Chapter 1: Semi-Arranged
I’m elbow-deep in the sink, rinsing the last of the dinner dishes, when my phone starts buzzing against the counter. I dry my hands on the towel hanging from the oven door and glance at the screen.
Meera Aunty.
I smile before I even answer, because Meera Aunty doesn’t call just to chat, she calls when there’s something worth calling about.
“Aashvi, beta, are you busy?”
“Just finishing up dinner. What’s going on?”
“I spoke to Divya today, you remember Divya, from the hospital, the psychologist.” She doesn’t wait for me to confirm I remember; she’s already moving on. “She has a brother. He’s twenty-eight years old. He’s a music teacher, very smart, has his master’s. Not to mention he comes from a good family too.”
I set the towel down slowly, giving her my full attention now.
“His name is Vivek,” she says, like she’s already picturing it working out. “I told Divya all about you, and she wants us to arrange something, a dinner maybe, so everyone can meet properly.”
Something in my chest lifts, quiet and hopeful, before I even let myself feel it all the way.
“I’ll call you back with details,” Meera Aunty says. “But Aashvi, I have a good feeling about this one.”
After we hang up I stand there for a minute, phone still warm in my hand, letting myself actually think about it. My roommate, Hazel, would probably find this whole thing strange if I explained it to her the way it actually feels. Hearing a stranger’s name and a handful of facts, and somehow already a small flicker of hope. But this is how it’s supposed to go. This is how it went for my parents, for half the aunties and uncles I grew up calling family.
Many of them didn't sit across from a stranger and feel lightning. They sat across from someone their families trusted, and they said yes to the possibility, and then they built something slowly, on purpose, out of patience and effort.
I think of my own sister, Nandini and her husband Siddharth. Arranged, both of them barely twenty-three at the time, strangers at their own wedding. And now, four years later, watching them together, the way she finishes his sentences and he still gets a little shy around her, you’d never guess they didn’t love each other first. They grew into it. That’s the proof I carry around that it works.
I’m twenty-five. I have my career, my own life here in America that I built myself, piece by piece, farther from home than anyone in my family has ever lived. I’m ready for the next part. And if my family and his family both look at this and see something worth building, then I trust that more than I’d trust some feeling I conjured up on my own in a bar somewhere.
The door opens before Meera Aunty even finishes knocking, and Divya is there, arms already out, saying my name like we’re old friends instead of two women who’ve met exactly once, two years ago, at a hospital fundraiser. She smells like cardamom and rose, and she pulls me into a hug that tells me this meeting has already been decided to go well before it starts.
Inside, the house is warm, filled with the sound of a cricket match playing low on the television and someone’s voice raised in the kitchen. Lakshmi Aunty finds me in the doorway before I’ve even taken my shoes off, taking my face in both hands like she’s checking for something, and whatever she finds seems to satisfy her, because she smiles and calls me beautiful and ushers me toward the couch. Vishnan Uncle is quieter, kind in that reserved way some fathers are, asking polite questions about my work, about Meera Aunty’s clinic, about whether I’ve settled into Chicago winters yet.
And then it starts, the part I was warned about and still wasn’t ready for. Divya sits beside me, closer than strangers sit, and begins to build her brother.
“He teaches high school band,” she says, like it’s the most important thing. “He’s wonderful with the kids, she says, truly wonderful; you should see him with them.”
“He has his master’s degree, well educated,” Lakshmi Aunty adds, “and he’s funny, and he’s kind and respectful.”
I can feel the two of them exchanging a look over my head, satisfied, like they’re presenting evidence in a case they’ve already won.
I nod and smile and say he sounds wonderful, because he does, and because I have no reason yet to doubt a single word of it.
The door opens sometime later, and I hear him before I see him. A low exchange with his father in the entryway, and the particular unhurried shuffle of someone who didn’t rush to get here. When he finally comes around into the living room, I know immediately that he didn’t want to come.
It’s not rudeness, exactly. He greets his mother with a kiss on the cheek, says something to Divya that makes her swat at him, and the whole room seems to soften around him, easy, familiar with him in a way I’m not yet. But there’s a stiffness in how he holds himself, a distraction behind his eyes, that I recognize.
I’ve sat in enough rooms, watched enough introductions unfold, to know the difference between a man who came because he’s truly curious and a man who came because his mother asked him to, and Vivek is the second kind.
I’ve seen this before, seen friends navigate the son who shows up out of duty and sits through tea with his jaw a little tight, waiting for it to be over. It doesn’t frighten me the way it might have a few years ago. I’m not obligated to want him just because our families have decided we might suit each other, and he isn’t obligated to want me.
His eyes find me before he’s said a word to anyone else in my direction, and whatever hesitation was sitting on him a moment ago clears out of his face entirely. He doesn’t try to hide it, doesn’t do the polite thing and glance away, he just looks at me, the corner of his mouth pulling into something that isn’t quite a smile yet but is getting there. I feel it land somewhere low in my stomach and I have to look down at my hands to keep from smiling back too fast.
Lakshmi Aunty catches it too. She leans in close to him under the pretense of fixing his collar, and I hear her murmur something in Tamil, quick and low, something about his sleeves. I watch him glance down at his own forearms like he’s only just remembering the tattoos are there but he doesn’t roll them down. He just smiles at her, unbothered, and says something back that makes her sigh because she knows she's lost an argument. Then he’s crossing the room toward the couch, toward me, like the conversation with her is already finished.
I find that I like it, more than I probably should this early, the fact that he didn’t fold himself smaller for his own mother in front of a stranger she’s hoping he’ll marry. Besides, I really like the tattoos.
“Aashvi, right?” he says, settling into the armchair across from me instead of the empty space beside me on the couch. It’s close enough to be polite, but far enough that it doesn’t feel presumptuous. “My sister’s told me approximately nothing about you, which I’m told is intentional.”
“She’s told me you teach band,” I say. “And that you have a master’s degree... Repeatedly.”
“God.” He drags a hand through his hair, and the movement pulls his sleeve up another inch, more ink catching the light, a line of it disappearing under the rolled cotton toward his elbow. “She does this. Builds you up like a LinkedIn profile and then just releases you into a room.”
“It’s working so far,” I say, and it surprises a laugh out of him, quick and real, and across the room I see Divya’s head turn toward the sound of it like she’s been listening for exactly that.
He asks about my program, my work with the lab, easy questions asked like he actually wants the answers and not like he’s filling silence before someone can accuse him of not trying. I find myself telling him more than I mean to, about the chemistry degree, about how strange Chicago still feel and how I planned to move back home to Mumbai. He listens with his forearms resting on his knees, sleeves still pushed up, tattoos on full display.
I’m aware, the whole time, of the fabric of the olive green salwar pooled around my knees, and how carefully I choose it this morning. I compare it to his jeans and boots and the shirt he clearly didn’t think twice about. It should feel mismatched, but it doesn’t.
We keep talking, and somewhere in the middle of it I stop tracking the questions I’m supposed to be asking myself, whether he’s kind, whether he’s serious enough, whether this could work, and just let myself enjoy the conversation instead.
He tells me about a kid in his intro class who can’t keep a beat to save his life but shows up early every single day anyway, and the way his whole face changes when he talks about it, unguarded, a little proud, makes something in my chest go soft and unsuspecting.
When Divya finally calls us all in for food, I catch Lakshmi Aunty watching us from across the room, both hands pressed together at her chest like she’s holding in to keep from spilling. She catches my eye and doesn’t look away. She just beams at me, unrestrained, and I have to look down at my plate to keep from laughing at how transparent she is.
Meera Aunty finds me in the kitchen afterward, pretending to help with the dishes, and murmurs that Lakshmi hasn’t stopped smiling since we sat down to eat, that Divya already cornered her by the stove to ask when we can meet again.
Vivek appears in the doorway, hands in his pockets, that same unhurried look on his face from when he first walked in, except there’s nothing distracted in it now.
“So,” he says, and glances back over his shoulder like he’s checking whether his mother is listening, which she absolutely is, “I was thinking, maybe we skip the part where our families plan this for us and I just get your number instead.”
He’s smiling now, easy, sure of himself in a way that has nothing to do with performing for the room behind him.
I hand him the phone and watch him type his name in, and behind us I hear Lakshmi Aunty make a small, delighted sound she doesn’t bother disguising. When he hands it back, his fingers brush mine, brief, deliberate, and I think, this is how it’s meant to work. The families vet each other first, and then two people are simply allowed to discover that they were right to trust them.
