final hand of cards. “This time, no problem.”

Krishna picked it up.

The girl in the photograph was twenty one. She stood beside a tulasi pot, her hair falling to her waist in one thick black rope, her bottu the size and red of a ripe chikoo seed. Her eyes had that wet-river look that the calendar painters of Sivakasi attempted on Lakshmi posters and never quite caught. Her lips were closed in the smile of a girl who had been told, ten minutes before the photograph was taken, that smiling too widely was unbecoming.

It was not Madhuri. Nothing was Madhuri. But it was the nearest the matchmaker had ever brought him.

Krishna felt something low in his stomach tighten, then loosen.

“Where?” he said.

“Husnabad side. Sivunipalle. Father tenant farmer. Mother runs baddi kottu—tiny kirana kiosk. Four daughters, this one is third. Cotton failed last year, again this year. They have heard, saar, that you have government job.”

“Education?”

“SSC compartmental pass. Saar, but you said—”

“I know what I said,” Krishna cut in, more sharply than he meant to. He set the photograph down beside his coffee mug and looked at her face for a long moment. SSC compartmental, no problem. What’s she going to do, correct my answer sheets? She has only to dress well and stand beside me like a mannequin at the school annual day, at colleague Kanakachari’s housewarming, at headmistress Balamani's birthday party, at niece Niharika’s half-sari ceremony, at neighbour Narahari’s wedding anniversary function. Stand beside me and let them all swallow their tongues.

“Bring them to Warangal,” he said. “Hotel Ratna. Sunday.”

~*~

Hotel Ratna in Warangal had a lobby done up in green marble and a reception desk staffed by a boy in a maroon waistcoat who looked permanently aggrieved. The meeting was held in a private dining room on the first floor, under a cheap China-made chandelier that had lost three of its twelve bulbs.

Sarojini’s father, Rangasamy, was a man whose wrists looked carved from drumstick wood. He sat with his palms pressed flat on his knees, as though afraid the chair might float away if he loosened his grip. Her mother sat to his left, fiddling with the end of her sari. Sarojini was seated to his right in a cotton sari the colour of unripe mango, looking at the tablecloth.

Krishna had worn a new cream shirt from Pothys. The starch was already darkening at the armpits in the shape of two halved papayas. He kept his stomach pulled in for the first ten minutes, then gave up.

“Saar,” Rangasamy began, in the slow, careful voice of a man laying down each word like a stone across a stream. “Our girl, she hasn’t studied much. But cooking, stitching, all she knows.”

“No need,” said Krishna. “She doesn’t have to work. My salary’s enough.”

Devaki, seated beside her son, said nothing. Her eyes, however, had not left Sarojini’s face since they sat down, and what was in them was not approval. It was the look of an old shopkeeper watching a customer pick out a piece of jewellery she suspects, in her bones, is being sold for the wrong reasons.

Anantam cleared his throat and named the salary. He named the dearness allowance. He named the house rent allowance. He named the gratuity that would be paid some thirty years from now, as though it were a sweet already in the box.

Rangasamy nodded at each number the way a man nods at the rosary, without quite hearing them.

Sarojini lifted her eyes once, exactly once, during the entire meeting. She looked at Krishna. Her gaze travelled, in a single slow sweep, from his thick soda buddi glasses that made his eyes look smaller and eyelids half-mast, to his pulled-in belly, to the gold ring on his little finger—ring finger too fat to fit—and then it went past his left shoulder to the wall, where there was a framed print of a fair, smiling god and goddess looking longingly into each other’s eyes, and it stayed there a beat too long. Then it came back to the tablecloth.

Krishna did not see the sweep. He was looking at the mole below her collarbone.

Two lakh forty thousand, Sarojini was thinking. Nanna’s loan. Four months of his pay will clear it. Chitti can finish Intermediate. Pinky can be put in a hostel. Amma’s cataract. I’ll be draped in gold jewellery. This man eats with his mouth open. This man’s mother doesn’t like me. This man likes me. I have my needs, he has his.

She folded her hands tighter in her lap and let her face hold these things the way a brass pot holds water.

Rangasamy’s hands, when he finally lifted them off his knees to fold them in a namaskaram, had left two dark patches of sweat on the polyester of his trousers.

Krishna and Devaki had barely stepped out of the gate when the phone calls began. By that evening, the elders on both sides had said yes. The dates were fixed. The wedding feast was ordered. The brass band was hired. The marriage hall was booked.

~*~

The muggu at the entrance of Sri Venkateshwara Kalyana Mandapam had been laid down at four in the morning by two women from Sarojini’s village. Rice flour curling into peacocks, lotuses, a central diamond filled with rose petals. By the time the baraat arrived, half of it had been smudged by chappals. The peacocks had lost their heads to careless heels.

Sarojini sat on the stage in a Gadwal sari, the colour of pomegranate flesh. The bridal makeup had lifted her two shades. The nose-ring tugged her right nostril down a little. The gold haaram across her chest reached almost to her navel and caught the tube lights and threw them back in small hot stars. Her mehendi was darkening to the colour of old blood.

Beside her sat Krishna in a cream silk kurta. The tailor had not allowed for the belly, and the fabric pulled across his stomach in small horizontal ripples, like sand-ridges left by a retreating tide. His scalp, freshly oiled, shone. His eyelids drooped. The garland of jasmine and red roses he wore looped twice around his neck, and even so, the lower loop rested on the upper slope of his belly.

Two hundred people sat on white plastic chairs and looked at the stage and did not say what they were thinking.

The photographer kept saying, “Sir, smile. Madam, look here. Sir, chinna smile.”

Krishna smiled the small smile.

Sarojini did not smile. She had not smiled since the start of the ceremonies. Her eyes stayed lowered, as they were supposed to. She counted the plastic flowers threaded along the edge of the stage. Forty?seven yellow. Thirty?two pink. One had slipped from its wire and now hung sideways by a single thread of gum, swaying in the gust from the pedestal fan.

The reception began at seven. By eight, the queue had stretched into the gravel parking lot where the generator coughed diesel into the night. Krishna’s colleagues from the high school came in batches, each batch louder than the last, smelling faintly of something potent they had poured on the way over. They thumped his back. They wrung his hand. They looked at Sarojini, and then they looked at Krishna, and then they looked at Sarojini again, and Krishna read every one of those second looks as envy.

He felt, beneath the cream silk, the old hot brick of vindication burning in his belly. He kept touching the small of Sarojini’s back through the Gadwal sari—first experience of its kind in his life—lightly, possessively, the way a man at a petrol pump keeps resting his hand on the bonnet of an expensive new car he can’t believe is his.

Sarojini did not lean in. Sarojini did not move away. Sarojini counted flowers.

~*~

The boy was six.

His name was Chintu, and he was the son of Krishna’s friend Venkat, who taught English at the same high school. Chintu had eaten an ice-cream cone and a packet of crisps. He had been refused a second ice cream. He was now in that state of injured boredom which children enter at weddings the moment the balloons stop being interesting.

He tugged his father’s trousers. The mandapam, by one of those accidents that acoustics arrange for the cruel pleasure of the gods, dropped at that moment into a small well of silence. The DJ at the console was wiping his forehead. The cook at the back had stopped shouting about sambar. The photographer was lining up six men in a semicircle behind the couple, his flash raised but not yet fired.

Into that well, Chintu said, in the clear high voice of a child who has not yet learnt that some questions are asked only with the eyes—

“Dad, that uncle next to the akka, why is he standing there all the time? Where’s the groom?”

The well of silence held.

Two hundred people heard it. Venkat’s hand closed over his son’s mouth half a second too late, and the words, where’s the groom, slipped between his fingers and travelled up to the canopy and bounced off the plastic flowers and came down again on the stage.

Devaki closed her eyes.

Sarojini did not look up. She had reached forty-seven yellow flowers for the fifth time and was moving on, very carefully, to the pink.

Krishna felt the hot brick of vindication go out.

It did not cool slowly. It went out the way a tube light goes out with a small electrical sigh when the power cuts. In its place there settled a cold, clear weight, the weight of seeing himself from outside for the first time in thirty two years. He saw the cream kurta pulling across the belly. He saw the oiled scalp throwing back the tube light. He saw the heavy eyelids and the garland resting on his belly. He saw the girl beside him, who had stopped counting flowers for one second and was now looking, not at him, but at her own mehendi-darkened hands. He saw, with the awful clarity of a slap, what every guest in that hall had seen since they arrived and had been too polite, or too guarded, or too afraid, to say.

Father of the bride, the boy had said, without saying it. Krishna looked at himself and then at Sarojini. They don’t see a trophy wife on my arm. They see a sugar daddy at hers.

The DJ struck up again. The photographer’s flash fired. Venkat hauled Chintu away, hissing into his ear. The queue began to move forward. A friend from the Department of School Education thumped Krishna’s back and said something about new pension rules.

Krishna smiled the small smile.