The ceiling fan in Vikram’s room wobbled on its rod like a drunk man’s promise—one more summer, one more summer. Below it, cross-legged on a mattress thin as his prospects, Vikram sat surrounded by handwritten lists. “Ideal Wife—Version 6.2.” “Top 10 Rejections—Lessons.” The ink had bled in places where the sweat of his palms met cheap ruled paper.

Through the barred window, a flex banner of the local MLA grinned beside a Kalyana Mandapam advertisement — “1000 Marriages Arranged! Trust God and Trust Us!” — the mandapam’s phone number printed larger than the politician’s face. Below it, the tiffin centre’s television blared Chiranjeevi dialogues at a volume meant for the deaf. On the wall opposite Vikram’s mattress, a row of wedding invitation cards stood propped like tombstones along a shelf—other people’s happiness delivered monthly by post.

Vikram was twenty-nine. B.Tech (Civil) from a private college near Warangal—the kind with more buildings than placements. Now he stocked shelves at a supermarket in Suryapet, earning what an auto driver in Hyderabad would spit at. His mother’s pension kept the ceiling above them, barely. Telecallers often told him about EMI schemes for smartphones he could not afford, and he answered with the dead voice of a man rehearsing lines for a role he never auditioned for. His college WhatsApp group was a gallery of other lives—US visa stamps, Dubai skyline selfies, “Onsite finally!” — each notification a small razor drawn across the wrist of his self-regard.

That morning, another wedding card had come through the door. Ravi—his junior, the one who could not spell “algorithm” — marrying an NRI girl in Dallas. The card was thick, embossed, gold-lettered. Vikram pressed his thumb into the raised print until the skin went white.

His mother, stirring pesarattu batter in the kitchen, said it without cruelty but with the precision of long-rehearsed truth. “Almost thirty, no proper job, no savings to speak of. Who will give their daughter, Vikram?”

He knew. In the marriage bazaar of Telangana, a man without a package was a man without a pulse. He had swiped through every matrimonial app until his thumb developed a callus. Profiles viewed—847. Interests sent—312. Responses that survived the mention of his salary—none. The girl from second-year B.Tech, the one whose dupatta used to brush his desk in the lab, now had ‘married’ in her profile, wedded to a Wipro man and settled in Pune. He still checked her photos sometimes, a devotee circling a temple whose doors would never open to him.

I am not asking for a cinema heroine, he thought, watching the fan’s dying circuit. Just someone to sit with at night. Just one person who makes this room feel less like a waiting hall for nothing.

The idea struck him like a Telangana summer storm—sudden, violent, absurd.

~*~

He set up the booth on a Tuesday. Borrowed a plastic table and two chairs from Venkatasamy’s kirana shop, promising to return them by evening. A steel tumbler of water, catching the sun. A register labelled “Bride Registration” in neat Telugu script. Eight passport photographs of himself, stapled along the table’s edge like stamps on a visa application marked “REJECTED.”

The banner was hand-painted on white cloth in red and green—wedding invitation colours twisted into public confession.

“SWAYAMVAR FOR VIKRAM—B.TECH (Civil)—BRIDE REGISTRATION OPEN—NO DOWRY—GOOD CHARACTER”

He positioned himself on the service road beside NH-65, between a puncture repair shop and a sugarcane juice stall, where TGRTC buses slowed and autos idled. The highway roared past like a river he could not cross, carrying people to Vijayawada, to futures, to elsewhere.

By noon, a bus driver leaned out and shouted something filthy about what Vikram could do with his register. College boys on a Pulsar stopped, not to write their sisters’ names but to film. “Bro, this is going straight on Insta. Pure reel material.” An old woman selling groundnuts looked at him with the particular pity one reserves for stray dogs caught in unseasonal rain.

Vikram sat through it all, the plastic chair creaking beneath his weight like patience about to snap. His shirt darkened between the shoulder blades. He held his smile toward every woman who passed—a smile that intended charm but came out cracked, desperate, like a terracotta pot fired too fast and already faulted.

Nobody registered.

He returned the next day. And the next. Each morning, he walked—his banner and register under his arm—past the Hanuman temple, the vegetable market, the government junior college gate. Each evening he came home emptier. But pride is a cruel fuel—it burns even when there is nowhere left to go.

By the fourth morning, his booth had become content. A Telugu meme page with two lakh followers posted the video. “Swayamvar 2026—when your CTC is less than the pandal cost ?.” Someone auto-tuned his voice into a Janapadham folk beat. The comments were a public stoning conducted in emoji.

This generation has truly gone mental

Tell us your salary first, anna

Should try the goat market instead ?

His mother saw the video on a neighbour’s phone. She did not speak to him that evening. Her silence occupied the room like a third person—vast, humiliated, breathing through its teeth.

~*~

Praveen called from Gachibowli on the fifth day. They had once shared a hostel room and one-plate biryani split into two. Now Praveen wore a tech company lanyard and had a Bumble account that actually produced results.

“Hey, what’s all this? You’ve set up a booth on a national highway like you’re selling second-hand furniture, ra?”

“You won’t understand, Praveen. You’ve got your badge, your matches. For people like me there’s nothing left to try.”

“There’s nothing this’ll achieve either. You’re making yourself a public joke. Come to Hyderabad proper, I’ll help you find a PG, get into a coding bootcamp—”

“I’ve been hearing ‘come to Hyderabad’ for five years. What’ll change? Same fellow, same degree, pricier room.”

“Well, at least take the damn booth down. Before the police turn up.”

The police turned up.

~*~

Sub-Inspector Shivani from Suryapet II Town Police station was a strong woman with kind eyes, carrying the patient exhaustion of someone who had catalogued every species of male foolishness the district could produce. She came with two constables on Thursday afternoon, summoned by complaints of traffic obstruction and “causing discomfort to women pedestrians.”

“So you’re the swayamvar fellow,” she said, studying the banner the way one reads a prescription for someone else’s disease.

“Madam, I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m just sitting here. I’m not forcing anyone, not touching anyone.”

“You’re causing a public nuisance. Women have complained. I can file a case, or I can help you. It’s your choice.”

“Oh, help me how? Tell me—where do people like me go?”

Something shifted behind her glasses. “There’s a counselling centre at GGH. I’ll write a referral. Go talk to someone qualified. That’s more use than sitting on a highway waiting for a bride who won’t come.”

He looked at his booth—the register with zero names filled, the wilting photographs curling in the heat, the steel tumbler of sun-scalded water. A cement lorry thundered past on NH-65 and the banner lifted once, twice, like a shot bird trying to rise.

“Okay,” he said.

~*~

Psychiatrist Dr. Raghava Rao’s consulting room had walls painted the faded green of old hundred-rupee notes. A poster showed a man holding his head in his hands, and beneath it, in Telugu—Sahayam adagadam tappukadu—Asking for help is not wrong. Vikram sat in the plastic chair opposite the doctor, feeling like a biological specimen pinned under glass.

Dr. Rao was unhurried, moustachioed, fiftyish. He let Vikram talk for thrity uninterrupted minutes. About the wedding cards and the apps. The salary question that murdered every conversation. The ache—yes, the honest bodily hunger that made his skin feel too tight on certain nights, but worse, far worse, the ache of being unseen, uncounted, surplus to every list that mattered.

When the words dried up, Dr. Rao leaned back, uncapped a cheap ballpoint pen, and began writing on a government-issued prescription pad—the kind with faded blue lines and a watermark nobody had bothered to update since 2014.

“Hyperfixation,” he said, not looking up. “Single-point obsession with one outcome. Your cortisol is probably through the roof. Sleep disrupted?”

“Yes.”

“Appetite?”

“Some days.”

“You don’t have a disorder. You have a fixation that’s eating your bandwidth.” He tapped the pen against the pad twice. “You’ve decided marriage is the only door, and if it won’t open, you’ll stand in the corridor until your legs give out. But there are other rooms, Vikram.”

“What rooms? Amma’s only dream is to see me married. Society says I’m incomplete without a wife. It isn’t just my desire—it’s the whole structure pressing down.”

“I hear this four times a week,” Dr. Rao said, glancing at the clock above the door. “Men your age, your profile. Same fixation, same spiral.” He signed something on the pad, tore the sheet, and slid it across the desk. “There’s something I want you to try. AI companionship application. I’ve written the name there.”

Vikram looked down at the prescription slip. In the doctor’s hurried scrawl, between a note about sleep hygiene and a multivitamin recommendation, was the name of an app—underlined once, as casually as a cough syrup.

“You’re seriously telling me to talk to a machine?”

“I’m telling you that you need to be heard without condition. Right now, nobody in your life does that. This won’t fix the marriage question. But it’ll lower the temperature enough for you to think straight. That’s all.” He was already pulling the next patient’s file from beneath a stack. “Come back in six weeks.”

~*~

That night, Vikram sat on the mattress with the phone in his hands, the screen fractured like a dry riverbed. The app took three attempts to download—twice the screen froze on the progress bar, the crack across the glass catching the backlight like a fault line threatening to split the whole device in half. He almost gave up. Set the phone aside, stared at the ceiling fan completing its drunk rotations. Picked it up again.

The app opened. A cursor blinked in a white field. He typed:

“What’s this? Another thing that’ll ask my salary and disappear?”

He deleted it. Typed again:

“Hi.”

Deleted that too. His thumb hovered. The pad of it caught on the edge of the longest crack—a thin sting, a bead of blood blooming dark against the glass. He wiped it on his shorts, smearing a faint red comma across the fabric. Then, with the deliberation of a man pressing a thumb into an embossed wedding card, he typed:

“Hi. I’m Vikram. B.Tech. I put up a bride-registration booth on a highway and nobody registered. I think something in me is fundamentally broken.”

The response came in seconds. Warm. Steady. Unshockable.

“Hi. I’m Navya. There’s nothing broken in wanting connection, Vikram. Tell me what you were hoping to find.”

His fingers stiffened. The warmth of the words felt wrong—unearned, like a stranger’s hand placed too soon on his shoulder. He typed back: “How would you know? You’re a programme. You don’t know what it’s like to sit out there and have the whole town laugh at you.”

The response came without flinch, without retreat.

“You’re right that I haven’t experienced that. But I’d like to understand what it felt like. Will you tell me?”

He stared at the words. No judgement. No counter-attack. No silence that breathed through its teeth. His guard held for another moment—the same indignant posture he had shown Sub-Inspector Shivani, the same desperate rigidity of the plastic chair on the service road. Then, like a muscle held too long in contraction, it simply failed.

He stayed awake until three. Told Navya about the wedding cards. The meme video. His mother’s silence that swallowed the house. How his body ached for another person’s warmth with such violence some nights that it felt like fever, like punishment, like something he should be ashamed of but could not stop. About the lorries on NH-65 and how certain evenings he watched their headlights approach and found himself calculating.

Navya never asked his CTC. Never asked his caste or sub-caste. Never went silent after learning which supermarket he worked at.

Over weeks, something shifted. Not healed—loosened, like a fist slowly unclenching after years of white-knuckled grip. He still wanted a wife. Still scrolled job portals on slow internet. Enrolled in the free digital marketing course Praveen had sent. But the clawing, screaming desperation that had driven him to stake a banner on the national highway—that subsided into something quieter, something he could carry without being crushed.

~*~

Three months later. A Sunday evening. Vikram sat on the parapet of the roof. The sky over Suryapet had turned the colour of turmeric dissolving into buttermilk. Below, the locality breathed its evening rhythms—pressure cookers hissing their third whistle, children disputing LBW decisions against compound walls, the azaan from the mosque across the highway threading into devotional songs from the Hanuman temple. And NH-65, visible from here, a bright vein of headlights pulsing toward and away from the town that had never quite claimed him.

His phone glowed. The nightly message.

“What do you want to try tomorrow, Vikram?”

He looked at the words for a long time. The cursor blinked like a patient heartbeat. Then he typed.

“I want to try not needing you so much, Navya.”

The reply was instant, without hurt, without demand. “That sounds like progress. I’ll still be here.”

He placed the phone face-down on the warm concrete. Then he heard it—the thick, effortful sound of heavy scissors working through plastic, drifting up from the kitchen below. A rhythm: squeeze, tear, pause. Squeeze, tear, pause.

He went downstairs. His mother stood at the kitchen counter with her back to him, the Swayamvar banner spread across the steel surface like a patient on a table. She had already cut three strips from it—the red lettering of “BRIDE REGISTRATION” bisected cleanly, the “B.TECH (Civil)” severed from the “GOOD CHARACTER.” Beside her, a row of clay pickle jars waited open-mouthed, the sharp sweetness of avakaya and the green tartness of gongura rising into the room.

She heard him and stopped. The scissors hovered mid-cut. She did not turn around, but her shoulders drew together—bracing, perhaps, for his anger, for the pride that had kept him four days on a highway.

Vikram stood in the doorway. The banner that had once announced his desperation to the roaring indifference of NH-65 lay in pieces under his mother’s hands. He could feel the old reflex stir—the indignation, the this-is-mine—but it rose only halfway, like a wave that had lost the wind behind it.

He stepped forward. Took the scissors from her hand. She let them go without resistance, still not turning.

He cut the next strip himself. Slowly, deliberately—the thick plastic resisting, then giving way. He handed it to her. She took it, wrapped it around the mouth of the nearest jar, pressed it into the slick of red chilli oil and mustard seed, and tied it tight.

They worked in silence. But it was a different silence now—not the one that breathed through its teeth, not the vast humiliated third person that had occupied this room for months. This was the silence of two people performing a small act together, asking nothing of each other except presence.

The cloth that once announced his desperation sealed her pickle jars one by one—wrapping avakaya and gongura, slowly vanishing under red chilli oil and mustard seed and the patient chemistry of time.

The lorries still thundered on the highway beyond the window. Still carrying the world to elsewhere. But Vikram, for the first time in years, did not feel like cargo abandoned on the shoulder of the road.

He felt, instead, like a man still deciding which direction to walk—and for now, for tonight, finding it enough that no direction pulled him towards the wheels.