Cheating Lagna

I have always believed marriage to be a particularly cruel trick of civilisation. The sort of institution invented by men who were too lazy to chase after women but too possessive to let them run free. It is, if you ask me, a gilded cage: gold-plated perhaps, polished weekly, adorned with flowers and Instagram hashtags, but a cage nonetheless.

And I, Veda Rana, am not the sort of woman who makes a convincing songbird. More of a hawk, if I'm honest, though admittedly one with a weakness for truffle fries, vintage Chanel, and outrageously expensive candles that smell faintly of cedarwood and poor financial decisions.

My family in Nepal would faint if they heard me say any of that aloud. Actually, my mother already has, figuratively speaking at least, during one of our spectacular arguments about matrimony. The woman has mastered the art of collapsing dramatically into sofas whenever I announce I have no intention of becoming someone's obedient little wife. It is one of her greatest talents, alongside guilt-tripping and selecting jewellery capable of blinding people at weddings.

But fortunately for me, my parents live in Kathmandu while I live in London, which is roughly 4,500 miles away, and even for the nosiest auntie with binoculars, that is a blessed distance.

London suits me. Not because it is warm, it absolutely is not; but because it minds its own business. Nobody here cares whether I am married, unmarried, divorced, spiritually confused, or secretly raising pigeons in my attic. The city simply continues around you with a kind of cold indifference that I find deeply comforting.

In Kathmandu, everyone knows everyone else's blood type, horoscope, and relationship status before breakfast. In London, my next-door neighbour once forgot my name for three consecutive years despite borrowing my hedge trimmer twice.

I live in Kensington now, in a narrow cream townhouse with heritage windows that trap heat in summer and release it enthusiastically in winter. Estate agents called it "full of historic character," which in modern British English, that is merely a polite euphemistic shorthand for bloody old and ruinously expensive.

My neighbours are either Russian oligarchs who never seem to emerge in daylight or aristocrats so ancient they look embalmed. One old woman across the street peers at me through lace curtains every morning while watering plants that appear to have died sometime during the Thatcher administration. I suspect my existence disturbs her. Especially my habit of doing yoga in my active wear with the curtains open. Last Tuesday she dropped her watering can after witnessing me attempt a headstand.

You might reasonably imagine that all this material comfort, this hard-won stability, would have softened my edges over time. You might think I would look around this empty, beautifully styled house and long for a husband to share the mortgage. Someone to hold my champagne flute at high-profile literary drink parties while I pretend to enjoy discussing the socio-political symbolism of the post-modern novel with men named Rupert or Barnaby.

But no. If anything, my own success has only made me look upon the entire institution of marriage with a deeper, more entrenched suspicion.

Husbands, from what I have observed across the dinner tables of my contemporaries, are rarely romantic partners. More often than not, they function as decorative anchors. Women begin their twenties like bright, helium-filled balloons: ambitious, glittering, full of impossible, floating dreams. Then marriage ties a lead weight to their ankles. Suddenly, within the space of a few short years, those same vibrant women are sitting in gastropubs discussing fixed-rate mortgages, local school catchment areas, and whether or not Nigel's passive-aggressive mother should be permitted to stay in the guest room for Christmas.

I decided at a very tender age that I wanted absolutely no part in that slow, domestic suffocation.

When I was fifteen, while the other girls at my school were pasting cut-outs of celebrities into velvet-bound notebooks and scribbling their future married surnames beside looping gel-pen hearts, I was watching my older female cousins. I watched them transform after their wedding days like wild flowers pressed flat between the heavy, dusty pages of an encyclopedia. Their laughter, which used to ring out across the courtyards, grew quieter, carefully modulated. Their opinions became softer, rounded off at the edges so as not to cause friction. Their entire worlds shrank until they fit within the perimeter of a marital home.

Girls who had once argued passionately, brilliantly, about international politics and literature over late-night plates of momo suddenly began asking for explicit permission before sneaking out to a local café with their childhood friends. One of my cousins, a girl who possessed a mind so naturally brilliant at mathematics it bordered on the frightening, abandoned her university degree entirely because her new husband held the firm, traditional belief that women became "too proud" if they tasted higher education. Another stopped wearing her signature red lipstick because her mother-in-law subtly insinuated that it looked "attention-seeking" for a respectable young bride.

I distinctly remember staring at her during the Dashain festival family gatherings, watching her serve tea with downcast eyes, thinking that she looked exactly like a ghost tasked with haunting her own living body.

That very evening, I stood before the mirror in my bedroom, my train-track braces glinting beneath the harsh glare of the fluorescent strip light, and I whispered directly to my reflection: "I am never, ever going to marry."

An aunt of mine, who had crept in unnoticed to retrieve a misplaced pashmina, overheard the declaration and burst into a loud, patronising laugh.

"Don't be so dramatic, Veda," she said, her heavy gold bangles clinking rhythmically against one another as she adjusted her sari. "Everyone marries eventually."

Well, not everyone, Auntie. Not everyone grows up to have the same profession. That would be disastrous.

By the time I turned twenty-one, however, my family had become collectively, fiercely determined to prove my teenage rebellion wrong. My father, using the terrifyingly efficient network of the Kathmandu elite, quietly arranged a match with the eldest son of an impossibly wealthy dynasty whose commercial empire involved either industrial bricks or luxury biscuits; honestly I never cared enough to remember which. I only recall the boy himself: possessed solemn, entirely unblinking eyes, shoes that were polished to a painful, mirror-like sheen, and a pair of thick, dark eyebrows that met precisely in the middle of his forehead like two wary diplomats negotiating a border treaty.

Our engagement was organised with terrifying efficiency. Dates were bandied about. Guest lists numbering in the thousands were drafted. High-ranking astrologers were consulted at exorbitant rates. There were endless, exhausting family conversations regarding auspicious hours and planetary alignments, as though I were a prize piece of livestock being delivered under optimum meteorological conditions rather than a human being with a pulse.

The fatal flaw in their magnificent, multi-generational plan was quite simple: the fatal flaw was me.

Because while everyone else was envisioning embroidered silk saris, heavy diamond and gold sets, and a lifetime of high-society luncheons, I was envisioning books. Not merely reading them, though I devoured pages with a hunger that worried my mother; but writing them. I wanted stories to spill out of me faster than my fingers could physically type them onto a keyboard. I wanted coffee-stained manuscripts, late-night editing wars, invitations to prestigious literary festivals, impossible deadlines, and my own name displayed in the front windows of Waterstones beside the authors I had spent my girlhood worshipping. I wanted freedom far more than I wanted material comfort. I wanted ambition far more than I wanted patriarchal approval.

So, on an entirely ordinary Tuesday morning, while my parents sat in the morning room discussing the specific floral arrangements for an engagement ceremony I dreaded with every single fibre of my being, I packed a solitary, battered suitcase and ran away.

Not dramatically, unfortunately. There was no sprint through rainstorms or emotional orchestral music. I simply slipped out of the house before dawn wearing trainers and carrying enough anxiety to fuel a small nation.

Now, despite appearances, I was not entirely reckless. I had a safety net, however fragile. My grandfather; a classic Rana patriarch with a history of scandal in his blood and a Cuban cigar permanently clamped between his fingers, had lived in England for a time during his father's military posting. During one of his many chaotic, highly publicised periods abroad, he had married a spectacularly sharp British woman named Margaret.

They divorced a decade later for reasons that were never fully articulated at family dinners, though various strands of gossip heavily involved polo matches, single malt whisky, and a glamorous lounge singer in Singapore. Nevertheless, the two of them remained bizarrely, fiercely fond of one another until the day he succumbed to his lung disease, much to my traditional grandmother's eternal, simmering irritation.

Margaret became my highly unlikely saviour.

She was the sort of old-school Englishwoman who wore real pearls to the local Sainsbury's and regarded any overt display of human emotion with deep, aristocratic suspicion. Every sentence she uttered sounded faintly like a BBC radio broadcast transmitted during the Blitz. Yet beneath all that starch and frost lay a sharp, deeply rebellious streak that I absolutely adored.

When I phoned her and confessed I intended to flee Nepal rather than marry a stranger, Margaret didn't gasp. She didn't lecture. She merely paused, took a drag of what I assumed was a Virginia Slim, and asked, "Tell me, darling, do you have a currently valid passport?"

Thankfully, I did.

A month later, she sent me a one-way plane ticket to Heathrow.

"London will eat you alive, darling," she told me bluntly when she met me at the arrivals gate, her face softening with the absolute ghost of a smile.

"But at least it won't marry you off to a biscuit baron."

She was entirely right on both counts.

My family was wealthy in that alarming, old-money, historic Rana fashion. The sort of wealth where the drawing-room chandeliers require their own independent insurance policies and an ordinary family dinner party involves twelve distinct types of silver cutlery. But the exact moment my feet touched British soil, every single penny of that security vanished.

My father, true to his word and his temper, had frozen my bank accounts before my flight had even cleared Turkish airspace. By the time I walked out of Terminal 5, I was, for all practical purposes, entirely penniless.

I can still vividly remember standing outside the terminal, clutching the handle of my suitcase, staring up at a leaden, miserable grey sky while an icy October wind slapped my face like a personal insult. I had romanticised my escape, naturally. In my teenage imagination, London resembled the films: glowing cobblestone streets, charming independent cafés, and handsome, brooding strangers reading poetry on the Underground. In reality, it smelled faintly of wet concrete, diesel fumes, and collective human exhaustion.

Margaret helped where she could, but she was a woman who believed firmly in the character-building properties of self-reliance. "No woman ever becomes truly formidable by accident, Veda," she liked to say while pouring herself a generous measure of gin at precisely noon.

She permitted me to stay temporarily in the spare room of her Chelsea flat; a space where absolutely everything smelled of dried lavender, damp spaniels, and old leather-bound books; but she made it abundantly clear that I would need to find a way to survive independently.

So, I worked.

God, how I worked.

I fetched lukewarm coffees in independent publishing houses where the unpaid interns were treated with less respect than the office furniture. I carried boxes of manuscripts that felt heavier than building bricks. I memorised the highly specific, neurotic coffee orders of mid-level editors and quickly learned that the selection of expensive biscuits in the executive kitchen was a highly charged political territory.

I lived in a succession of damp, cramped flats in zones four and five, featuring radiators that wheezed theatrically for twenty minutes before giving up the ghost entirely. Some nights, I sat on the edge of a sagging mattress and literally cried into a bowl of supermarket-brand tomato soup, calculating down to the penny whether I could afford both my bus fare and the electricity meter for the coming week.

There were moments, so many moments. If I am being entirely honest; I remember the temptation to return home was almost overwhelming. Kathmandu waited for me like a warm bath. It offered soft beds, unlimited family money, freshly prepared food, and a blanket of forgiveness that came wrapped in very specific, suffocating conditions.

All I had to do was surrender.

Walk back through the front gates. Marry politely. Behave appropriately. Become manageable.

But every single time that temptation reared its head, I pictured myself trapped inside that beautiful, suffocating gilded cage. Smiling for the cameras. Hosting dinner parties for my husband's business associates. Slowly, quietly, entirely disappearing.

So, I stayed.

Eighteen months after fleeing, my father finally answered one of my calls.

I remember gripping the plastic receiver of my cheap mobile phone so tightly my knuckles turned white. His voice over the international line sounded older, stripped of its usual booming, patriarchal certainty.

"I forgive you," he said eventually, after a long, heavy pause.

Not I miss you. Not Come back home.

But I forgive you.

As though my desire to own my own life were a criminal offense requiring a formal governor's pardon.

But his forgiveness, it turned out, did not extend to my bank balance. My inheritance remained locked away in a trust fund I could not touch. The accounts stayed frozen.

"You made your choice, Veda," he told me quietly, his tone flat. "Now you must live with it."

And so, I did.

Years passed. Difficult, grinding years at first, which eventually gave way to merely exhausting ones, and then, quite suddenly, to extraordinary ones.

My debut novel exploded into the cultural zeitgeist with an unexpected, dizzying success shortly before my thirtieth birthday. One moment I was panicking over my publisher's modest sales projections; the next, I was being interviewed in glossy weekend broadsheets by journalists with intimidating cheekbones and impeccable tailoring.

Suddenly, strangers began recognising my face in local cafés. University students wrote actual dissertations about my prose style. People on the internet began tweeting quotations from my chapters alongside photographs of moody sunsets, which felt simultaneously deeply flattering and utterly, beautifully absurd.

And with success came the money. Real, independent, life-altering money.

Enough to purchase the Kensington townhouse without a glance at a mortgage broker. Enough for silk dresses that felt like water against my skin and spontaneous, first-class weekend trips to Florence just because I fancied seeing the Uffizi again. Enough to finally, permanently stop checking my banking app before deciding to order the dessert course.

My father phoned me from Kathmandu the week my novel appeared on the Sunday Times bestseller list. For one glorious, fleeting moment, I allowed myself to believe that he had finally understood. That he saw me for who I was.

Then came the inevitable, crushing pivot.

"Now that you have achieved this great dream of yours, Veda," he asked, his voice crackling across the miles, "when do you intend to marry? You cannot live in an empty house forever."

There it was again. Marriage.

Always waiting at the end of every family conversation like an overdue utility bill.

After that particular phone call, the family campaign intensified into an all-out offensive. My email inbox began filling up on a weekly basis with attached photographs of "highly eligible young men." There were Bankers, Politicians, tech Entrepreneurs and Neurosurgeons. One particularly enterprising aunt even attempted to set me up with a organic farmer from Karnali province whom she described in her email as being "exceptionally emotionally mature" because he owned several sustainable cucumber greenhouses and had once attended a seminar on women's empowerment. Another aunt mailed a physical, bound biodata packet to my publisher's office, tied up with a silk ribbon as though it were a luxury hamper.

My mother, however, became utterly relentless. Our FaceTime calls always began sweetly enough, her face framed by the expensive decor of her sitting room.

"How are you keeping, my darling?"

"Are you sleeping enough? You look a bit pale through the camera."

"Have you considered freezing your eggs? I read an article in a magazine about a lovely clinic in Harley Street." That last question, delivered casually while she sipped her tea, nearly caused me to choke on a stuffed olive.

No matter how the conversation started, it always, inevitably, circled back to the same monolithic, inescapable topic.

Marriage.

Marriage.

Marriage.

One winter evening, a particularly horrifying Nepali investment banker who lived in Brighton attempted to impress me on a forced blind date by presenting an actual, multi-slide PowerPoint presentation over our main course. My family had explicitly set up the dinner, and he had arrived armed with a tablet computer to explain the benefits of compound interest and "future joint family asset investments." He had slides. He had bar graphs. He had a digital laser pointer.

I sat there, staring at him across the white tablecloth, before quietly informing him that I would genuinely rather sit stark naked on an angry hedgehog than spend the rest of eternity discussing tax-efficient savings accounts with him.

He did not find it funny. He didn't even laugh.

To be entirely clear, I do not dislike the male of the species entirely. In small, carefully metered doses, they can be thoroughly delightful company. They are rather like an exceptionally rich tiramisu: pleasant to indulge in on an occasional Saturday night, but utterly intolerable if forced upon you for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every single day of your life.

I have dated, of course. There was a charming Italian restaurateur who turned out to be pathologically obsessed with his franchise expansion plans in New York. There was a hollow-eyed yoga instructor who held the firm spiritual conviction that cold-pressed celery juice could cure childhood emotional trauma. There was a fellow novelist who actually wept during the more intense erotic scenes in his own unpublished manuscripts. They were charming, magnificent disasters, every single one of them.

Meanwhile, nearly all of my childhood friends have gone down the traditional route.

My English friends now host elaborately stressful dinner parties involving experimental desserts and highly passive-aggressive arguments regarding private school admissions. My Nepali friends send me daily WhatsApp photographs of toddlers wearing knitted hats shaped like organic strawberries. Yet, invariably, whenever we get through the second bottle of wine, they all look at me and sigh wistfully.

"You are so incredibly lucky, Veda," they whisper, casting a cautious glance toward the kitchen where their husbands are arguing over the correct way to load the dishwasher. "You have total freedom."

And perhaps I am lucky.

Mostly.

Still, if I am being completely honest with myself in the quiet hours of the night, there are moments when a very specific kind of loneliness arrives without knocking. It isn't a loneliness for romance; certainly not that, I have no desire for a man's emotional baggage, but a quiet, aching longing for children.

For my own children.

Sometimes, standing at the top of the stairs, I imagine the sound of little feet thundering down the wooden hallway of the townhouse. I imagine tiny, ridiculous voices singing nursery rhymes in the kitchen, or bright smears of fingerpaint left drying on my expensive, heritage-painted walls.

The sheer warmth of that image hits me somewhere deep and unprotected.

Unfortunately, traditional Nepali society insists that children must arrive packaged alongside a husband, like a dreadful supermarket bundle deal.

Buy one baby, receive one husband absolutely free.

No refunds.

No exchanges.

The sheer, systemic injustice of it irritates me to my very core.

And then, on a thoroughly miserable, rainy Thursday morning, my mother officially escalated our cold war into a nuclear conflict.

I was sitting at my marble kitchen island wrapped in an oversized cashmere cardigan, halfway through my second cup of loose-leaf Darjeeling tea. I was idly scrolling through yet another digital engagement album that had been forwarded to me from Kathmandu. My second cousin, Anisha, was beaming beneath a canopy of fairy lights while her new fiancé fed her a butter-loaded sweet with the solemn, unblinking intensity of a high priest performing an ancient religious ritual. There were twenty-two separate photographs documenting what the caption referred to as their "sacred engagement journey," a phrase I found deeply alarming because, in my experience, engagements generally involve a ring and some tipsy aunties, not a spiritual pilgrimage.

My phone began to vibrate violently against the marble.

Mother calling.

I considered ignoring it, letting it ring out while I pretended to be deep in the throes of literary creation, but a strange sense of foreboding made me swipe the green icon.

"Veda, my darling," she began, her voice dripping with a sweetness that instantly set my teeth on edge.

Dangerous. Highly dangerous.

Whenever my mother sounded that performatively gentle over an international connection, a structural catastrophe usually followed within minutes.

"How are you keeping, chori?"

"I am currently very suspicious, Aama, given that you are asking so nicely."

She bypassed my sarcasm with the practiced ease of a luxury liner cutting through choppy waters. "I spoke to a very special fortune teller yesterday afternoon. She came highly recommended by Mrs. Shrestha."

I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose. "Aama, please. If this is another thinly veiled conversation about suitable matches—"

"Just listen to me first," she snapped, her maternal patience evaporating in a flash, returning her to her natural, commanding state.

"This woman is famous across the entire country. Even government ministers and film stars consult her. She took your exact birth chart, Veda. She spent hours studying the houses."

"Wonderful," I sighed, taking a slow sip of my tea.

"And what terrible, cosmic fate awaits me this time? Total financial ruin? Premature baldness? A sudden, tragic allergy to Chanel?"

"She said you are destined to marry before this year ends."

Silence fell over the kitchen. The rain tapped softly, rhythmically against the glass of the heritage windows.

Then, I laughed.

It wasn't a polite chuckle; it was a loud, sharp, hysterical bark of a laugh that echoed off the kitchen tiles.

"Oh, is that all? Brilliant. Shall I expect a bolt of lightning next? Perhaps a visit from The Queen?"

"Veda." My mother's voice sharpened into a tone that was dangerously cold. "Do not mock these sacred things. The stars do not lie."

"I absolutely will mock these things, Aama. It's the twenty-first century."

"She said you cannot run from your path anymore. You have spent ten years dodging your duties, but the planetary alignment has shifted." There was something unsettling in her delivery then. It wasn't her usual manipulative guilt-tripping or her standard theatrical sighing. It was a flat, unshakeable conviction.

I rolled my eyes toward the ceiling, trying to shake off the strange, cold chill that was suddenly crawling up my spine. "I have successfully run from it for over a decade, Aama. I am quite good at running."

"Yes, because your chart allowed it. But you have entered a new phase now. The fortune teller was very clear: a wedding is fixed in your destiny before the winter solstice. It is already written."

"Well, my personal destiny also includes an upcoming literary award and a fabulous new pair of knee-high leather boots, neither of which require a marriage license."

"You only joke because you are secretly frightened."

"I am not frightened of marriage," I said, my voice hardening. "I am fundamentally allergic to it."

My mother exhaled heavily down the line. I could practically picture her pacing through the grand sitting room of our Kathmandu home, walking beneath the crystal chandeliers while she wrung her hands.

"If you find yourself a respectable Nepali man who treats you well, your father and I will gladly accept him into our family without hesitation." she said, her voice dropping into a quiet, chilling ultimatum. "We will not interfere. But if you do not produce a suitable man before the year is out, then enough is enough. Your father and I have already drawn up a shortlist with the family matchmaker. We will arrange it ourselves."

I sat bolt upright in my chair, my tea entirely forgotten.

"Aama.. you're serious?"

"Very."

"Aama, I am thirty-two years old, not a prize heifer to be auctioned off at market!"

"You are our daughter first and foremost."

"I live in a completely different country! I am a British citizen!"

"And yet," she said, delivering the final, crushing blow with absolute precision, "you are still entirely unmarried. In our community, that is a lingering shame."

There it was. The ultimate family tragedy. The great, unspoken stain on the family ledger.

Unmarried.

They spoke the word as though I were suffering from a highly contagious, socially debilitating tropical disease.

"You cannot avoid the reality of life forever, Veda," she continued, her tone softening just enough to imply a deep, maternal pity. "A woman needs companionship. A woman needs a husband to anchor her."

"A woman needs equal pay, structural autonomy, and decent medical-grade skincare, Aama."

"This is not a joke, Veda."

"No," I agreed, my heart beginning to hammer against my ribs. "Actually, it is incredibly terrifying."

But beneath my quick-fire sarcasm, something immensely uncomfortable was twisting in my stomach. Because for the very first time in my adult life, my mother sounded serious in a way that bypassed her usual dramatics. She didn't sound hopeful. She didn't sound persuasive.

She sounded utterly, terrifyingly certain.

"I mean what I say," she concluded quietly. "Either you find a man yourself this year... or we will choose one for you. Get your house in order."

The line went dead with a soft click shortly afterward, but her words lingered in the quiet air of my kitchen long after the screen of my phone had gone dark.

Either you find someone yourself... or we will.

Outside, the city of London moved on with its usual, sublime indifference beneath the silver autumn rain. Black cabs rolled smoothly past the end of my street. A sea of umbrellas bloomed across the pavements of Kensington High Street. Somewhere in the distance, church bells rang out the hour.

And for the first time since I had stepped off that plane at Heathrow as a penniless twenty-one-year-old, I felt utterly cornered.

Not by the cosmic alignment of the stars, of course. Certainly not by the predictions of a celebrity fortune teller in Kathmandu.

I was cornered by my family. By generations of crushing expectation. By the terrifying, very real possibility that they might actually find a way to drag me back into the conventional, suffocating world I had spent my entire adult life escaping.

I stared down at my cooling, half-empty cup of tea, my mind racing at a frantic, desperate pace. And then, quite suddenly, brilliantly, absurdly, an idea began to take root in the dark corners of my brain.

A thoroughly dangerous, high-stakes idea.

If my family insisted on the presence of a husband to satisfy their traditional sensibilities, then perhaps I could simply give them exactly what they wanted.

Not a real husband, obviously. I still possessed my sanity, my standards, and my legal rights. But a convincing imitation? A charming illusion.

I could hatch a plan. A small, dangerous seed of a plot.

It would be an elegant, sophisticated lie wrapped in expensive tailored suits and carefully staged, curated photographs; a convincing mirage. A beautifully crafted, Instagram-ready, smiling-for-the-camera husband. It would be just enough to satisfy my parents' demands, temporary enough to avoid any actual legal or emotional commitment, and believable enough to survive one single, high-intensity family visit to Kathmandu.

I leaned back against my chair, a slow, wicked smile spreading across my face as the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into alignment.

And quite suddenly, I knew just where to find one.